Tamara Kushnir McGillivray, AMBA’06

It’s been nearly two decades since Tamara Kushnir McGillivray completed her Smith Accelerated MBA (AMBA)—as part of the second-ever cohort to do so—and the program’s fingerprints are all over her life.

They’re in her career, where her AMBA-enhanced skills set helped win her a role at Imperial Oil more than 18 years ago and equipped her to take on more than a dozen opportunities within the company since.

They’re in her professional network, which is stocked not only with her teammates and classmates, but also Smith graduates and students of all stripes, thanks in part to her volunteer work with the Calgary Smith School of Business alumni chapter.

They’re even in her personal life: Many of Tamara’s closest friends are former classmates. Her husband, Mike McGillivray (EMBA ’11) was so impressed with her experience that he started his own MBA journey with the school a few years later. Their kids, now teens, wore Queen’s onesies before they could sit up.

Not a bad legacy for a program she started in hopes of getting a modest professional boost. “I was more than five years into my career, and I wasn’t accelerating as fast as I would like. I felt like a B player, and I didn’t understand why others were As,” she recalls, thinking back to her decision to enroll. “I realized I needed that next level of learning to gain strategic thinking and become a leader within an organization.”

The Smith AMBA was still brand-new, but its appeal to Tamara was immediate. She could learn from her home in Calgary and continue to work as she studied. And because her undergrad commerce degree had given her a solid foundation of knowledge, she could graduate a year after starting. “For me, it was just a dream fit,” she says.

Within days of starting the program in January of 2005, Tamara felt her horizons broadening. As someone whose background had mostly been in sales, Tamara had approached the program’s finance-focused coursework with equal parts enthusiasm—it was a clear area in which she could grow—and intimidation. One of her teammates worked in the field, and as they collaborated on team projects and assignments, she began to pick up a deep understanding of the subject. (It went both ways—she also found herself counselling peers on client-centric coursework.) “That wasn’t happenstance,” she says. “The teams were so well formed, with so much thought.” When Tamara sat down to write her finance exam, she was pleasantly surprised to find herself fully prepared for it; furthermore, when the marks were posted shortly after, she was delighted to see she’d earned the top grade in the class. “That was a marker moment for me,” she says. “It helped me see myself as a leader beyond the specific stream I was working in.”

Tamara’s employer saw the difference, too: Midway through the AMBA, she received a significant promotion, something she directly attributes to the skills she was building. “The company recognized the commitment I was bringing to the program,” she says. “And what I was learning was very clearly rubbing off in my work,” she says.

After graduation, Tamara poured herself into her new role with renewed confidence and energy. Within a few months, she got a request from a fellow Smith graduate, who asked if she’d be interested starting up a Calgary chapter for alumni of the school. They met to plan a barbeque and got talking about their work; he offered to pass her resume along to a few contacts. That sparked a series of connections that led her to get a call, seemingly out of the blue, from Imperial Oil. “The alumni network is so powerful,” she says. “It creates what I think of as natural collisions, but they are also facilitated by Queen’s.”

Tamara moved to Imperial Oil in 2007 and hasn’t looked back. Today, as she tackles a challenging and rewarding portfolio—leading the development carbon credit markets for ExxonMobil (the majority owner of Imperial Oil)—she finds herself drawing from her AMBA experience every day. “It really did change my life,” she says. “Take it from someone with 20 years of hindsight. If you foster those connections, the Smith community will reciprocate. The school doesn’t walk away from you. It sticks with you in the most positive way.”