2025 Best & Brightest Business Major: David Elias Kurzmann, ESCP Business School

by: Jeff Schmitt on March 29, 2025 | 684 Views

David Elias Kurzmann

ESCP Business School

“A reading aficionado with a particular attraction to classic menswear, philanthropy, and corporate finance.”

Fun fact about yourself: As a kid, I won my fishing club’s ‘Biggest Catch of the Year’ award two years in a row (both times with a carp, one weighing 12 kg and the other 16 kg).

Hometown: Augsburg, Germany

High School: Gymnasium Koenigsbrunn, Germany

Major: Management

Minor: Finance

Favorite Business Course: Mathematical Finance taught by Professor Dr. Spyridon (Spyros) Poulimenos

Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles During College:

Honors & Awards:

  • Dean’s List: Placing in the top 0.62% of the year (2022-2025)
  • Student Society of the Year Award (2024) for vipi.education
  • ESCP Dean’s Award (2023): first-ever bachelor recipient for commitment to the school community and concurrent academic excellence awarded directly by Dean Léon Laulusa and Chairman Philippe Houzé.
  • The Bachelor Initiative Award (2023)
  • Paris Campus Winner of MG11 Business Pitch Competition (2023)
  • ESCP Merit Scholarship (2022-2025)
  • E-fellows Scholar (since 2021)

Leadership Roles:

  • vipi.education, Founder, Chairman, Tutor (since 2022)
    • Founded an award-winning, fully funded student society organizing free student-to-student tutoring lectures at ESCP Business School (and recently ESSEC) for more than 1,000 Bachelor’s students in Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, and Turin (over 300 hours tutored in autumn 2024).
    • Delivered free tutoring lessons in 11 subjects myself, with my most popular session having 134 attendees.
  • Students’ Philanthropic Foundation, Global Head of Operations (since 2022)
    • Managing operations of 16 university branches collecting over €10,000 donations per year to support educational and vocational projects in South America and Asia together with our partner Plan International e.V. (branches include St. Gallen, Bocconi, Frankfurt School, ESCP, Nova BS, and many more).
    • Initiated “Walks of Kindness” initiative, and co-founded Turin and London branches.
  • “Walks of Kindness”, Founder (since 2022)
    • Volunteering initiative bringing together university students who together shop for food and everyday items, pack survival kits for homeless individuals, and subsequently distribute them on long walks through Europe’s largest cities.
    • Cumulatively more than 200 survival kits distributed to unhoused individuals in Berlin, London, Paris, and Turin since the first Walk of Kindness in Paris in December 2022.
  • AGORA ESCP Student Union, Vice President (2023/2024), Turin & London Campus Referee (2023-2025)
    • Democratically elected to represent ESCP’s entire student body and subsequently appointed as VP of the board to manage all ongoing union projects.
    • Delivered commencement speech for Master in Food and Beverage Management during their graduation ceremony in Turin (2023).
    • Delivered honorary speech at Cholmondeley Room in the House of Lords in London during ESCP’s UK Degree Awarding Power Ceremony (2024).

Other Involvements:

  • Member of Junge Union (JU) Bavaria
  • Former VP at King’s M&A Group, King’s College (2023/2024)
  • Former Member of ESCP Finance Society (2022/2023)

Where have you interned during your college career?

  • Private Equity Intern at Adiuva Capital (Hamburg, Germany)
  • Investment Banking Intern at Arthos Corporate Finance (Munich, Germany)
  • Corporate Banking Intern at Société Générale, (Frankfurt, Germany)
  • Investment Management Intern at Scalable Capital (Munich, Germany)

Where will you be working after graduation? I will continue with graduate school. I would like to pursue a Master’s in Finance before entering the workforce full-time.

Who is your favorite business professor? I was fortunate to learn from many passionate and knowledgeable professors during my undergraduate studies. Many left a lasting impact and I would gladly name them all. But one professor who stood out was Professor Irina von Wiese, who taught “Intro to Politics” and “Liberalism and Populism” during my final year.

Being a politician herself, Professor von Wiese allocated 30 to 40 minutes of every lecture for a parliament-like class debate on a controversial topic that fit the day’s lecture. She split the classroom in half, assigning students to argue for or against the day’s topic, regardless of your personal views, and without the option to switch sides. I found this approach brilliant because more often than not I found myself having to argue for positions I fundamentally disagreed with or against those I strongly supported, forcing me to confront my own biases. The imposed cognitive dissonance helped me uncover fallacies in my thinking and taught me the importance of making an effort to understand the other side. During the debates, Professor von Wiese took a moderating role, constantly questioning the validity of arguments on both sides, ensuring a steady and stimulating dialogue. In the end, you could not leave a single lecture without questioning what you originally believed. I think, throughout the year, those weekly debates were what I looked forward to the most.

