A year of parallel growth.

Where I started

In October 2025, I started this MBA year with a very clear identity: a 23-year-old from Bunschoten who had graduated from Windesheim with solid commercial instincts, five years of sales experience at MATCH-DAY, and a semi-professional soccer career on the side. I knew how to work hard. What I was less certain about was whether I could think strategically, not just execute well, but truly understand why organisations succeed and fail at a deeper level.

That uncertainty was the honest starting point behind my six SMARTO goals. They weren't aspirational in a vague sense. They were precise commitments to close specific gaps: in research, in communication, in leadership under academic pressure, and in my professional network.

"The same discipline that gets me to evening training three times a week has kept me consistent in every other part of my life. The challenge this year was learning to be strategic about both, not just hardworking."

What the courses taught me

The five courses I completed this year each contributed something distinct to my professional self-concept. Growth Strategies and Organisational Challenges (GSOC) gave me frameworks to think about the kind of expansion decisions I see at MATCH-DAY every week, how firms grow, why some fail, and what the human cost of misaligned growth looks like. It was the course that felt most immediately applicable to my daily work.

Organisation Development and Change (ODC) was harder. It asked me to sit with complexity, to understand that organisations resist change not out of stubbornness but out of deep-rooted systems and cultures. Leading a group project here while that very theory was being discussed in class was its own kind of learning. I found myself applying Kotter's model not to a case study but to the dynamics of my own team.

Alliances, Mergers and Networks (AMN) was where I felt most confident academically, a 7.5 that reflected genuine engagement. The course connected directly to my professional world: understanding how partnerships are structured, why trust matters in long-term commercial relationships, and how firms balance cooperation with competition. These are questions I face daily as an SDR navigating multi-stakeholder clients.

Business Ecosystems and Open Innovation (BEOI) broadened my thinking most significantly. I entered it expecting another strategy course and left with a fundamentally changed view of how value is created, not within firms but across them, through platforms, communities, and shared innovation. This is the course I will carry with me longest.

Strategic Entrepreneurship and Organisational Renewal (SEOR) challenged my assumptions about growth and disruption. It reinforced something I believe deeply from my sales experience: the best strategies are built not just on market analysis but on genuine understanding of what customers actually need.

The goal I didn't reach

The networking goal is the one I need to address honestly. I set out to attend five industry events and conduct five informational interviews. I didn't get there. The reason is simple and uncomfortable: I consistently deprioritised it in favour of things that felt more urgent, a deadline, a busy week at MATCH-DAY, a training session that couldn't be missed.

What this taught me is a distinction I hadn't made clearly before: networking is not an outcome, it's a habit. You don't network when there's time. You build it into your routine the same way I build in gym sessions. The metacognitive lesson here is that I optimise well for structured, time-bound tasks, and I need to apply the same structure to relational investment. That is something I am actively building into my approach for the year ahead.

Who I am becoming

I started this year as someone who worked hard and instinctively. I am leaving it as someone who works hard and thinks carefully about why. The MBA has not changed who I fundamentally am, it has given me language, frameworks, and perspective to be more deliberate about the kind of professional and leader I want to become.

My combination of a commercial background, 5+ years of front-line sales experience, and now a master's in Strategy and Organisation is not accidental. I am building towards roles where strategy meets execution, where business development decisions are grounded in both market reality and organisational capability. The sports and tech sectors remain my focus, because they sit at the intersection of the two worlds I know best.

The soccer doesn't hurt either. Playing soccer at Derde Divisie A level while completing this programme has been a weekly reminder that high performance requires recovery, that teams win on trust and communication more than individual brilliance, and that the discipline of showing up, even when you're tired, is itself a transferable skill. Employers rarely see that on a grade list. I hope this portfolio shows it.