BCG consultant Stephanie van den Boogaard is being sponsored by her company to study an MBA at HKUST. Here’s how business school is making her a better consultant.

For many MBA graduates, management consulting is the ideal end-goal, with a career in consulting offering sky-high salaries and the opportunity to combine everything learned on an MBA to lead projects across an array of sectors and functions. But Stephanie van den Boogaard is already there.

She’s a management consultant at big three firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and currently an MBA candidate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) Business School. Stephanie is being sponsored by BCG to study her MBA.

She joined BCG in November 2017 as an associate, after an undergraduate degree in engineering and management and then master's in systems engineering, policy analysis, and management from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She gained experience in the public sector, retail, social impact, and people and organizations.

Stephanie then earned fast-track promotion into her consultant role in August 2019, enrolling on the HKUST MBA in August 2020.

Develop intercultural management

Stephanie says she’s quickly developing her understanding and appreciation of the diverse elements of consultancy - important when your job revolves around working with a huge array of clients from different backgrounds and cultures.

The MBA classroom at HKUST is made up of students from finance and accounting, HR, IT, marketing and sales, logistics, and other professional backgrounds. The average age of a HKUST MBA is 29, and 96% of the class are of non-local nationality