Why I chose London Business School for my MBA

I came to the MBA from quantitative finance. I was a developer and then a researcher, I was good at building models, and I had started to notice that the decisions that mattered were being made by people who spoke a language I didn't. They talked about clients, capital, incentives and risk appetite. I talked about estimators. Both of us were right, and only one of us was in the room when it counted.

That is the honest reason I did an MBA. The reason I did it at London Business School takes a little longer.

Why do an MBA after a career in quant finance?

Not for the money. I have written elsewhere about when an MBA is worth it, and a quant who wants to stay a quant is close to the top of the list of people who shouldn't bother.

I wanted the second language. An MBA teaches you how people who run businesses think: what they optimise for, what they fear, how they decide with half the information. It also teaches you how little of that resembles what technical people assume. That turned out to be the most useful thing I learned, and it is the reason I can help someone with an application and not only with the mathematics.

I specialised in quantitative finance, so I didn't walk away from the subject. I wanted both, and the programme let me have both.

Why London and not the United States?

Three reasons, in order of how much they mattered.

1. London is where the work is. You do not leave the financial industry to study it. The banks, the funds and the trading firms are a short journey away, and that shows up in the speakers, the projects and the people you meet in the evenings.
2. The class is international by default. LBS's Class of 2026 has 431 students from 65 nationalities, and about 90% of them are from outside the UK. No single region is more than about a fifth of the class. At most US schools, international students are a minority. At LBS, the British are.
3. The time zone. A trivial point that isn't. From London you can talk to Asia in the morning and New York in the afternoon, and a global career is built on exactly that kind of day.

If you know you want to spend your whole career in the United States, a US school's local network is denser, and that is a perfectly good reason to choose one. I didn't know that, and I didn't want to decide it at the start of the programme.

Why LBS and not INSEAD, Oxford or Cambridge?

All three are excellent, and all three are shorter. INSEAD's MBA runs for ten months across its campuses. Oxford and Cambridge offer one-year MBAs. For someone who already knows exactly where they are going, shorter is a real advantage.

I wanted time to specialise and room to change my mind. The LBS MBA lets you finish at fifteen, eighteen or twenty-one months, with more than a hundred electives and over thirty exchange partner schools. That flexibility was the deciding factor. It meant the programme could be built around what I wanted to learn, not around a fixed calendar.

The finance faculty helped too. LBS is one of the strongest finance schools in Europe, and it hosts the AQR Asset Management Institute, a research partnership with the investment firm AQR. For a quant, that is a signal the school takes the technical side of finance seriously.

What is the LBS MBA actually like?

Busier than you expect, and more social than a quant expects. The core year puts you in a study group chosen to be as mixed as possible. For someone from a trading floor that can mean building a valuation with a former diplomat, a doctor and a brand manager, and finding that they see things you do not.

The electives are where you make it your own. Mine leaned heavily toward finance. The courses that surprised me were the ones furthest from it, because they were the ones where I had most to learn.

And it is in London, which sounds obvious and isn't. Many classmates stay in the city afterwards, so the network is still round the corner when you need it ten years later.

What does the LBS MBA cost, and what does it lead to?

On test scores: LBS says its minimum is usually around 555 and that it has no preference between GMAT and GRE. For the GRE it prefers 160 or above in both verbal and quant. If you are working on the GMAT, I have written up how to score in the 99th percentile.

What I look for when I interview LBS applicants

LBS invites selected applicants to interview with alumni or senior admissions staff, usually in their own region. I interview for the school, for the MBA and the Executive MBA. I won't share the school's assessment criteria, and nobody who interviews for LBS should. What I can tell you is what makes a conversation easy to write up well.

• A goal you can say in two sentences. What you want to do after the programme, and why you are the person to do it. If it takes five minutes, it isn't clear yet.
• A reason for LBS that could not be about another school. "Great reputation" and "diverse class" apply to twenty schools. Name the part of the programme you will use, and say why.
• Evidence you have done the work. People you have spoken to, events you have attended, clubs you would join and what you would do in them.
• Real questions at the end. Not ones you could have answered from the website.
• Being the same person as the application. The interview is a check on the written file. Candidates who suddenly sound different cause doubt.

How to answer "Why LBS?" in your application

The strongest answers I read follow the same shape, whatever the details.

1. Where you are going. The specific role, sector and region after the MBA.
2. Why an MBA gets you there. What you are missing today that the programme gives you.
3. Why London. Something true about your career, not about the city's museums.
4. Why LBS in particular. Two or three concrete things: the flexible exit, particular electives, a club, an exchange, people you have met. Each tied back to point one.

The common mistakes are quoting rankings, praising diversity without saying what you will do with it, and writing an answer that would work for INSEAD if you changed the name. Admissions readers see that very quickly.

Would I choose LBS again?

Yes. Alongside the MBA I hold master's degrees in computer science from Oxford and financial engineering, and my work now sits across mathematics, finance and admissions. The MBA is the part that made the other two useful to people who are not mathematicians. Admissions work is mostly translation, and LBS is where I learned the language.

Questions people ask about LBS

If you are applying to LBS and would like someone who knows the school from both sides of the interview table to look at your case, that is most of what I do.

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