Rahul Paul-Chowdhury

Rahul completed an MBA at Aber in 2000.  In addition to his successful career, Rahul also acts as Aber's unofficial ambassador in Canada and he is willing to assist any Aber alumnus with locating and/or doing business there.  Contact him at canada@alumni.aber.ac.uk

What do you remember most about your time at Aber?

When my wife and I left our apartment in Toronto, put our belongings in storage and gave away our car in preparation for heading to Aber for an MBA, we were not sure what to expect.  But when we walked into the MBA’s administrative offices we were greeted with big smiles and a cheer “The Canadians are here!” … it set the tone for the year ahead and we knew we had made the decision that was correct for us. 

Our class was a United Nations of students that brought valuable national and cultural diversities in addition to the wealth of business experience that you would expect from an International MBA.  Well over a decade later, we still count many of our classmates as close friends and enjoy sharing in their successes as they have gone on to new heights in their careers around the world.

What are you doing now career-wise and how has your Aberystwyth Degree helped?

The MBA from Aberystwyth allowed me to quickly be accepted into a high impact consulting firm that taught me project management, process design and, most importantly, behaviour change at the point of execution.  The teamwork and listening skills I learned in the MBA proved invaluable here.

From there I went on to apply those skills in Canada’s largest privately held transportation company where, over a number of years, I was their internal efficiency expert leading both site specific and company-wide change programmes delivering significant monetary savings.

I now operate the finance arm of a mining services company that has brought to market a “game changing” technology for mapping drill core.  In each of these roles, I have found an industrial or geographical connection with someone from my MBA class. Rarely a week goes by that doesn’t have me reaching into my tool box of skills and experiences from my time at Aberystwyth to develop an approach to a situation, solve a problem or illustrate an idea.

What advice would you have for a student doing your course now?

I have two observations, the first of which is that you are a composite of all your experiences, good and bad.  Use the MBA program to help build the framework that allows you to organize those experiences and you may be surprised how much ‘real life’ connections you already have with the concepts presented in the coursework. 
The second is that the MBA, more than any other programme, is a “team sport”.  While you are responsible for learning new skills and sharpening the ones you arrived with, you must also learn how to apply them in a fashion that makes the team successful.   “You don’t know what you don’t know” so when a team mate puts forward an idea contrary to yours, pause to understand where it came from and recognize it for what it is – another opportunity to learn.