Two months after starting an MBA at Insead in France, Aubrey Keller found himself in lockdown at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. “I did not expect Covid,” he recalls of those first weeks of the pandemic, “but neither did the world.”
Around the same time, Hanna-Lil Malone, a former accounts director at PR company Lansons, was quarantining with her parents in Dublin. Sick of working on Zoom all day, she looked forward to September and the start of her MBA programme at Cambridge Judge Business School in the UK.
But in May, the school gave her an ultimatum: defer, or recommit knowing the experience would be entirely different to what she expected when she was first admitted in October 2019.