Sannan Pervaiz

MSc Economy, Risk and Society (2019)

This programme is now called MSc Economy and Society

A degree may help you get through the door, but staying curious and being willing to learn are what continue to matter once you are there.

Tell us about your journey since graduating from LSE?

Since graduating from LSE in 2019, my career has taken me from Whitehall to NATO, Harvard, and now Geneva. Before LSE, I had worked in strategy and risk at KPMG, but the MSc gave me the confidence and intellectual grounding to make a more deliberate move into public service.

I joined the UK Government at a particularly consequential moment, working across the Cabinet Office and later the Foreign Office. Those early years coincided with Brexit and the response to COVID-19, and gave me a close-up view of how institutions make decisions under pressure. I then moved to the NATO Headquarters in Brussels, where I worked on climate and energy security and helped shape the Alliance’s work on security.

I later returned to university to complete a MPA at Harvard Kennedy School as a John F. Kennedy Fellow. At Harvard, I worked on geopolitics and public policy, which gave me an opportunity to reconnect academic research with many of the practical questions I had encountered professionally.

I have recently moved to Geneva to work on the Geopolitical Agenda at the World Economic Forum, at the intersection of geopolitics, business and public policy. Looking back, the common thread has been an interest in how institutions understand risk and make decisions in periods of uncertainty - which is, in many ways, exactly what first drew me to the MSc in Economy, Risk and Society.

What advice would you give to current students?

What I found distinctive about LSE was that it gave me the freedom to look at the same problem through several lenses at once - economic, political, sociological and institutional - while being surrounded by a genuinely international community. My advice would be to use that environment to explore, rather than feeling that you need to optimise every decision around a single career path.

Careers rarely follow a straight line, even if they look that way in hindsight. I would focus on developing skills that are useful in any setting: writing clearly, thinking carefully, making good judgements and building relationships with people who see things differently from you. Those skills have helped me as I have moved between consulting, government, diplomacy, academia and my current work with business leaders. A degree may help you get through the door, but staying curious and being willing to learn are what continue to matter once you are there.

Your career has taken you from consultancy into government, international diplomacy and global policy. Looking back, was there a particular experience or insight from your time at LSE that helped shape that journey?

One of the most important things I took from the MSc was that risk is never just a number. The programme taught me to see policy problems not simply as technical questions, but as products of institutions, incentives, perceptions of risk and wider social context. That way of thinking has stayed with me - whether assessing climate and security risks at NATO, thinking about resilience in government, or now discussing geopolitical risk with business leaders.

LSE also made me much more comfortable crossing disciplinary boundaries. I was interested in economics, sociology, politics and public policy at the same time, and the programme showed me that those boundaries are often artificial when you are dealing with real-world problems. That intellectual flexibility has probably been one of the most useful foundations for a career that has moved across sectors and institutions.

What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve received?

The spaces and opportunities that seem unattainable from the outside often only look that way because you have not entered them yet. Apply, ask, reach out and put yourself forward - do not disqualify yourself before anyone else has the chance to.

What is your fondest memory from LSE?

My fondest memories are probably the conversations that spilled out of seminars and continued long after class - debating ideas with classmates from very different backgrounds, often over coffee or on the walk across campus. The Library is still the place I associate most with my time at LSE. It captured what I valued about the experience: being surrounded by people who were intensely curious about how the world works and comfortable challenging one another’s assumptions.

What challenges have you had to overcome in your career?

One recurring challenge has been moving between sectors without following an obviously linear path. Consulting, government, diplomacy, academia and the World Economic Forum each have different cultures and different ways of establishing credibility. Every transition has required me to be comfortable being a beginner again, learn quickly and earn trust in a new environment.

The other challenge is the nature of the issues I have chosen to work on. Climate security, resilience and geopolitical risk are complex problems where progress is rarely immediate or easy to measure. Over time, I have learned not to worry too much about whether the career story looks perfectly neat from the outside, and to focus instead on the substance of the work, the people I can learn from, and whether I am contributing something useful.