For Lisa Bui, MBA ‘25, reaching her career goals has been a team effort.

While she had great learning opportunities during her time at Deloitte, advising senior leadership executives at various companies on transformative business events, she wanted to experience these events within an organization to grow as a leader and broaden her perspective. This led her to the opportunity at Maple Leaf Foods Inc., which she learned about from one of her undergraduate classmates.

“This role has allowed me to utilize my consulting and audit background while continuing to learn and grow. It has allowed me to be a part of critical business decisions and task forces, and to learn from some of the best in CPG. Being part of such an iconic Canadian company like Maple Leaf Foods and currently contributing to the Canada Packers spin-off is a career milestone that few in Canada can claim,” says Bui, Manager Strategy and Corporate Development at Maple Leaf Foods Inc.

“It has been a great experience, but about a year in, I felt the need to take some time to reflect on what I’d learned and seen so far, and that’s when I came across the Accelerated MBA.”

To Bui, the program was the perfect way to reflect on her work experience so far and meet people in other industries, without pressing pause on her career.

“Ivey was the perfect opportunity because of the Case Method Learning; I wanted practical applications,” she says. “I also wanted to force and enable myself to read more business cases and reflect on what other businesses did in the past in a structured way, as opposed to learning and reading things on an ad hoc basis.”

It has also provided her with the opportunity to reflect on leadership characteristics (which Ivey places a big emphasis on) after being fortunate enough to have had stellar leadership from her bosses at both Deloitte and Maple Foods.

“A lot of what they teach in those (leadership) courses is to let your team members bring their full self to work. And that is hard to enable,” she says.

“I've seen the benefits of that type of leadership on my team at work, how loyal and committed everyone is to deliver, always strive to do what is right and how everyone on the team has each other's back. That is a hard environment to enable and foster.”

Bui says her partner, friends and classmates have been instrumental in helping her get through the program, whether it was helping her prioritize, sharing the workload, or reflecting on what’s really important.

For anyone thinking about joining Ivey’s AMBA, Bui says it’s crucial to think about what they want to get out of it for their current career path and trajectory.

“I wanted time to reflect on the experiences that I've had and to validate those experiences with other ways to think through problems,” she says.

“The number of cases we did under tight timelines also forced me to focus on what's important. But I’m also grateful for all the people and the leaders that have helped me get to where I am, because they are at the core of why I've been successful and had the success in my career to this point.”