Associate Professor Peter Reed, MBA Director congratulates Benjamin Haan on his nomination for the prestigious International MBA Student of the Year Award.

Monash MBA student awarded one of top four MBA students in the world

MBA student Benjamin Haan, was the only Australian and one of just four finalists worldwide at the prestigious International MBA Student of the Year Award held in London recently. He is the first Australian ever to make it to the finals in this competition.

Now in its tenth year the competition, run jointly by The Independent and the London based Association of MBAs (AMBA), is designed to highlight the value of the MBA, both to businesses and to individuals.

It highlights the all-round contribution required of a MBA student. Academic achievement is, of course, vital, but this year's finalists proved it's the vision and ability to add that elusive "extra" element to their exam results that really makes the difference.

The finalists were nominated from students at AMBA's accredited business schools and this year there were a record number of entries, says Jeanette Purcell, chief executive of AMBA.

"The judges found it difficult enough to pick the shortlist of ten. Picking the four finalists and a winner was almost impossible. The standard was incredibly high.
Other candidates on the short list were Bart Knolls from Open University Business School, Bjorn Dudok van Heel from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and Amiee Abbott Cocco from Istituto de Empresa.

Before undertaking the MBA, Benjamin spent seven years as a consultant at Accenture, specialising in business transformation consulting, working on projects as geographically separated as Sweden and India and including clients as diverse as Unilever and the Australian Tax Office.

“But I wanted to move into private equity, a step that recruitment companies were telling me was impossible given my background,” Haan says.

A two-year full-time MBA from Monash University, and he's now on the road to exactly where he wants to be having recently joined Partners Group, a Swiss-based Alternative Investments company.

"Quite simply I wouldn't have been able to get the job I have just commenced without my MBA and awards like this are valuable to highlight that the MBA is so much more than just an academic exercise,” Haan says.

The Monash MBA Director, Professor Peter Reed, said that “one of the strengths of the Monash MBA is its ability to allow students to tailor-make their MBA program to suit their individual personal and career aspirations.

For Ben the MBA was a means to facilitate a career change from consulting to the finance industry.  Ben focussed on entrepreneurship and finance electives and undertook a private equity research paper to provide him with exposure to the industry.

Ben also played a major role in leading a Monash MBA team that won the premier Australian new business planning competition, the John Heine Entrepreneurial Challenge, and then went on to represent Australia in the global Moot Corp entrepreneurial competition in Texas, for which they were given an award for “Outstanding Product.”