Putting Time Aside with a QS Community MBA Scholarship Winner

The winner of a QS Community MBA Scholarship, Gennaro Bozza, spoke to TopMBA.com during his last month at CERN, where he has been putting the finishing touches to the second of two major projects conducted during a two-year stint at the renowned research institute based in Geneva.

There, Gennaro – who has a background in mechanical engineering – has been helping to design the cooling systems that ensure CERN’s Large Hadron Collider can function at the extremely low temperatures it requires, using what Gennaro describes calmly as “special super-conductive magnets that create the highest magnetic fields on earth, and that need to be cooled down.”

Gennaro could have stayed on in search of a new position at CERN at the end of his current contract, but says: “What I wanted to do was to complete my education with an MBA.” 

 “I always look to put some time aside for community engagement - this is something that is very important for me. I always feel like I don’t do enough but, of course, I am busy with my work,” he says. Gennaro found time, during his university years, to take on the role of student representative and to help create a way of providing professors with individual feedback that is still in use today. He was also able to improve the university’s procedure for scheduling exams – a seemingly small detail that led to an immediate surge in the exam completion rate. Most recently, however, he has been volunteering his services as an Italian teacher at the nonprofit adult-learning institution, the Université Populaire of Geneva Canton (UPCGe):

“The average age of my class, I would say, is 55 years old – much older than me, but it’s very rewarding and I always have a lot of fun in the class,” he says, expressing his sadness that his voluntary teaching must come to an end, at least for the time being, when he joins the incoming St. Gallen MBA cohort.

Of course, the importance Gennaro attaches to social responsibility is something he will take with him to business school:

“When you develop a company, of course, a very important part of it is considering sustainability. A responsible leader means not making profit at any cost but rather, making profit in a sustainable way, from an environmental point of view, from an economical point of view and also with an eye on the stakeholders,” he explains.