Nick Hwang may be used to designing equipment to withstand pressure, but the former mechanical engineer wasn’t as adept at withstanding the pressure of juggling an MBA with his Wharton consulting project. “For a long time, I was sleeping maybe three or four hours a day, Max,” says Nick. “I was surrounded by top-performing people that were pushing you to be your absolute best.”

 

The HEC Paris MBA was lucky enough to enroll onto Wharton’s Global Consulting Practicum, an initiative of the prestigious, Ivy League b-school that has around 15 business projects across multiple different countries. The program pairs teams of Wharton MBA students and faculty with teams from partner universities (in Africa, Australia, Chile, China, Colombia, India, Israel, Peru, Spain, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates) to consult with a client company interested in entering or expanding its position in the world market.

 

Nick, who graduated from California State Polytechnic University with a BS in mechanical engineering in 2006, worked in the energy sector for five years before starting his MBA in Paris. He was an Equipment Specialist at Sofregaz, after working in the oil and gas industry for five years across America. “I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I was already in Paris,” he said of his MBA at HEC. “I still wanted to work at the same time, so that meant I would be doing a part time MBA. There’s not that many global level part-time programs in Europe, and HEC is one of them.”

 

The decision to study on the MBA program was one born out of Nick’s desire to pursue a career change from the energy sector to consulting. “For me, the project with Wharton was to get a taste of the consulting world,” he explained.

 

“I’ve always been in a technical field within energy, so I had the desire to open up a bit and be able to look into different industries. Consulting gives me a very good anchor to be able to do that in a short space of time.”

 

Aside from a distinct lack of sleep, Nick, an American national, learnt how to solve the problem of increasing financial access to poor people in Kenya, Africa, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation - established by Bill, the Microsoft supremo and his wife, Melinda, is the largest transparently run, private philanthropic foundation in the world. The foundation's Financial Services for the Poor division aims to harness advances in science and technology to help those in developing countries.“I was particularly interested because it’s a nonprofit sector. It’s completely different to what I’ve done in the past: oil and gas has virtually nothing to do with what the Gates Foundation does,” Nick said.

 

“Kenya is kind of particular because, when it comes to using your mobile phone for financial transactions, it is the most advanced country in the world. So the Gates Foundation was interested in developing that market, to see if we can figure out if maybe it’s something that can be scaled into other parts of Africa and the rest of the world.

 

“Our project was to look into that and see what the most promising solutions that we can extract are and the Gates Foundation should look into.

 

“We got to talk to the people out in the countryside who usually don’t have any access to banks. The system has been in place for the last 5-6 years but the impact in the country has been tremendous.”

 

Aside from working in consultancy with Wharton, Nick says his MBA at HEC has given him a greater understanding in everything from marketing to finance. He says that, in the long run, an MBA will make him a lot better prepared to be in a position where he will be calling the shots within a company: “It’s a 360 degree view of how a business is run”.

 

Coming from a background in engineering, Nick was President of the Energy Club at HEC for a six-month term and helped MBAs create links with the industry, as well as organizing career visits to various companies. “There was huge competition,” Nick, whom is also an officer of the Consulting Club, says. “My time as President of the Energy Club is was what I’m most proud of: being able to link the club with the EMBA of HEC because before the MBA and EMBA programs were not that much connected.

 

“While I was in the club we would engage the EMBA students as well because they work in the energy industry, too. There is no Energy Club on EMBA so it matched what we were offering them access to.”

 

Nick finishes his MBA as early as December and has his sights set on a consultancy career. He says his goal on the MBA program at HEC is to prepare himself to be able to get into a consulting company. And has HEC Paris helped him towards achieving that? “Definitely,” he adds. “HEC wasn’t known as a consulting school in the past. But over the last few years it is changing, I think.

 

“The Consulting Club is one of the strongest ones in the school. There are a lot of people interested in it and the school backs it up well.” 

 

Consulting is one of the most popular MBA career paths, and thanks to MBA program at HEC Paris, Nick has already kickstarted his career.