One of the main reasons I chose UCLA Anderson was the diversity of its student body. Anderson’s admissions committee truly does a great job in building a class filled with candidates with different professional backgrounds, life experiences, and interests. This helps to make our MBA journey a lot more enriching as we learn from one another. In this post I wanted to introduce three of my future classmates to give you an inside look into what the Class of 2017 has to offer.
I worked for almost five years at Commerzbank in London. I was a member of the EM Structured Credit Trading team as an EM Repo trader. My job was to price and structure financing deals with various counterparties across the globe. After I resigned, I embarked on an adventurous and extremely rewarding two-month travel that started in LA with A-days and ended up in Peru. I travelled throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia and Peru. The highlight was a 4-day trek that brought to me to the incredible Machu Picchu. Apart from the amazing things I saw, the best and most enriching experiences were meeting fellow travelers and locals and learning about their different values and thoughts.
Manavi Abrol, India
I am a biochemical engineer and have worked as an intellectual property analyst for four years. I love music but I have had a nearly non-musical corporate life. Though I did gift myself an audio interface and a microphone on my first promotion, I treated them with lots of procrastination. I have taken the summer off to work on reviving my musical skills and to finally setup my home studio. Anderson has provided us access to this awesome online education portal named Lynda that has video lessons on a slew of topics including recording software. I am also trying some long distance jamming with a few Anderson classmates. Cheers to two musical years at Anderson!
Rute Ramalho, Portugal
In Portugal, I earned a Master’s degree in Dentistry. After one year, I moved to London where I worked as a dental surgeon. I quit my job earlier this year to join an NGO called SOLS 24/7. This NGO has locations in India and Southeast Asia and is dedicated to teaching English to underprivileged people, so they can gain access to better jobs. I taught from 8 am to 8 pm for 2 months starting in April in a school located in Phenom Phen in Cambodia. It was such an eye-opening experience to see how much these children value education and how hard they are willing to work to be successful in life. I have now spent 5 weeks in Vietnam, 2 weeks in Thailand and now I am heading to Malaysia for a week.
