Opera Singer Explores New Opportunities after Laurier MBA

Twenty-six-year-old Kate Applin was an aspiring opera singer training in Italy and Canada when she decided to attend Wilfrid Laurier University to earn her MBA. It was there, while she completed her one-year program, that she discovered a new passion and enthusiasm for marketing and sustainability and landed a job with Microsoft Canada.

It was definitely not the career she had envisioned for herself before enrolling in the MBA program. In fact, while she was training to be a singer she was also running a company she founded to help young singers make the transition to professional careers, but school changed everything. Now 29, Applin sings just for her own pleasure at home.

“I can say confidently that I would not have the [Microsoft] job I have without an MBA,” Applin told The Globe and Mail. “I was a singer by training with a little bit of experience running my own company. I had an entrepreneurial edge, but I didn’t have any practical knowledge.”

And Applin isn’t alone in her decision to completely change careers. A recent survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council found that 39 percent of MBA graduates now work in an industry that they hadn’t considered before earning their degree. The truth is that while it’s well known that business professionals use the MBA to switch careers, a significant number of students also use it to completely reorder their career priorities, which is what Applin did.

At first, Applin saw the MBA as a chance to formalize what she had learned from founding her company. However, she didn’t expect to take a course with an inspiring professor of marketing that would change everything. “I knew I had a bit of understanding of marketing from my company and the school I had been working for but not at all in the way I understand marketing now,” she said.

But it wasn’t just the coursework that changed things for Applin. She was also a member of the winning Laurier team at the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society International MBA Case Competition in 2015. And she served as an executive of the local chapter of a global sustainability organization.

“Those extracurricular activities add value,” she explained. “You get a chance to put those ideas in motion when you are doing things outside of the classroom.”

regions: Toronto

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