Executive MBA alumni return to teach at Cambridge

Alumni such as Lee Cortez (Executive MBA 2023), Gunnar Droescher (Executive MBA 2020), Anyu Gao (Executive MBA 2022) and Anna Hoff (Executive MBA 2019) have taught alongside faculty on topics ranging from leadership and culture to AI, responsible innovation and supply chain strategy. Their stories show how the Executive MBA experience continues after the degree, sustained by ongoing connections and shared learning.

Gunnar says: “As a student, I enjoyed learning from people who came back as guest lecturers as they made the concepts more tangible through sharing practical examples. Coming back myself, I am always amazed by the level of questions and challenges I receive from the students. It is a lot of fun.”

From participant to teacher: why alumni return to teach

Although their paths differ, these alumni are often driven by similar things: a wish to give something back to the Cambridge Judge community, to keep learning and to help connect theory with what happens in real organisations.

For some, the starting point was work they had already done on the Executive MBA. Anna was keen that her individual project should not sit on a bookshelf, so she turned it into a case study on responsible innovation. Gunnar, who had learned a great deal from case studies during his Executive MBA, wanted to see what it would be like to write one himself, using his own experience in supply chain management.

Others were drawn in by the feel of the classroom. Anyu remembers how interactive Executive MBA teaching felt as a participant, with faculty, students and other contributors shaping the sessions together. When he was invited to teach a case study he had written during his Executive MBA, he found it both enjoyable and energising. That first session led to more teaching, and eventually to becoming a Fellow of Cambridge Judge, with a deeper role in teaching, assessment, research and partnerships.

For Lee, coming back to teach, and now to pursue a PhD, feels like an aspiration realised. He sees Cambridge Judge as a community built around sharing knowledge, and teaching as a way to contribute while also stretching his own thinking. Like many alumni who return to the classroom, he has discovered that you often understand a topic most clearly when you are trying to explain it to someone else.

How alumni in the classroom enhance the Executive MBA experience

Alumni who come back to teach bring a perspective that feels quite special. As Anyu puts it, alumni understand the direction of the Executive MBA curriculum from their own lived experience and have a good sense of what participants may be thinking or feeling at different points in the programme. This makes it easier for them to link classroom discussion to real leadership responsibilities.

The learning runs both ways. Alumni often describe the classroom as a space where they continue to grow: through the questions participants ask, the challenge they receive from faculty and the effort involved in turning their own experience into something they can share.

Faculty, in turn, benefit from close collaboration with alumni who bring contemporary organisational challenges directly into the classroom. Lee Cortez’s work with Dr Lidia Mishchenko, Senior Teaching Associate at Cambridge Judge, on the Organisational Behaviour course is a good example. Together, they developed and refined a case on implementing a new parental leave policy, turning abstract theories of change and culture into something concrete, personal and analytically rich for students.

Reflecting on this collaboration, Lidia Mishchenko says, “Alumni bring something genuinely distinctive into the classroom. Having completed the programme themselves, they are insiders and outsiders at once, fluent in the language of both practice and academia. Research often describes the lecturer and student as occupying different worlds separated by institutional role, language and different reference points. Alumni dissolve that gap. Lee Cortez did exactly this: he translated the realities of practice into a language and voice the students recognised as their own.”

A continuing Cambridge journey

For these alumni, coming back to Cambridge Judge feels both professionally rewarding and personally meaningful. It keeps them connected to the Business School, gives them an opportunity to support current executives and offers a way to bring together research, practice and the challenges they encounter in their own work.

Their experiences highlight a distinctive aspect of the Cambridge Judge Executive MBA: learning does not end at graduation. For some, it comes full circle, as they move from participant to teacher and help shape the very experience that once shaped them.

Anna says: “It is a privilege and a joy to return to Cambridge Judge. Finding that balance between student and lecturer to bridge the gap between theory and practice truly makes me smile.”