Returning NYU Abu Dhabi alumnus, Allen W Magnusson, reflects on the first month of the Stern at NYUAD MBA and the Class of 2025 cohort.
By Allen W Magnusson
When I would go for runs around NYU Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat campus in 2016, just before I graduated with my undergraduate physics degree, I would run (quite literally) in the sand. There was nothing standing between the Saadiyat campus and the sea except for unfenced and gently rolling dunes.
Returning to Abu Dhabi for the first time in nearly nine years to be part of the Stern School of Business at NYUAD’s inaugural cohort, so much has changed across the city. With an intervening population increase of around 30%, the skyline in Abu Dhabi is denser, its streets busier, its tenacious ambition extending further across its previously-untamed islands. I can almost run across Saadiyat Island now on paved roads. Even with so much change, one thing that has remained constant as I reflect upon my undergraduate experience:the spirit and passion that imbues NYUAD’s programs and characterizes its students.
I’m at an interesting crossroads in my personal and professional life: intellectually engaged but spiritually dissatisfied with my past four years of attorney practice in Denver and Chicago, I felt it was necessary for me to pivot into a professional setting that was more community-focused, values-driven, and impact-oriented. In late 2023, when I first received an alumni email announcing the launch of NYUAD’s inaugural one-year Stern MBA, I couldn’t shake the feeling this program might provide a springboard into that trajectory. I applied singularly to the Stern at NYUAD program, even in spite of my aversion to MBA programs at-large, trusting the inaugural cohort would completely subvert the “suits in skyscrapers” stereotype in search of something much larger and meaningful.
I’m writing this piece more than a month into a very intense academic year. Despite heavy backgrounds in physics, law, literature, philosophy, and liberal arts, I have never taken an accounting course, and I’m flying a bit by the seat of my pants. Setting aside the books for a moment, though, I’d like to wax poetic about the quality of my 53 colleagues, whose diversity, talent, and passion goes above and beyond anything I had expected. In the past month — in lecture halls, desert safaris, and dining halls — what shocks me is the consistency of spirit across my cohort, even as it comes from so many different backgrounds and is focused on so many different futures.
My peers are already law-firm owners, florists, scientists, and entrepreneurs focused on intercontinental agriculture. They are looking to become restaurateurs, sustainability leaders, ethical AI champions, and so much more. Uniting everybody is a purely kind and unselfish caring toward both a UAE and a planet that is more integrated, visionary, exciting, and hopeful. How rare is that among a group of business students?
Over these next 11 months, I’m committed to a deep chapter of learning and self-betterment, and advancing toward new career trajectories. The focus on myself feels secondary, however. Much more meaningful this year is connecting with and celebrating alongside the extraordinary group of humans in my cohort. With my peers, I’m truly proud and honored to be part of the inaugural NYUAD Stern MBA class, a first chapter in the many to follow that will bring true leaders (not just “business” leaders) to the UAE and beyond.