The first week of the Cambridge MBA was probably one of the most exciting of the programme. I had finally made it here, after months of preparation and years of hard work that led me to this place. I met engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, professional athletes and art dealers. I didn’t know it yet, but a lot of them would soon become my family away from home. One thing I still remember from that week is when I was introduced to the concept of “serendipity”. The term has several definitions, but my personal favourite is that serendipity means opening yourself to as many opportunities as possible, allowing yourself to be in uncomfortable, unfamiliar situations even when you don’t feel ready. The Cambridge MBA has proven to be the perfect example of a serendipitous year across three main areas: professional, academic, and social.

Professionally, the highlights have been two direct working experiences with companies in the UK. The first came through the Cambridge Venture Project (CVP), where I got the chance to work with a local Cambridge company. I learnt how to operate in the local environment alongside four other MBA peers from different parts of the world. The second was my Global Consulting Project (GCP), an amazing opportunity to engage with one of the largest organisations in the country and apply concepts I learned in my digital transformation concentration. The biggest lesson from these two experiences was realising how quickly unfamiliar environments can start to feel familiar. Even though I had never worked in the UK before, and certainly not in these industries, many of the same challenges I faced before in my career kept appearing in both projects: aligning people with different perspectives, making sense of large amounts of information and adapting quickly as priorities changed. Working across such different organisations made me realise that the most useful skills are not industry specific. They are just good thinking and judgement applied to new contexts.

Academically, I’ve genuinely loved some of the classes, especially electives in Lent and Easter term like private equity and venture capital, where I had the opportunity to step into new environments I didn’t have much experience in but was very interested in learning from. These classes were taught by leaders who work in these fields and provided a lot of insight beyond the theory. The digital transformation concentration has been equally rewarding, pushing me to think about how technology is reshaping industries and organisations in real and practical ways. One of the most memorable moments of the year came when a personal finance startup visited Cambridge for a week to work with students on launching their product. I got to work directly with the founders, combining my consulting background with what I had learned in my digital transformation courses to help them understand the customers’ real pain points and how an app could genuinely solve them. It was a crash course in how founders think about value propositions before a single line of code is written.

Socially, there is so much that Cambridge has to offer that sometimes I had to choose between two or three things to do at the same time. From formal dinners at century-old colleges, fascinating debates at the Cambridge Union, playing football and squash with friends, attending speaker events from some of the best minds in the world, to just generally hanging out. There is always something to do. But what is the best part? It’s the people and communities you get to meet along the way. Being an MBA student means I’ve had the chance to meet people at the business school, but also in my college and in the wider Cambridge community, with many opportunities to connect with people from backgrounds like science, medicine and literature. This melting pot of connections and points of view is what has really enriched my way of approaching problems.

And that, I think, is serendipity in its truest form. Not luck, but the result of saying yes before you feel ready and trusting that the year will meet you halfway. And it did. The Cambridge MBA gave me the framework; I just had to show up for it.