Can you tell us more about yourself?
My name is Apollo and I come from Romania. I lived in Frankfurt Germany for many years and that is where I met Dr. Hubert Silly. I was the CEO of Medical City Hospital, Bucharest Romania, for over 8 years. I also held a dual management position as CEO and Executive Consultant at BICS, Belgium, which is a leading international communications enabler facilitating reliable and secure mobile experiences.
What prompted you to apply for an MBA?
When I applied for an MBA program I already had two top-level management positions: one was as the CEO of the Medical City Hospital in Bucharest and a dual management position at BICS. I had already achieved something that many MBA and MBA applicants are targeting. However, as I am very ambitious and wanted to have a CEO position in a top telecom company, preferably in a developing country. Having had a technical education in Romania I felt that after having worked for 15 years, it was time for me to go back to school, gain more knowledge and learn more about business and also gain more credibility in Western Europe and globally. That’s what I received from my education with the MBA program at TRIUM.
I decided to take the MBA at TRIUM because it is a program that is given at the three most prominent business schools in the world, HEC, London School of Economics and NYU Stern, and I wanted to get the best out of these three countries. The program allowed me to interact with top-level senior managers globally and also allowed us to discuss different perspectives on business since we had French, British and American professors.
What did you find the most difficult in the application process?
TRIUM doesn’t ask for the GMAT. But I still attended the MBA Center Frankfurt classes for GMAT because I wanted to put myself on the level of what all the other students are at before starting the MBA. Being fluent in English and having an engineering background, I was able to do well in the GMAT. The applications were more difficult as I had to explain that even though I already had a top-level management position I still wanted to study further for the same. It was not an easy task to sound humble and convincing while being very ambitious at the same time. Dr. Hubert Silly, who was my teacher at MBA Center Frankfurt, and his team helped me to find the right words and right attitude throughout the application process.
What is life like at TRIUM?
As an amalgamation of three of the top schools, the classes at TRIUM are also spread across there campuses. Modules take place for two weeks each in London, New York, and Paris and one week each in two emerging markets. The students come from over 30 nationalities and most of them are global executives with an average age of 40 and over ten years of work experience. The professors from all three schools, who are well-renowned academics, teach at TRIUM making it a truly global program.
What would be your advice to someone applying for an MBA program?
The first advice I’d give students is this: the MBA is a big investment, so I strongly suggest that you make a 360 degree research on each school that you are interested in, especially on the teachers, the recruiters, the career services, the philosophy and academic approach of each school because each school has its own approach. Case in point, TRIUM is a program given by three highly reputed universities and you have teachers from HEC, LSE and NYU teaching and it gives a completely different approach than the one offered by INSEAD or Chicago or any other school where you have teachers from those specific institutions only. So if you are looking for diversity, a global approach to business and business issues TRIUM is the right school.
Secondly, an Executive MBA is expensive and at TRIUM it will cost you around $150,000. So clearly assess whether it is worth spending so much money. In Germany, we have programs like Mannheim, ESMT which cost one-fifth of that. To investigate the finances required and decide whether your MBA is worth it to spend so much money.
Finally, MBA preparation is a lot of work and if you have a lot of personal and professional constraints it becomes harder to prepare for it. I suggest that you get targeted training, working with professionals who will help you save a lot of time. That’s exactly what I enjoyed and appreciated with the MBA Center. I had personal support and targeted training where I could complete the process for my GMAT, INSEAD, TRIUM, Chicago in less than three months and a 100% success in these schools. I recommended other friends from Romania and Germany who were also interested in MBAs and they have all been pleased and happy with Dr. Hubert Silly and MBA Center services.