From The Prime Minister’s Office To An Oxford MBA - Poets&Quants

Tim Krupa, right, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Krupa worked on the policy team in Trudeau’s office, advising on youth, sport, and disabilities policy. Courtesy photo

Tim Krupa has always had the good fortune to be around great leaders. Those who have worked with him — a list that includes Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada — might well put Krupa in that category, too.

Krupa has been a teacher and a researcher, studying the well-being of children in Zambia, Africa and helping design after-school programs there. He’s also been a policy advisor for youth, sport, and disabilities at the highest level of Canadian government, serving as an aide to the Trudeau government. Now he’s studying at Oxford University’s Said Business School, a candidate in the 1+1 MBA program, for which he was awarded a Pershing Square Scholarship — the first Canadian to ever achieve the honor.

Not bad for a schoolboy from Kelowna, a mid-size city deep in the interior of British Columbia, Western Canada.

A TASTE FOR POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY

Tim Krupa

Krupa expected to become a doctor. He studied biochemistry and biology as an undergrad at the University of British Columbia, and in his junior and senior years served as a research and teaching assistant. But everything changed when he spent the summer after his junior year in Zambia, where his interest in public policy was sparked anew as he worked directly with teachers and schoolchildren, seeing the impact of good — and bad — government decisions. The experience was so profound, he returned to the country again the next year.

“I was on a path to becoming a physician, but my experiences in Zambia really brought home the importance of public health policy,” Krupa tells Poets&Quants. “In low-resource areas, by the time you are in the hospital, the probability of a positive outcome may already be low. Policies can help prevent disease and promote health and well-being. I felt my work could one day have a real and scalable impact on people’s lives if I moved more upstream into policy and politics.”

Back home in Canada, Krupa began volunteering politically, first for a liberal candidate in a conservative district — “I think we ended up getting something like 10% of the vote,” he laughs — then on campus, setting up a political club, getting elected executive chair of his student union and member of UBC’s Board of Governors, and transitioning immediately from valedictorian of his graduating class to a Master of Arts in political science candidate. His thesis examined the political economy of subnational carbon pricing policies.

MOST LIKELY TO CHANGE THE WORLD

In 2013, Krupa’s classmates voted him Most Likely to Change the World. They couldn’t know how quickly that prediction would begin to come true.

In the summer of 2014, midway through his master’s program, Krupa volunteered as an intern in the office of the newly elected leader of the Liberal Party, then a minority opposition party. He had, without knowing it, grabbed the tiger by the tail: His new boss was Justin Trudeau, who within a year would soar to power at the head of one of the most decisive waves of change in modern Canadian political history.

“I was planning to go back to UBC to finish my MA thesis, but I got really fortunate and got to stay on board, and it transitioned into a full-time job,” Krupa remembers. “I finished my thesis by distance and ended up staying in Ottawa for three and a half incredible years.”

Winners of the 2017-2019 Pershing Square Scholarship, from left, Giorgio Tarraf, Tulsi Parida, Tim Krupa, Lauren Xie, and Vuyane Mhlomi

A ‘PERSONABLE’ AND ‘DOWN-TO-EARTH’ BOSS

Among the achievements Krupa is most proud to have worked on, the first he names is the Canada Child Benefit, a $23 billion program that has helped lift an estimated 300,000 children out of poverty. It was a signature program of Trudeau’s. “The benefit gives more to low- and middle-income parents,” Krupa says, “and many consider it Canada’s most significant social policy innovation in a generation.”

In fact, Trudeau — who also serves as Canada’s minister of youth and intergovernmental affairs — is very serious about issues affecting Canadian youth, Krupa says — and that’s “one of the many things I admire about him greatly. He’s tremendously passionate about youth policy, so he takes the issue quite seriously.”

The prime minister, he adds, is “really personable. He takes time to get to know his staff and he’s really down-to-earth. He loves yoga and boxing and being in the outdoors and spending time with his family. And when I was thinking about leaving, he took time to chat with me and sit down, and he was really good about it — he understood that this was something that I had wanted to do and would ultimately allow me to contribute to Canada down the road in an even more impactful way.”

A BUSINESS MODEL TO SOLVE THE WORLD’S PROBLEMS 

Tim Krupa. Courtesy photo

Looking back at his time working for Trudeau, Krupa is filled with optimism. “The fact that the Prime Minister’s message of cultural diversity and inclusion resonated so well, not just in Canada but around the world, is a source of hope for me,” he says. “It’s easy to get cynical today, but despite all the challenges in the world, I believe politics and policy can still be tremendous forces for good.”

Business, too. In Ottawa, Krupa worked with the most diverse and gender-balanced cabinet in Canadian history, which included “incredible leaders” like Finance Minister Bill Morneau, whose background is in business and business education. “Folks with that kind of analytical ability are really able to add more value to the policy development process and leadership in general,” Krupa says.

“I agree with (founder of The Pershing Square Foundation) Bill Ackman when he said a lot of the world’s problems are best solved using a business model.”

EQUIPPING LEADERS TO SOLVE GLOBAL PROBLEMS

That viewpoint made Oxford a logical choice, Krupa says. Though he applied to Stanford GSB, Harvard Business School, and MIT as well, “I wanted to experience something different, outside of North America. My older brother had studied in the UK about seven years ago, and I remember visiting him and felt inspired — so the seed was sort of planted in my mind then.

“I love what Oxford is doing, teaching business principles and business models to empower students to become leaders who are equipped to solve global challenges in a nontraditional business education. I think Stanford and Yale are doing that as well, and that’s the direction we’ll start to see more and more business schools head toward.”

The Pershing Square award, one of the largest offered at Oxford, is worth more than 200,000 Canadian dollars. It affords Krupa the chance to not only get an MBA, but to also get a Master of Public Policy through Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, a combination made possible by the school’s 1+1 program. “If you are motivated to study business because you want to help solve world-scale problems, I think the Pershing Square Scholarship is the best opportunity out there,” Krupa says. “I want to use business models to have an impact on as many people as possible, and ultimately have a social impact and improve the well-being of Canadians. The 1+1 was a perfect way to combine my interest in economic policy and business. Because from my experience in Ottawa I knew that in my next steps I wanted to study those things, and there aren’t a lot of programs around the world that combine the two so well.”

Might there be a return to politics in his future?

“It’s possible — I love people. They energize me. My parents raised me to always treat others with kindness and consider their well-being and be curious, and so I think that’s why people energize me, and I believe I have something to learn from everyone.”

DON’T MISS MEET OXFORD SAID’S MBA CLASS OF 2018 and THE MBAs IN OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE SCULLS

The post From The Prime Minister’s Office To An Oxford MBA appeared first on Poets&Quants.

from Poets&Quants
via IFTTT