The enduring benefits of scholarships

LBS is committed to removing the barriers that all too often prevent bright minds from pursuing a world-class business education. Mariline Zing Tsala SLN2026 and Isabella Baldwin MBA2027 are both recent scholarship recipients; Mariline via the LBS Sloan Women’s Scholarship and Isabella via The Laidlaw Foundation.  

Mariline would have found studying at LBS impossible without a scholarship, given her existing financial commitments to support family members at home in Cameroon. Having had to initially decline a place whilst on maternity leave at the BBC, she reapplied the following year and was successful a second time. Mariline explains,

She has already made a personal commitment to give back to LBS, and to use her Masters to help increase opportunities for women, particularly in Africa.  

Despite juggling a full-time Masters with a young toddler, she has nevertheless found time to promote LBS as a participant in the annual student calling project. “It’s often LBS alumni that are responsible for scholarship funding, so it was important for me to play my part in encouraging former students to give back. I went to LBS with an open mind but also imposter syndrome and very little self-confidence. I’m only halfway through my Masters but the experience has been mind-blowing. I want more women to have the same opportunity I have had.”

Isabella’s background from a rural farming family in Australia made her journey to a Masters at LBS equally interesting. Her scholarship from the Laidlaw Foundation has enabled her to combine her studies with the launch of defence technology startup StagOn, which she sees as “a critical cog in the wheel of preserving a free UK and Europe.” Like Mariline, LBS has given Isabella the confidence to believe in herself and her business idea: “It shot dead my imposter syndrome. I deserve to be here, and the LBS ecosystem gave me technical co-founders, access to investors and visibility that I don’t know how I would have accessed otherwise. It gave me an institutional pedigree that speaks for itself.”

The Laidlaw Foundation Scholarship that Isabella and 18 fellow students received in the 2024/25 academic year expands access to transformative MBA education for talented women whose ambition and leadership potential exceed the opportunities traditionally available to them. Mariline’s Sloan Women’s Scholarship (awarded to four female students each year) recognises professional contributions and empowerment as a leader, with future goals and initiatives that support diversity. Both scholarships have given Mariline and Isabella permission to think bigger and act on ideas that would once have felt too uncertain or too audacious to pursue, and then to pay that forward. In Isabella’s words: