African Students Are Flocking to US MBA Programs
Michael Ibonye had an enviable career path ahead of him in 2022 by any measure, but especially by the standards of his home country. As a strategist for the African mobile phone company MTN, in Lagos, Nigeria, Ibonye had a hand in an array of future-forward projects, from broadband expansion to streamlining operations. 'I was the coordinating point for a lot of the strategic initiatives that we were implementing across the business,' he says.
But Ibonye had ambitions of one day running a company, and that, he concluded, would require building a global career, as his mentors had. 'Those networks and those relationships, and the experiences that they brought from different markets around the world, helped to make them successful along that journey to the C-suite,' he says. So he applied to seven business schools in North America and eventually enrolled at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.
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