MBA — Melbourne Business School
Melbourne Business School · Copenhagen Business School · 2021–2023
Went back to study seven years into a career to get the formal strategy vocabulary to sit alongside the practical experience. Both things happened — plus six months in Copenhagen that I'll never forget.
What I Learned
- Going back to study after years in industry changes what you hear in lectures. The case studies land differently when you've lived adjacent to them.
- The Copenhagen semester wasn't really about business school. It was about life -- extensive travel through the Nordics and Western Europe, a city that cycles everywhere, and a lifetime's worth of memories and friends compressed into six months.
- The Melbourne MBA gave me a tight network across Australia that proved genuinely useful after moving from New Zealand. Those relationships opened doors that cold outreach never would.
- The MBA demystified the credential. The people who hold them are not magically smarter or more capable -- they're regular people. Some teenagers hustling a business on social media have sharper commercial instincts. Book smart and street smart are different things.
The MBA at Melbourne Business School ran from 2021 to 2023. I went back for specific reasons: I wanted the formal strategy and finance vocabulary to sit alongside the practical experience I'd built, and I wanted the time to think without a deliverable attached. Both things happened.
Seven years had passed since the engineering degree — Deloitte, GramWorthy, SEEK — and I'd been operating on instinct and pattern-matching for most of that time. The MBA forced rigour. It gave structure to things I was already doing intuitively, and occasionally showed me I'd been doing them wrong.
The Copenhagen semester was the six best months of my life. I'm not being hyperbolic. An exchange at Copenhagen Business School gave me a base to travel extensively through the Nordic countries and Western Europe, and the coursework itself — pricing strategy, international business operations — was some of the most directly applicable content of the whole degree. But the real return was the life experience: friends I'll have for decades, memories that don't compress well into bullet points, and a city that taught me what it looks like when cycling culture is taken seriously. The Danes have figured something out there. You leave fitter and slightly smug about it.
Back in Melbourne, the MBA gave me something more cliche but equally valuable: a solid network. A tight cohort of people across industries and across Australia. When I moved from New Zealand, those connections were already there — warm introductions, familiar faces, a foothold in a new market. That doesn't show up on a transcript but it's one of the more tangible returns on the investment.
The other thing the MBA gave me was a demystification of the credential itself. The people who hold MBAs are not a different species. They're not magically smarter, more commercially sharp, or better at building things. They're regular people who studied for two years. Some of them are genuinely impressive. Some teenagers running a scrappy business on social media have sharper instincts about what customers actually want. The degree teaches you to think rigorously. It doesn't teach you to see clearly — and those are not the same thing.
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