Student profiles

Richard Thomas MBE, Sloan Fellow 2007

"Deciding to do the Sloan Fellowship has been the best idea I have had in a long time. When I first came here, my view was that Sloan was a tremendous luxury, like a gift and I was so pleased to be a part of it. Now, as I come to the end of the programme, I am starting to think of Sloan as a luxury you can't do without. All the doubts I had about doing this have completely evaporated because this is something that is life changing. Whatever I do, the lessons from the Sloan Fellowship will form a fundamental basis for my future decision-making.

One of the great things about throwing yourself into an environment you don't really understand is that you challenge your entire basis for decision-making. When you are doing well in an organisation, it is very easy to start believing your own publicity. Coming here allows you to question yourself in a very positive way. No matter how good you are in your own little pond, it's a big world and there are a lot of people excelling at things a million miles away from your core competencies.

Without a theoretical underpinning, you're never quite sure whether what you are doing is right, which makes it hard to keep developing. You rely on your intuition and what you know works from experience. Once you have that theoretical underpinning, you can then trust your instinct a great deal more, and this allows you to fly; a very liberating experience. That's why Sloan is so invaluable.

I am now doing my final management project on the impact of private equity on professional service firms, which I am enjoying very much. It is a very rich field of study and I feel confident in the research that has been gathered already. The research is interview based, so I am getting into several different spheres of work with access to high-ranking people who really understand their business. The access I get to companies by saying that I'm doing a project at London Business School is amazing. If that is not education, then I don't know what is."

Stefano Turconi, Sloan Fellow 2007

Stefano Turconi joined the Sloan Fellowship as Senior Consultant for LabCom - a boutique consulting firm specialising in innovation and marketing.  Stefano's achievements on the programme include being part of the winning teams of the inaugural PricewaterhouseCoopers Sloan Fellowship prize and the Fuld & Company strategy simulation competition.

"Every moment of the Sloan Fellowship programme has been a great experience for me. The learning curve has been particularly steep in subject areas in which I had no previous experience, such as corporate finance, financial accounting and managerial accounting. Thanks to the rigorous curriculum and approachable faculty, I have thoroughly enjoyed learning these subjects and benefited tremendously from them.

In subjects with which I already had experience, courses have been similarly engaging, in particular the brand management elective, which is closely linked to my past professional experience. My appreciation for this course was undoubtedly enhanced by my passion for the subject, but more important was Professor Ritson's magnificent delivery of the course. I am now more confident to bring new insights and make branding recommendations to my clients that create business impact. 

The biggest strength of the Sloan Fellowship program is that you do not just analyse a situation, but are given the opportunity to apply your analysis and strategic thinking without skipping any stage that you would encounter in an actual business context. The Sloan Fellowship is endowing me with a top-notch toolkit of all aspects of business management and strategy, allowing me to further enhance my leadership capabilities and expanding my horizons. 

Best of all, is having the opportunity to enjoy this experience with classmates who are outstanding professionals at the top of their industries and from around the world. As we share a common goal of surmounting the same rigorous challenges of the Sloan Fellowship, our diverse experience and backgrounds complement London Business School's resources, creating an unforgettable, satisfying educational and personal experience."

Miguel Mira da Silva, Sloan Fellow 2005

Prior to the Sloan Fellowship, Miguel was Professor of Information Systems in the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal.

"Taking a year out to undertake the Sloan Fellowship may not seem the best way to spend my precious sabbatical year, but after five years teaching Information Systems I felt that management skills were essential for solving business problems in real-world organisations using technology. Furthermore, IT departments and firms desperately need to manage themselves. I also had my own software company and was looking forward to acquiring formal management know-how.

After two months in the Sloan Fellowship I can summarise my experience as clearly above expectations… and my expectations are very high. As a lecturer myself, I can assess that the faculty is truly amazing, the classes are very well run, and everything runs smoothly.  I am also very impressed with the number and quality of talks and presentations for which we are invited every week, including those especially organised for the Sloan students.

But I am mostly impressed with my classmates. My colleagues come from lots of different countries and have lots of experience and know-how in many different industries and functions. And we all help each other and have lots of fun. So I am learning as much with them as I am learning from proper classes and reading material. I thought I would learn management and I am now learning many other skills, such as dealing with completely different people… something that is just impossible to learn by reading a book or attending a course."

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