Facing health challenges head-on during B-school

When business school began with an unexpected turn, a One-Year MBA student reveals how a challenging diagnosis transformed into a springboard for personal and professional growth.

Written by:

Kellogg

Jun 20, 2024

6 minute read

Topics:

Danny Leemputte celebrating his MBA graduation with family at the Global Hub

Leemputte (center right) and some of his family members including his wife's parents, grandmother and cousin.

By Danny Leemputte ’24 One-Year MBA

When I joined the One-Year MBA Program at Kellogg, I showed up eager to immerse myself in a rigorous intellectual environment and pursue a degree to accelerate a career intersecting general management and technology. Early in my career, I had the good fortune of being able to assume a variety of leadership roles in the home lending industry. These positions provided me with invaluable experiences working cross-functionally with technology teams and leading large-scale teams across the U.S. and India. Eventually, I witnessed the other side of success when the company’s fortunes turned, and I had to help it weather extremely challenging conditions in the mortgage market — a difficult but formative experience.

While I’m proud of my accomplishments and grateful for everything I had learned on the job, I felt that an MBA education would provide me with other foundational business skills that would make me even more effective and confident as a leader going forward.

My experience at Kellogg quickly proved to be a breath of fresh air. During my first quarter, I learned about new tactics for building strong workplace relationships, acquired helpful frameworks for developing business strategy and bolstered my finance and accounting skills in business mechanics.

I didn’t take this rare chance for granted. I was surrounded by a group of highly driven peers with a wide variety of experiences who I could learn from. I was looking forward to building off of the courses in the following quarters through electives in strategy and entrepreneurship, but life had other plans in store.

Handling life’s unexpected moments

Mere weeks into the program as I was beginning to map out my professional future, life thew me a curveball in the form of a cancer diagnosis. I took the fall quarter off to focus on my treatment, hopeful that I could rejoin my peers shortly afterward. Early into my leave, I wanted to find something to keep my mind active, so I embarked on a personal project that would help me explore my professional interests.

Using my experience in the mortgage industry as a starting point, I analyzed the challenges faced by borrowers and lenders alike, brainstormed solutions and made use of the school’s relevant frameworks in entrepreneurship to develop a business idea. I nurtured this concept in the home lending space through my own industry research and early customer interviews — all with the intention of continuing to work on it upon my return to school. In the face of the uncertainty due to my health situation, this project helped me to reconnect with my career aspirations during a time when my professional future felt far away.

Getting back into the swing of things

By winter, my treatment had wrapped up and I returned to Kellogg as a full-time student. Back in the classroom again, my peers and I brought the home lending concept to life in Professor Birju Shah’s Product Management for Technology Companies: An Entrepreneurial Perspective. We expanded on my initial customer research, built user personas to guide our product development process and created a detailed product roadmap for a home lending platform. We also designed long-term growth tactics that would simplify consumers’ financial lives and minimize the pain of financing a home purchase.

At the same time, I was also enrolled in Professor David Schonthal’s New Venture Discovery, an applied course in entrepreneurship that expands beyond the more technical components of creating a new product offering from scratch. Working on an entirely separate idea in the auto repair space, my team and I gained other fundamental skills in entrepreneurial thinking, including prototyping solutions, designing a business model and even entrepreneurial pitch craft. All the work I had completed independently over the fall enabled me to truly apply myself in both courses and get more value out of them as a result.

Danny and his New Venture Discovery teammates after completing their final in-class pitch. — Leemputte and his New Venture Discovery teammates Connor Kitko, Nick Amoroso, and Jonny Goldenberg (L to R) after completing their final in-class pitch.

These experiences helped me pull myself out of the physical and mental rut resulting from my treatment. In addition to the deep support from my wife and family, I was fortunate to have Kellogg peers who looked out for me and made me feel part of the community despite my prolonged absence from the school’s social and academic life.

Being forced to step back from an experience I had been so eager to begin in the first place made me more grateful for my time at Kellogg and my previous educational opportunities. At this point in my life, I can truly appreciate the value of my time in the kind of environment where business experts and accomplished peers are easily accessible. They have pushed my thinking in ways I did not anticipate. Amidst untimely personal challenges, my time at Kellogg provided me with a healthy distraction and an extremely formative intellectual experience.

After completing two entrepreneurial endeavors alongside my peers, I do not have plans to start a business after graduating, but those experiences have given me confidence in my abilities to think critically, challenge my assumptions and collaborate with others to begin solving formidable business problems. I have been lucky to have been able to explore new facets of the business world while reaffirming my original interests in working as a business leader and operator.

This year, I hope to be approaching the end of a period in my life that was filled with extreme challenges — professional, intellectual and personal. Thanks to these experiences and my time back in school, I am increasingly confident that I will be prepared to tackle whatever challenge comes next.