Kiezik certainly walks the walk. Disconcerted at what he perceived as insufficient “volunteering and student engagement” in the business school, he co-organized the school’s first student society and served as its inaugural president. His initiative carried him in his final semester into an internship at the start-up enterprise Eaglys and later into the role of that company’s director of global business development.

Networking opportunities are the first of Waseda Business School’s virtues that roll off Kiezik’s lips. “The student body is pretty international, and the talent is topflight. Networking is what MBA programs are supposed to be about, and Waseda presents all sorts of opportunities for forging ties with counterparts from all over Asia. If doing business in Asia is part of your career vision, this is the place to be.”

“Price point” is another compelling advantage for Waseda Business School that Kiezik cites. “Here we have a world-class MBA program, while the tuition is about a sixth of that of the best U.S. MBA programs.”

The Waseda MBA program was an opportunity, Kiezik continues, to fill in some gaps in what he’d learned in business. His impressive resumé suggests convincingly that he had surely learned a lot.

Born in Poland, Kiezik moved to New York with his family at the age of 12. He put himself through New York University by working as a web project manager at that institution. He then spent six years at the telecommunications technology company Avaya and three years as vice president of e-commerce operations at Bank of America.

Kiezik insists that, robust resumé notwithstanding, the time had come to broaden his business perspective and understanding. “We might think that we bring a broad perspective to our work,” he notes, “but in our careers most of us focus pretty narrowly on what we need to do to get the job done. Management at the C-suite level requires a different approach—a generalist’s perspective—and this is where Waseda Business School comes in. It imbues people with the stance and skills they need to manage organizations that span multiple specialties and skillsets.”

“I’d been thinking of going to graduate school for a long time,” Kiezik relates. “Even with my MBA, I’ve got the lowest educational attainment in my family [laughs]. I’d been to Japan once as a tourist and a couple of times on business trips for Avaya. So, I had a passing familiarity with the country, and I liked Tokyo. Europe was another possibility, but I’d been there a lot and wanted to do something different. I considered multiple Asian nations and ended up deciding that Japan was the best place for my purposes.”

While Waseda Business School offers a full curriculum in English, Kiezik regarded basic language competence as a prerequisite for living and studying in Japan. So, he enrolled in Waseda’s Center for Japanese Language in 2016 and studied there for a year. Although he was studying Japanese at Waseda, during that time he hadn’t yet committed to the Waseda Business School.

Kiezik also considered other schools in Japan but decided to pursue his master's at Waseda. That was on account, he reports, of its reputation as being the most international school in Japan, as well as having the best MBA.

Kiezik was thinking, too, of bypassing the MBA route and plunging directly into venture business entrepreneurship. “I was seriously interested in space development,” he recalls, “and Japan is a hotbed of commercial activity in that sector.” He ultimately decided, however, to “broaden his business perspective and understanding” through an MBA program as a first step. He evaluated the different MBA programs on offer in Japan and opted for Waseda’s.

“I feel that I have achieved my initial goal of communicating the concept of “individual beauty” to people in both Japan and Asia as a whole,” she said.

As an MBA student, Kiezik took mainly classes offered in English, but he also took some classes in Japanese. “It wasn’t my best work,” he smiles as he recalls the papers he submitted in Japanese, “but Waseda offered a simple pass-fail option for some classes, and I managed to get through.”

A Waseda option that proved transformative for Kiezik was a collaborative undertaking with Stanford University. Waseda held a Design Thinking Workshop led by Stanford University d.school lecturers. The workshop was open to master’s and doctoral students from the humanities and sciences, and Kiezik, true to form, jumped at the opportunity in the second year of his MBA program.

Participating in the Design Thinking Workshop was one of the cofounders of the data-protection venture Eaglys. Kiezik’s encounter with him led to the aforementioned internship. Kiezik joined the company as the head of global business development in October 2019, after earning his MBA. He thus culminated his Waseda Business School matriculation with a paradigmatic demonstration of the school’s networking potential.

Eaglys has won business with a blue-chip clientele and has garnered numerous prestigious awards. The company won first place in the cybersecurity category, for example, at the 2019 edition of the ICT Spring global tech gathering in Luxembourg. Kiezik, then an Eaglys intern, contributed to that victory as the company’s speaker in the final.

Today, Kiezik continues to live in the Waseda neighborhood from which he commuted to his MBA studies.“The area around the school offers a great environment,” he says, “a great place to live. It’s another advantage for Waseda Business School.”