Five MBA Students Designated 2016 Siebel Scholars

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From left to right: Michael Mester, Dorian Bertsch, Ibrahim Alsuwaidi, Sarah Wang, and Michael Ding. | Chuck Goodman

A strategy specialist, a private equity associate, and three management consultants have been named 2016 Siebel Scholars at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

These five accomplished second-year MBA students join an elite group chosen by a faculty committee based on academic achievement and demonstrated leadership within the business school community during their first year. The honor, which includes a tuition grant, recognizes the brightest students at the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, and bioengineering, who are at the forefront of the collaborative search for solutions to the world’s most critical issues. On average, Siebel Scholars tend to rank in the top 5% of their class.

The five Stanford MBA students are: Ibrahim Alsuwaidi, Dorian Bertsch, Michael Ding, Michael Mester, and Sarah Wang.

Ibrahim Alsuwaidi

Ibrahim is passionate about the intersection between entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development. Prior to business school he planned and led engagements for an in-house consulting group of Abu Dhabi’s Executive Council across strategy and policy development, and state-owned enterprise portfolio management. He earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University, where he was awarded the Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Research & Innovation Award, and served as elected president of the Mechanical Engineering Honor Society. He also holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford. A native of both the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan, he is fluent in English, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese.

Dorian Bertsch

Dorian serves on Stanford GSB’s Academic Committee and represents the school on the Stanford Graduate Student Council. In his first year at Stanford GSB he became a radio broadcaster for Stanford Baseball and intends to go back to the announcing booth for additional sports in the coming school year. During the summer he interned with the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED) in Accra, Ghana, where he worked with a small e-commerce company focused on promoting Ghanaian and West African writers and publishers. Prior to business school, Bertsch was a management consultant at Bain & Company in Los Angeles. He also worked for six months with US Airways in Tempe, Arizona. He majored in economics at Stanford University and was elected Phi Beta Kappa. Bertsch is a native of Palo Alto, California.

Michael Ding

At Stanford GSB Michael is co-CIO of the Finance and Investment Club’s Student Investment Fund, a teaching assistant for the corporate financial modeling class, and a member of the Asia Business Student Association Leadership Board. He also serves on the boards of the Stanford Club of San Francisco and the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a Bay Area nonprofit that provides rehabilitation programs to adults and youth in the criminal justice system. During the summer, he worked at Viking Global Investors, a New York hedge fund. Prior to Stanford GSB, he spent two years in private equity at TPG Capital, where he evaluated investments in the technology industry. Before TPG, he worked in the Global Technology Group in the Morgan Stanley Investment Banking Division. Ding received his BS in mathematical and computational science from Stanford University. He was born in Nanjing, China, and spent his childhood in Sweden, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.

Michael Mester

During the summer Michael worked in product management at Google. Prior to Stanford GSB, he spent four years as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago. At BCG, Mester worked with industrial clients in the aviation, defense, and electrical equipment industries. He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from Yale College, summa cum laude with distinction in the major. While at Yale, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and received the Yale Science and Engineering Association’s High Scholarship Award in his junior and senior years. He is from Chicago, Illinois.

Sarah Wang

At Stanford GSB Sarah is co-president of Women in Management, the Venture Capital Club and E@T Club. She is also an Arbuckle Leadership Fellow, Impact Labs Investing Associate, teaching assistant for Leadership in Entertainment; and she serves on the Career Management Committee of the GSB’s Student. Prior to the GSB, Wang worked in impact investing at Eagle Cliff Partners. She spent three years at the Boston Consulting Group in San Francisco and Chicago after working at Morgan Stanley on the Global Capital Markets team in New York. She spent the past summer focused on early stage investing at DCM Ventures. Wang received her AB in economics from Harvard University, where she was elected Phi Beta Kappa and designated a John Harvard Scholar. She is passionate about creating gender-mindful workplaces and was selected as this year’s scholarship recipient of the Financial Women of San Francisco. She grew up in North Dakota and Illinois.

About Siebel Scholars

The Siebel Scholars program was founded in 2000 by the Siebel Foundation to recognize the most talented students at the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, bioengineering, and energy science. Today, an active community of over 1,000 leaders serves as advisors to the Siebel Foundation and works collaboratively to find solutions to society’s most pressing problems.

About the Siebel Foundation

The Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation, a nonprofit, public benefit corporation, was established as a private foundation in 1996. Its mission is to foster programs and organizations that improve the quality of life, environment, and education of its community members. The Siebel Foundation funds projects to support the homeless and underprivileged, education and research, public health, and alternative energy solutions.