For Ruben Steinhardt, moving from Germany to study the MBA (Leadership and Enterprise) at the University of Sydney was a career decision and significant investment. Now a Senior Consultant at TTE Strategy in the DACH region, he credits the MBA with helping him broaden his thinking and move from operations consulting into strategy.
Why Ruben chose an MBA to broaden his career
Before the MBA, Ruben worked at EY in supply chain, operations and procurement. While the field was broad, he was conscious of becoming too specialised.
“I do feel very easily claustrophobic when I have the feeling I'm too narrowed in,” he says.
The MBA offered a deliberate interruption to an established career path and the freedom to explore alternatives.
“An MBA is always a logical intermission in an already existing career path,” Ruben says. “It's a generally excusable way of stopping the thing you're doing, doing something else, and then having the liberty of pursuing something else you have discovered in the meantime.”
He returned to consulting, but with a wider remit. “Where the MBA definitely helped was that it was the step up to strategy consulting,” he says. Today his work includes strategy and AI.
An MBA is always a logical intermission in an already existing career path.
Ruben Steinhardt
MBA alumnus
What international students need to consider
Applying from Germany meant evaluating the MBA from the other side of the world. Reputation, cost, relocation and the visa process all mattered.
“You're paying a lot of money. You want to know that it is actually something which is worthwhile investing in,” Ruben says.
Personal interaction helped make the decision tangible. Conversations with the program team transformed the University from something he had researched online into a place where he could imagine studying and living.
He is candid about the administration involved. The visa process was manageable, but required time and organisation to understand the steps and complete them on schedule. Once in Australia, he found the support strong and says he still misses Sydney “tremendously”.
How the MBA changed the way Ruben thinks
For Ruben, much of the MBA's value came from the cohort. He describes “communication, interaction, the sharing of experiences and insights” as central to the experience.
An internship with Venture Studios also gave him an opportunity to apply his consulting experience in a different environment.
The deeper return was intellectual. “The MBA challenges you to think of problems more broadly and to consider more perspectives,” he says.
That shift continues to influence his strategy work with senior leaders across industries. For Ruben, the MBA did not provide a completely different career - it helped him see his existing one more broadly and move into the part of consulting that suited him better.