My inspiring experience on the WBS Global Mentoring Programme

MBA alumnus, Tuan Nguyen, shares how the Global Mentoring Programme enriched his overall experience.

It has been 12 years since I officially started the WBS Global Mentoring Programme, however, I actually started the mentor and mentee relationship two years earlier, back in 2008 when I first joined the MBA programme.   

At that time, I worked for Nortel, once a giant telecom company in supply chain management. Since the dot-com collapse, Nortel had to file for bankruptcy protection and I knew I had to find a way to change my career. My dream was always to embark on an MBA programme and to find a new challenge in another job such as finance. Starting up a business was never a plan back then. 

As part of Warwick Business School’s mentoring service, I searched for a mentor in operations management. After being accepted by my WBS Mentor, we started talking over email and phone and got along quite well. However, our relationship developed to a new level when I met my mentor in-person during September 2008 when I visited WBS for on-campus training. Looking back, I remember my WBS Mentor always challenged my thinking, and he had formed various opinions based on his experience. I remember my mentor taking me to visit the church where Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was buried and I learnt about leadership skills through his story. My mentor also surprised me by his dedication to health training and martial arts which I also shared an interest in.

On my graduation day in July 2011, after a wonderful ceremony, splendid photos and congratulatory words from my family, my WBS Mentor, the old wise man and me, a not so young graduate, strolled to the car to go to the hotel and I started to feel there was a quiet moment. I knew that the mentoring journey had almost ended. I also realised that my WBS Mentor had not only been helpful as a mentor but had also been a great friend. I had learnt so much and now I had to put it all into practice to be successful. I had already resigned from a brokerage securities company and started up my own company, so I mumbled to my WBS Mentor that I will fight hard for my start-up business, a business consulting company with legal services to be added down the road when my lawyer certificate would be available.

The promise to my mentor on that graduation day has been a motivation for me to reach where I am now, managing ANT Lawyers, a law firm in Vietnam which I founded, where the business, leadership and entrepreneurial skills that I learnt through my time at WBS, alongside the help from my mentor, are being honed. 

My WBS Mentor has inspired me to follow an intellectual and healthy journey and since we met I never stop chasing knowledge and health.

Find out more about our Global Mentoring Programme here and more on our Distance Learning MBA here.