Moe Alaeddine, AMBA’22

Moe Alaeddine has long considered himself a life-long learner. He reads business books for fun (a recent favourite is Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality), finds tests and paper deadlines invigorating, and gravitates towards any situation that allows him to spend time with professors. Up until a few years ago, he planned on being one himself.

It was, somewhat ironically, the Smith Accelerated MBA (AMBA) program that helped steer his aspirations away from academia. He was three years into his career at the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) when he started in the program in 2021, seeing it as a stepping stone to one day stand behind university lecterns himself. Two things changed his plans: First, he got promoted within the bank, which made him realize the degree to which he really loved his work. And second, the AMBA exposed him to a much broader, and much more compelling, range of possibilities. “The program taught me that there was a lot more to explore in the world of business,” he explains. “I learned that I should be a bit more open about what my career progression could look like. That I should take on new challenges that might come my way. That I could stand to take more risks.”

During a strategic operations management class, professor Barry Cross tasked Moe and his teammates with the deceptively simple assignment of designing a restaurant that would allow for better flow of customers. “He gave us all the data, and the layout, and asked us to optimize it,” Moe recalls. He quickly realized the task was more complex than he’d imagined. After pondering dozens of different placements for the entrance, the checkout counter, and the host stand, and after visiting local quick-service restaurants to take notes about what could make the experience more pleasant, he began to consider things he’d never thought of before. “I really loved that challenge, because it made me think in so many different ways,” Moe says. “I was used to interpreting financial statements and letting them dictate my conversations with clients. This made me think beyond just the numbers.”

Across the board, Moe loved the intensity of the curriculum: “I wanted to be under pressure, because I knew the challenge of rising to the occasion would be good for my growth as both a leader and an individual in business.” He was energized by the enthusiasm and experience of faculty and fellow students, “Everyone was extremely ambitious, and everybody had the same mindset to help one another to get as much as we could out of the program.”

The extent to which Moe was able to collaborate with teammates and faculty came as a bit of a surprise, considering most of it occurred via laptops. In fact, because the program began during a period of Covid, and because Moe was part of a geographically dispersed Northern Ontario team, he didn’t actually encounter his teammates in real life until the final two weeks of study brought them all to Kingston. But efforts the Smith team took to ensure that all remote students were engaged, equipped with top-tier communications tools, and meeting regularly—not to mention the care with which teams were assembled in the first place—made the whole ordeal feel personal. “I knew my teammates inside and out before I ever met them in person,” he says. “We built such a strong bond. I consider them family. Possibly because we spent a year in each other’s faces through our screens.”

Since Moe graduated in 2022, the program’s benefits have accrued swiftly and measurably: “It became a lot easier to move up in my career.” The degree empowered him to make an upward move into a coaching role at BDC, a “really great” stretch experience he held until he was promoted again into the bank’s special accounts department, and once more into his current position as a senior manager on the credit risk management team.

But Moe considers his rapid post-grad career advancement a secondary benefit: “The most valuable thing the AMBA has given me, by far, is momentum,” he reflects. “I’ve gained the ability to take what I’ve learned and apply it in a way that will keep me focused and learning for a long time.”