Clémentine

My name is Clementine Contat and I am the Global Operations Manager at Louis Vuitton. I have a Master of Science in Mathematics, Physics and Industrial Engineering from the Centrale Suoekec and I have been accepted by the Harvard Business School Class of 2014.

I was working for LVMH in their logistics department and even though I liked the job, I did not have many responsibilities. Given my education and potential, I felt that I needed to fast track my career. In this respect, the career evolution at LVMH was far too slow for me. 

I am also quite interested in living and learning in different cities and cultures, making my career graph more international. I asked LVMH for a transfer of base to Hong Kong and this request never materialized. Since my career path had stalled I decided that it was time for me to take matters into my own hands and decided to go for an MBA.

My fluency in the English language and engineering background to go with it, I got the 740 required for the GMAT after just one month of private classes with Dr. Hubert Silly who got an 800 in his own GMAT. The difficulty lay in the application process as I wasn’t very proud of my career evolution till then and felt that I had nothing significant to show for it. I did not believe I had a really competitive profile. So it was very difficult to have the deep introspection required to understand who I am and what I want and to find my inner motivation. It was tough to find the value and the positive points in the application and the confidence in myself to go forward with the application. The conversation that I had with Dr. Hubert Silly was key to helping me identify the value in my experiences gain confidence and create a good profile to communicate positively on my experiences.

There is a lot of history behind Harvard and getting to be a part of it is considered highly fortunate. The workload can be stressful at times but it pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to question your assumptions about your ideas. There is a lot of focus on case studies and you need to be prepared to defend the position you choose to take.

There are a lot of social activities you will be invited to be a part of during your time here. It will be up to you to prioritize what you want to do. At the risk of running yourself ragged, you will need to choose only those events that you’d really like to go to. 

I met Dr. Hubert Silly and MBA Center in late January 2012 with an admission deadline that was two months after. This was a mistake from my side and I would not recommend that you get that close to the admission deadline before starting to prepare your application for an MBA. Take time and prepare at least six to nine months in advance. Do not prepare for the GMAT and the TOEFL simultaneously as they will hamper each other. So prepare slowly but stick to your routine and do it one at a time.