Often, we enter debates opinionated or fall victim to some deeply ingrained heuristics, and it is only when we actively engage in opposing positions that we can begin to truly understand an opposing point of view. In an increasingly divided world, open dialogue that considers all perspectives before making a judgment is more important than ever. The ability to challenge one’s assumptions and think critically is instrumental to success in business and finance, making the lessons from Professor von Wiese’s courses invaluable.

What is the biggest lesson you gained from studying business? Treat excellence as non-negotiable and strive for continuous improvement in every area of your studies.

Studying business, I was exposed to a vast set of subjects, from history and politics to micro- and macroeconomics, as well as financial accounting and security analysis. As we live in a multifaceted world, I found it important from the beginning to engage as much as possible in every single subject and try to make the most of it. I came to firmly believe there was no reason not to strive for an A+ in every subject. From there, I set audacious goals for myself, but I learned that you need an even bigger amount of tenacity and curiosity to accomplish them.

I think that was a very valuable lesson because to achieve this I had to be brutally honest with myself. You cannot become truly skilled in multiple fields unless you acknowledge that every field might require you to use a different approach or set of skills altogether. Sometimes, I lacked those prerequisites, and it was up to me to catch up.

When I was still in high school, I started noting down my biggest mistakes and my greatest areas of improvement after exam season, put them on a wall, and aimed not to repeat them the next time. This approach turned out to work brilliantly back then and it still applied to my undergraduate studies. Whenever something in my academic or personal life did not go as planned, I remained calm, analyzed, improved or adjusted, and came back better. Mastering this process has been integral to my track record of academic and extracurricular accomplishments.

What advice would you give to a student looking to major in a business-related field? Be a good human in your pursuit of excellence. Give back.

It is sometimes easy to forget how privileged we are to complete an undergraduate degree and how much more unique it is to attend a world-class business school that encourages global and sustainable leadership. But simply acknowledging that from time to time is not enough. With privilege comes responsibility, and I would encourage every student looking to major in business or a business-related field to go all in on that responsibility and be audacious enough to create a lasting impact.

To me, that always meant trying to approach every project with as much passion as possible, trying to inspire others in the process, and trying to create a tangible impact. Personally, I would have never believed just how impactful some of my initiatives would be for my community when I started them, but I did believe with all my heart they would benefit everyone. After all, I started my tutoring initiative, vipi, just to help some struggling peers but I was audacious enough to turn it into an organization helping students on all campuses, and now it has become an integral part of studying for over a thousand bachelor’s students. I joined the Students’ Philanthropic Foundation because I believed it was crucial to support educational empowerment and social mobility in South America. I was tenacious in meeting incredible students who made it possible to set up a branch on every campus, organizing fundraising events to support education abroad while also helping local communities. Time-and-again, I encouraged as many fellow students as possible to get involved—and it worked! Recognize the power of your education and creativity and use them to build something meaningful.

Looking back over your experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently in business school and why? Looking back, I wish I had prioritized networking more effectively from the beginning. To me, that does not just mean connecting with industry professionals, but also engaging with students from other universities and disciplines. During my undergraduate studies, I was already privileged to be immersed in very diverse environments living in three of Europe’s major capitals. However, I now realize the immense value of regularly stepping outside the business school bubble and engaging with very different disciplines, such as friends who study sociology or physics. I think this helps a lot with outside-the-box thinking, keeping an open mind, and preventing toxic bias. Balancing academics, extracurriculars, and meaningful connections is certainly challenging, and it can be hard to make time to engage with off-agenda topics while juggling a full load of existing commitments. In my opinion, it is worth the effort. Also, sharing your experiences and projects with a diverse set of people can amplify their impact. Time and again, I found that students from entirely different backgrounds contributed to my projects in unexpected ways. In the end, effective networking isn’t just about career opportunities, but also about stepping out of your intellectual comfort zone to open doors you never even knew existed.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What is one insight you gained from using AI? At ESCP, integrating AI became an immediate priority when ChatGPT emerged. I feel like, from the start, AI has been understood not as a threat but rather as a tool for efficiency, enhancing learning, and innovation. This likely influenced ESCP’s decision to collaborate with OpenAI to roll out ChatGPT Edu to help students in their academic journey and researchers produce better and more impactful outcomes. Including students in this journey from the outset has also been a priority to ensure it accurately reflects the student body’s needs. I was actively involved in a workgroup within our student union dedicated to collaborating with AI coordinator Louis David Benyayer to explore ways in which we could best integrate AI into the learning experience. Currently, everything remains in the proof-of-concept phase, as it should be. After all, such innovations should not be taken lightly. However, we were already encouraged to think critically about this technology in most subjects where AI finds some application, notably in the course Key Scientific and Technological Issues (KS21).

