Arun Balu Pazhayannur

I hail from a small village in Southern India. I am a Chartered Accountant and a mechanical engineer. I started my professional career working for a financial consulting firm where I had the opportunity to work on varied financial advisory projects. I was working across different industries and I was particularly fascinated by the financial services industry. After qualifying as a Chartered accountant, I joined Citibank in a rotational leadership role where I thought I could not only learn a lot more about the industry but also work on my managerial skills. I have worked with Citi in the retail and corporate sectors in business and operational roles over a period of five years. I was managing a team of 20+ in the ATM operations department, working in Capital markets — Interbank forex division and lastly, as a Business Development Manager. What I enjoyed the most was working on technology projects in the bank where I could devise innovative solutions to some of the complex problems the bank was facing and bring about a lasting impact. While I was solving these problems and making my career choices, I realized that I needed to broaden my business knowledge.

About eighteen years ago, my family and I tried to immigrate to Vancouver, Canada. However, we were unsuccessful in doing so and returned to India in two months. It was my dream ever since to return to Canada to live here someday. At this point in my life, I made the simple choice of achieving both my goals by pursuing an MBA in Canada. Ivey was the top school I picked to pursue my MBA.

Two primary reasons I picked Ivey was because of the one-year duration and the case-based method of teaching. I wanted to quickly get back to working and didn’t want to study for two years. Moreover, I heard a lot of good reviews about the case-based method, talking to alumni and students in the program. It was difficult to fully appreciate the value of this method of teaching over phone calls and blogs, but I was able to appreciate the true value of this method only when I attended the first few classes at Ivey.

It has been a couple of months into the program and it has been a great learning experience so far. I was pushed out of my comfort zone from day one of the program and driven to achieve more out of myself. We have about 120 students in our program and the close-knit community of the program is very advantageous to get to know all my fellow classmates.

I am an active member of the consulting club, finance club, and am the President of the Toastmasters club.