Sydney was never the plan. I had done an exchange year in Rotterdam during my bachelor's, at the Erasmus School of Economics, and I knew I wanted to live abroad again one day, but Australia had simply never crossed my mind.
After a few years working in marketing in Russia, I started looking at master's programmes and, honestly, I knew right away that CEMS was the right fit for me. Then my brother-in-law asked a question that sounded completely out of the blue: why not Australia? I remember a complete loss of words – because, what do you mean Australia? It felt so random. And at the same time - why not? And then I did what I always do with a big decision.
I researched. The University of Sydney Business School, the partner schools, the country, the curriculum. Piece by piece, everything clicked, and the decision that had sounded the wildest became the one I was most prepared for. That, in a way, is already how an evidence-based problem solver works.
From day one in Sydney, something clicked
The place gave me the serenity to build my life at my own pace, and the energy to create. I became head of Social Responsibility at the CEMS Club Sydney, and together with my team we managed to do a lot: from the cooking competition to the Aboriginal cultural walk, from the beach cleanup to the charity walk.
Our coastal walks and Blue Mountains trips with classmates are also some of my favourite memories. At the end of the semester, the club asked me to make a film about everything we had done together, so I spent ten hours editing a five-minute video that now lives on our social media page. Moving across the world also gave me the fresh start I needed to finally commit to my personal blog.
Creativity, I learned, follows you when you put yourself in the right conditions and find your why. You spot the opening, and you take it CEMS links people and opens opportunities, and then it is up to you to build on them.
In Sydney, we had a skill seminar with a recruiting specialist who had spent his whole career in the industry. I found the session so valuable that I approached him afterwards and asked him to become my career mentor. He said yes. Nobody hands you that kind of relationship; you spot the opening and you take it, and I was so grateful for the chance. Tailoring your own journey is, to me, the most entrepreneurial skill the programme develops.
"CEMS links people and opens opportunities. Then it's up to you to build on them."
My second semester took me to HKUST Business School in Hong Kong, a city where you can be surrounded by skyscrapers one minute and hiking towards a beach the next. Our Business Project there was with HSBC, a CEMS Corporate Partner, on their strategy in financial philanthropy. The brief our client gave us was to inspire them with new solutions for how a global bank can build on its resources and commitment to strengthen financial literacy in a way that is credible and genuinely community-centred.
We built our ideas through expert interviews and research, testing intuitions against what the field actually says. That project captured the whole descriptor in one experience. Imagination on one side, evidence on the other, and a real client waiting for both.
CEMS also inspired me to step up in a way I had not planned, as a Student Board Representative. Representing the student voice inside the organisation means contributing to conversations about the programme, carrying initiatives, and learning to keep many projects moving at once. It is a responsibility I am proud of, and a masterclass in turning ideas into things that exist.
Creative intelligence, backed by evidence
Looking back, being an innovative and evidence-based problem solver is, above all, an approach, and CEMS trains it constantly. You stay curious, you do the research before the leap, you take risks you have sized up, and you treat every challenge, from a client brief to your own next chapter, as something you can design. CEMS opened a new chapter, and handed me an approach for all the ones ahead. The boldest choice of my life turned out to be the best one, because I had done the work to make it so.