Which academic, extracurricular or personal achievement are you most proud of? Creating meaningful impact next to school has been very important to me and the one achievement I am particularly proud of is vipi.education. Dissatisfied with the existing student support system at ESCP, I initiated free “explanation sessions” for struggling mathematics students, which I helped in the afternoons of my first semester, starting with just attendees in October 2022. Within three weeks my listeners had tripled. This led to the revival of vipi.education. vipi is standing for “voluntary, independent pioneers of education,” all in lowercase letters. It was a concept I first developed during the COVID-19 pandemic for free online tutoring at local high schools. The idea is simple: students with a better understanding of a subject help their peers for free in lecture-style tutoring sessions. In this way, the tutors gain a unique edge to their understanding and the students receive vis-à-vis explanations without pressure. This way, the entire community thrives, improving everyone’s learning experience.

Thanks to the unwavering support of Professor Erwan Lamy, Director of Studies Marion Leparmentier, and Federal Academic Director Fabrizio Granà, we were able to extend this initiative to all ESCP campuses. By the winter semester of 2024, our network included 65 tutors across Paris, Turin, Berlin, Madrid, and London, catering to 1,000 bachelor’s students. The tutors provided a cumulative 300 hours of tutoring that semester.

Since 2025, we also began offering sessions to Master’s students and collaborated with students at ESSEC to set up a subsidiary. I tutored ten subjects, always free of charge, driven by my passion for education: Mathematics 1, Mathematics 2, Statistics 1, Advanced Statistics, Microeconomics, History, Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Law, and Finance. My most-attended tutoring session was for Financial Accounting in November 2023 and had 134 attendees on Google Meets. We were going over a case for Debit/Credit adjustments that I created specifically for the session called “Muffin Else Matters” – a muffin company that needed to close their journals and prepare their financial statements.

Which classmate do you most admire? Throughout my time at ESCP, I came to sincerely appreciate my classmate Ferdinando Reho (Ferdi) who is arguably one of the kindest people I have ever met. I still have a vivid memory of one occasion in London. We were on our way to a friend’s birthday and made a stop at a local supermarket to buy some snacks around midnight. However, we didn’t even make it past the entrance before Ferdi found himself in conversation with the security guard working the night shift.

I quickly joined the conversation, and for about ten minutes, we simply chatted with the guard, asking about his day and his work. We did eventually manage to buy a couple of snacks, and as soon as we left the store, I asked Ferdi, “How on earth did you know that guy, Ferdi?” He answered, in a slight Italian accent, “Ma David, I don’t know the guy. But he looked like he could use a conversation, so why not talk?”

This was no rare occasion. Wherever we go, Ferdi will find a stranger to talk to, always asking how they are and if he can do something for them. Too often, we forget the importance of small pleasantries—of exchanging conversations and expressing sincere interest, even in strangers. I truly believe the world would be a much better place if more people were like Ferdi.

Who would you most want to thank for your success? When I was in elementary school, my teacher called my parents in one day for a consultation and advised them I would be better off at a special needs school. She argued that my constant urge to ask questions and doubt everything she said was a sign of mental slowness. She predicted I would not last a year in Gymnasium (high school), which is the hardest of three possible tracks after elementary school that students can pursue in Germany.

What did my parents think? They laughed and shook it off as nonsense. They sent me to Gymnasium the following year, despite the teacher’s urgent recommendations. Fast forward eight years later and I had graduated Gymnasium on top of my class with a perfect Abitur of 1.0. Throughout Gymnasium, teachers constantly highlighted my unwavering curiosity.

More than anyone else, my parents have always believed in me, even when others did not. They supported me unconditionally, believed in me and my talents and they knew exactly that asking challenging questions was no sign of stupidity.

If I had to name one of them, I would say my mum has probably been my greatest fan of all. She has always been my biggest supporter, cheering on my successes and encouraging me to keep on pushing and improving when something did not go as planned.

So, I would like to thank my mum not only for her unwavering faith and support but also for instilling in me the audacity and tenacity that have enabled me to become who I am today.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

* Teach students, ideally as guest lecturer, next to professional future job commitments in Private Equity or Investment Banking.

* Start at least one more non-profit organization concerned with education, human rights, or animal protection.

What made David such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2025?

“David Elias Kurzmann is one of the brightest students of the Class of 2025, combining academic excellence with transformative leadership. Ranked among the top students of his cohort, he thrived in finance and management, consistently pushing intellectual boundaries. Beyond academics, David’s impact was unparalleled. As the founder of vipi.education, he created an award-winning, student-led tutoring initiative that supported over 1,000 students. His leadership as Vice President of AGORA ESCP Student Union and his work with the Students’ Philanthropic Foundation showcased his commitment to our school and the Bachelor program.

David’s academic excellence, leadership, and commitment to the ESCP community make him an exemplary student—one who serves as a model for future generations.”

Fabrizio Granà
Associate Dean of the Bachelor in Management
ESCP Business School

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