MBA Student of the Year

We are delighted to announce that Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke is the winner of the
 MBA Student of the Year Award 2009.
The winner was announced at the Association's annual Gala Dinner, on 12 November 2009, to a select audience of business school representatives, journalists and MBA alumni.

 

MBA Student of the Year Winner and Finalists (left to right): Tiffany Wang Lam-Balfour. Jeannette Adu-Bobie, Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke and Andrés Barragán Montaña

The selection process this year was especially difficult as all the nominations we received were of an extremely high-standard. Thank you to all the schools who submitted entries.

The final four have their own unique background and story, but are united by their desire to use their MBA degree to generate change for good and make a mark in their individual fields.

We would like to congratulate the winner and the three runners up.
You can read their impressive stories below:

 

Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke - winner of the MBA Student of the Year Award 2009
ESCP Europe

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For the past six years, Lindsey has worked with a Paris-based humanitarian NGO, Enfants d’Asie (www.enfantsdasie.com) which operates humanitarian programmes in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and the Philippines. The main focus of the association’s work is to provide access to education, but they also provide comprehensive care for children in distress – food, shelter, medical care, counselling and schooling. Lindsey is Director of the Philippines Programme (working particularly closely with families and children living in the slum areas of Cebu city), and for the past year has been a Board Member. She committed to an Executive MBA because she wanted to apply business, management and leadership skills to strengthen her work in the humanitarian field. She also wanted to explore the possible synergies between corporate social responsibility and humanitarian work and to move into the field of microfinance.
Since her interview in May this year for the MBA Student of the Year Award, Lindsey has completed her Executive MBA at ESCP-EUROPE and has carried on with her work with Enfants d'Asie, developing a children's education programme in Cebu, Philippines and implementing an urban microfinance programme to provide microloans for disadvantaged families in the region. She is also managing the expansion of Women's Wordlwide Web, with a view of opening a Paris office in the near future.

Jeannette Adu-Bobie - finalist of the MBA Student of the Year 2009
Imperial College Business School

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Jeannette Adu-Bobie is a research scientist currently based in London and is working in collaboration with the Sanger Institute where she is project lead and coordinator for the Pathogen Database project. Recently she started work on a project to develop a low cost blood culture instrument to measure bacterial growth in less developed countries. In recent years Jeannette’s career has been put on hold due to the fact that in 2005 she contracted septicaemia resulting in various amputations and a long spell in hospital. Jeannette was keen to get her career back on track and achieve her potential, as well as gaining the necessary managerial skills to do so. To achieve this she enrolled for an MBA at Imperial College. During the MBA Jeannette has faced several challenges which she has overcome and the MBA has enabled her to achieve several personal milestones.
Since interviewing for the MBA Student of the Year Award, she has been busy writing her dissertation, helping organise and find sponsorship for her business school's summer ball and being a guest speaker at various prestigious events in her field. She has also helped raise money for a charity that provides prosthetic and orthotic support in Malawi and Zambia.

  

Tiffany Wang Lam-Balfour - finalist of the MBA Student of the Year 2009
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

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Tiffany currently studies full-time on the International MBA programme at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), where she immerses herself in understanding the Chinese culture, language and business perspective. She hopes to utilize her bi-cultural heritage to act as a ‘corporate diplomat’ as China continues on its dynamic growth ascent and globalization melds Eastern and Western business practices. Tiffany’s mantra has always been a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”  She hopes that as SJTU provides a great learning opportunity for her, she can give back just as much to her fellow classmates and University. 
Since interviewing for the MBA Student of the Year Award, she has progressed with her thesis on the topic of anti-dumping while working as a teaching assistant in her MBA course and maintaining her part-time role at UBS. She has also helped her school with translation work for their future English-speaking MBA cohorts. Her long-term goals include finsihing her PhD in international business and management.

 

Andrés Barragán Montaña - finalist of the MBA Student of the Year 2009
Universidad de los Andes

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A prominent figure within the Colombian creative industries, Andrés has led numerous entrepreneurial projects (dance, theatre, cinema, rock bands and a publishing house) that combine his humanistic vision and artistic sensibilities with strategic planning and management practices. Andrés joined the Universidad de los Andes’ Partial Time MBA Programme on August, 2008, and has become an advocate for the education of artistic and creative entrepreneurs in the areas of management. He gives lectures on this issue in the Colombian Chamber of Commerce and at numerous universities, where he hopes he can continue to promote his business legacy and ‘mission statement’: that creativity, art and culture not only benefit from management, but also need it desperately to survive in today’s society.