Alexandre Lemaire, MIB’23

There’s a reason Alexandre Lemaire accepted a job helping to organize the Formula 1 Grand Prix du Canada, the biggest sporting event in the country: He’s a guy who likes to push himself out of his comfort zone. Whether he’s managing the development of a new app or brainstorming better on-site experiences for the 350,000 fans who attend the event every year, he loves the rush of a fresh challenge. “I take ideas about making the customer experience better and work to make them happen,” he says. “It’s crazy, but it’s so fun and rewarding.”

This same drive prompted Alexandre to enrol in the Smith Master of International Business (MIB) program in 2022. He’d spent his entire educational career to date studying close to home in Montreal, in his native French, and had no clear career goal in mind, aside from a general desire to do something entrepreneurial. But he did feel an itch to test his limits. A demanding business program—delivered in English, and, partially, across an ocean—felt like the kind of stretch exercise he needed. “I wanted new challenges and new learnings,” he says. “And I wanted to be exposed to as many cultures as possible.”

The MIB program gave Alexandre all that—and more.

Almost immediately after arriving in Kingston to start the first year of his double-degree program he felt the interactive and fruitful tenor of classroom conversations expanding his mind. “It was never about a professor saying something to simply be written down,” he says. “It was about discussing ideas, understanding different perspectives, and learning to disagree without confrontation.”

A few weeks later, Alexandre invited a dozen of his still-new classmates for a weekend at his family cottage near Montreal. He’d never organized anything quite like it, and wasn’t sure how folks would gel. Yet as soon as he sat down to dinner with new friends from Mexico, India, China, Germany, and more—each of whom had brought a dish from their culture to share—it was immediately clear that the effort was worth it. “It was a really great moment,” he recalls. “There’s no way I could have done that outside of the program.”

Alexandre spent the second year of his studies in Barcelona, at Esade, where he amped up his pursuit of new experiences on campus and beyond. He got to know the startup founders behind an app that allows people to book tennis courts. He had coffee with professionals working at FC Barcelona. He met with dozens of entrepreneurial thinkers in a diverse range of businesses both large and small. As he did so, he started to see a career path that wasn’t clear to him before. “These conversations helped lead me to a job that I love,” he says. “And I might not have had them if I’d went into the program with a fixed idea of what I wanted to do.”

Indeed, the MIB’s influence informs almost every aspect of Alexandre’s work today. Formula 1 is a highly dynamic and international sport, and its fanbase is evolving and diversifying every day. Thanks in large part to the program, Alexandre has the tools to create innovative experiences that exceed everyone’s expectations. “We need to have open-mindedness in the way we do business—internally, and also for our customers,” he says. “And the MIB has given me that.”