Student Profile

Sohaib Ahmed

What is your current job/where are you working? Any career highlights you'd like to share?

Currently, I'm serving as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of 99point9, a standardized test and exam prep. company specializing in offering inexpensive, comprehensive, personalized, strategy-centered crash courses that frequently succeed in elevating students' scores to the 94th percentile plus! I run the entirety of 99point9's operations, working with the Co-Executive Directors to define vision, optimizing company budgeting and capital generation, quality-checking and researching curricula, developing regional, national, and international growth schemes (as well as content expansion schemes), defining student acquisition and instructor recruitment strategies, organizing course logistics, setting and implementing social media and online marketing strategies, organizing promotional events across GTA universities, and speaking to groups of high school and university students about our offerings. In terms of career highlights, I was recently featured in a book profiling young leaders under the age of 30.

Why did you decide to sign up for CORe?

When I signed up for CORe, I had already been a COO. However, I had never formally learned business at school: I had solely relied on my intuition, work ethic, analytical inclinations, and communication skills.I wanted to go beyond the soft skills I already had to add some hard business and finance into the mix; I liked business, and I wanted to learn how to do everything I needed to at least cursorily understand as a C-level executive without committing too much time to learning highly specialized skills like financial accounting flawlessly. I didn't want to become an accountant: my start-up already had professionals in that regard. I just wanted to understand the fundamentals of several business domains well enough to navigate and delegate, while still having the flexibility to run my business and do other things. CORe was the perfect fit in this regard.

What was your favorite part of the program?

Likely the fact that everything was cased-based: as someone who does quite a bit of consulting, this made things intuitive for me. I also enjoyed the fact that all course content was to-the-point and application-heavy: that made keeping up with content efficient, and ensured that I could immediately put what I learned to work at, well, work! I also appreciate the community of people I met via CORe, and the chance to interact with people in-person as well as online across the globe.

How are you applying what you've learned in CORe?

When I was taking CORe, I was actually pursuing a business development position alongside my COO role; I was quite literally applying whatever learning I did via CORe in the morning to the business development work I did in the evening! Since, I've used what I learned in CORe in my project management certificate program, in the management consulting preparatory courses I teach to my undergraduate and graduate students, and in my day job as COO of 99point9.

Any advice for people who will be taking CORe?

It is easy to do well in CORe if you apply yourself, but it's also very easy to forget that you need to put the work in every week, particularly if you have other commitments. Don't slack off! The network and content you access is indispensable, and HBX is always willing to reach out to you with opportunities if you put your best foot forward, so make sure you make the most of the CORe program!