Olga Antimonova is our November 2004 Student of the Month Olga scored an outstanding 730 on the GMAT exam!

Olga Antimonova was born and grew up in Novosibirsk , where she graduated from the Novosibirsk State University Economics department with a Diploma in Mathematical Methods in Economics. After her third year she was awarded one of the first internships Procter&Gamble had in Russia , where she says “the three months of intensive training and challenges in an international corporation were a priceless experience.”

Upon graduation, in the tough crisis year of 1998, Proctor & Gamble offered her a position of sales manager in Krasnoyarsk region. Olga says that relocation to another city was a big decision for her to make, but a couple of years later she was very thankful for that hard experience of being on her own in a city where she knew nothing and no-one.

After a year with Procter&Gamble in Krasnoyarsk , Olga won the Edmund Muskie fellowship from US Department of State to pursue postgraduate education in the USA .

She was off to Indiana University Bloomington to get Master's degree in Economics. While at Indiana University , Olga changed her focus from sales to analytics, quantitative methods, and finance. During the summer she interned with UBS PaineWebber Private Clients Group (an investment bank) in San Francisco . Olga says “These two years in US changed me a lot. Beside the usual cultural shock, I survived September 11 th in the USA . I learned a lot of new things, especially in the field of finance and financial management.”

Upon return to Russia , Olga began to work at the World Bank's Moscow Office. She has been with the Bank for two years as a Research Analyst for the Economics Unit, involved in macroeconomic analysis and monitoring of the situation in Russian economy.

Wanting to eventually return to the private sector, Olga has just started thinking about an MBA. We applaud her understanding that the best way to prepare for an MBA is to take your time. She started early, studying for and taking the GMAT this year and scoring an outstanding 730! She plans to start applying to MBA programs only next year however, and this year she has dedicated her after work hours to an intensive German course at Goethe Institute in Moscow, while investigating to which of the top American business schools she wants to apply. Olga likes to travel and she enjoys nature and art, so we hope that she will take the time to visit several of those schools in the process of her planned vacation trips to see some American national parks and art museums. Afterall, we have a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words (and this is especially true for a first hand look at a potential B-school).

After B-school Olga wants to keep her options open. While she realizes that investment banking would be the most reasonable private-sector application of her experience, she says that a totally different path of career development is always possible.

Congratulations Olga. We wish you every success in your well thought out B-school selection process.