During your studies you may have met the school’s founder Dame Celia Russo. Her vision, first stated in 1988, was to create a new breed of business school, one that was “in business to make a better world”. We strive to remain faithful to this vision and to graduate alumni who take this vision to heart and strive to make the world a better place in their own way. Whether these contributions are big or small, visible or discreet, long-lasting or more ephemeral, the essential is that our combined efforts are indeed making a difference.

In the face of the world’s challenges of today and tomorrow, École des Ponts Business School, your school, feels more than ever that these values need to be the DNA of all that we do. And, increasingly, we are trying to instill these values throughout our programs and to develop our areas of focus – namely innovation and entrepreneurship – around these values. For example, in our newly re-designed MBA we have included a social impact project from the beginning of the program that spans 10 weeks. What better way to sensitize participants to the importance of doing well and doing good than from day one?

So, in a nutshell, we’ve stayed small, we’ve kept our start-up mindset, but our values have not changed! Beyond trying to reassure you, we are also telling you this because we are open to working on positive impact initiatives with our alumni. We hope you have leveraged the MBA to create a career you are proud of, maybe we can now leverage your talents and accomplishments to do things at the school we can all be proud of.

Come to us with your ideas, passions and projects and let’s see how we can co-innovate, co-develop or co-ordinate new events, courses, master classes, programs, guest lectures, partnerships, sponsorships, projects, conferences, crazy ideas, not-so-crazy ideas, small ideas, big ideas, world-changing ideas, etc. Let’s start the conversation. 

We all know that to face the world’s challenges, new mindsets, skillsets, approaches, ideas and actions are needed. We would like to hope that many of our Alumni are ready to step forward to be effective decision makers in a world that needs more leaders, more right-minded action and a more positive outlook.

Just like in the classroom where every participant was needed to create valuable discussion, every alumnus is needed to make our voice heard way beyond our size. This allows us to “keep punching above our weight category”, so that we can continue to make a much bigger impact than anyone (but us) would expect.