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Transcription:

Welcome to MBA Podcaster. The only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Catherine Girardeau. On today’s show, the MBA Tour’s International School Stop in San Francisco. I sat in on the event at San Francisco’s Hyatt Regency. Representatives from eight business schools from Europe, Latin America and Asia were on hand for informal round table discussions with about 100 prospective applicants.

Let’s back up for a second; why pursue a MBA at a school outside of the United States? There are a few reasons: international exposure is becoming an important calling card in this highly competitive economic climate. Since the name of the game is to set yourself apart whether you’re applying to MBA program or hitting the job market, global experience divides you from the pack. Another reason is time and cost. International schools typically offer an alternative MBA program that is shorter than those in the US. Less time in school means less tuition to pay though it does put you back out on a tough job market sooner. That being said, a degree from a MBA program abroad expands your job market. It’s a big plus to speak the language but even if you don’t an international MBA globalizes your rolodex and your contacts don’t have to be limited to the host country of the school from which you get your degree. At Insead near Fontainebleau, France 80% of the school’s MBA spend time on the school’s Singapore campus according to Business Week. Some go to the education and research center in Abu Dhabi adding Asia and the Middle East to your potential job contacts and alumni network is a good way to try to beat a bad US economy. Those are just some of the reasons US students are going for MBAs abroad. It’s not surprise 100 people showed up for the MBA Tour’s international event in San Francisco.

The Admissions directors will tell you more. First let’s set the scene: 10 tables, 8 schools, 100 potential applicants in a hotel conference room. The students divided into groups of 4-8 and admissions directors rotated from table to table to give each group a 10-minute presentation and follow-up Q&A. The student’s job? The compare school programs and also if they were ready to make an impression on the admissions directors of schools they were planning to apply to. Melissa Broussin, Director of the MBA Tour Europe told me what the event offered potential applicants, “The goal is a more individual approach to the MBA Forum. It’s not just about going to a booth and ask questions but for the students it is really about participating in a discussion with the alum and the school representatives. The students benefit from each other’s questions and then afterwards they will be able to talk more over a drink.” Broussin gave me thumbnail profile of the participating schools, “The schools represented tonight are schools that have small classrooms between 100 to 300 students a class per year. Most of them have between 50 to 60 nationalities represented.”

I parked myself at table number seven where HEC Paris’ Development Manager, Marie Laurence Lemaire held court. European MBA programs tend to focus less on finance than US schools. HEC’s program is a case in point. “So in economic crisis as it is right now we have opportunities in industry. Career choices in 2008 so that is for the intake in 2008 we had 18% in finance, 43% in industry, so you know those figures show that we’re not only concentrating on consulting and finance but a lot of people are really placed in the industry sector. Services 20% and consulting 19.” Lemaire said being in the center of Europe was a big advantage for internship placement and building network, “You know it’s pretty close to London so you can travel quite easily to London. It’s pretty close to Italy, you can go to Milan, you can go to Germany quite easily as well with low cost airlines and train transportation today.”

As the saying goes, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Most students in international MBA programs are required to take language classes, Marie Laurence Lemaire, "Built in within the curricular of the program you have language classes as well. Everything is in English in the program but if you don’t know French you will have to take French right from the beginning of the program. Or you’ll have my business card so if you want a little bit more detail later on and I think there is a reception at the end of this.”

Next up at our table was Anna Farrus, the Admissions Manager at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford in the UK, “They say business school as I was mentioning is part of the University of Oxford. It’s the business school in the University of Oxford. It’s a very young business school; it’s only 12 years old. But the University of Oxford as you probably know is very, very old. It’s almost 900 years old; it’s the oldest University in the English speaking world.” Farrus said the Said MBA program typically takes one year with a main focus in general management and a particular strength in social entrepreneurship. Students can expand the program into a 15 month one which adds a summer internship, though the core program doesn’t have the internship option. The student body is quite diverse, Farrus said, “About 95% of our students are international. So it’s a very international program and it’s also very diverse. We like people coming very different backgrounds, we have people coming from non-traditional backgrounds. This year we have about four professional athletes. Three of them were in the Olympic Games last year so that’s quite cool. We have people coming from media and entertainment, from music, we have people coming from medicine, I think we have a couple of doctors this year. We have people coming from law and we also have people coming from investment banking and from consulting of course. But you know it’s a very diverse group of people and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for people that can bring something unique to the class and that can really bring diversity and can contribute and teach something different to the rest of the students.”

According to Anna Farrus the trends in hiring for Said students have definitely changed during the course of the current economic downturn, “We’re seeing a new trend of companies that traditionally were not hiring MBAs coming to the school and starting to hire MBAs. And I really don’t know what is going to happen in the future, it’s something that we’ve never experienced before. We have experienced crisis but never this bad so another table was asking me do you expect to see an increase in applications next year. I don’t know, we have seen an increase of applications this year and I would think that yes next year we are going to have an increase in the number of applications but I honestly don’t know because we’ve never seen something this bad.”

One of the students at the table who requested to not have her voice on tape asked how the school is adapting to the changed hiring climate. Here is Farrus’s answer, “Well the school is adapting through the electives, through the courses and you know through what the professors are teaching and we also bring lots of key note speakers from different companies, CEO from banks and from consulting companies telling what is happening and what are the companies doing to approach these changes. I have been talking to many candidates and one thing that I find very interesting is that what they say is I want to be part of the change in the financial industry. We’ve seen what we’ve done wrong so far and you know I want to be in that industry to be part of that change and I think that the schools should really face that teach what should be done and how it should be done.”

Farrus packed up her kit and moved on to the next table. She was replaced at table seven by Rick Rudolph from the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Like the Said Business School in Oxford, Rudolph said Erasmus values a diverse student body. The school looks for students who are diverse both in their nationalities as well as their career interests and core beliefs. Rudolph himself is South African and used himself as an example of what it is like to be unique in a cohort of other unique individuals, “So we’re trying to cater for a very large, diverse audience and the beautiful thing about that is you get to know yourself quite well in such a diverse group of people. They say that in a world of blue, blue does not exist and that’s really true in this situation as well because once I entered this program, I’ve never been more South African to be quite honest with you. The way that I speak, the way that I think, people have made some comments about the jargon that I use my assumptions about certain things, the spirit I bring. So once you’re in a group like this you get to know yourself quite quickly and you discover a lot of niches as well. Because never before have you probably noticed how creative you are or how what a good presenter you are for example. So that diverse group of people is actually what makes the whole experience. We kept so we don’t have an excess of certain amount of Americans, Indians, doesn’t matter what nationality but also in terms of the professional experiences and educational backgrounds. I mean you can imagine if we had only a bunch of engineers around who’d say present a business case; five minutes later they come back they tell you from a quantitative perspective this is what we need to do to solve this case. But throw in somebody like myself who is much more philosophical, maybe it’s a case in India where you have more insight then the business case becomes so much more complex and you start looking at different things that you probably didn’t think of before. And that’s the value of having such a diverse group.”

Rudolph told the students about what is special about the MBA program at the Rotterdam School of Management, “One of the things that Erasmus is pretty well known for is the personal leadership development program. It’s embedded from the very first day that you start until the very last day. So what this is what I call the nasty mirror because it is a reflection of yourself. You have to really look deep into this mirror to make come to certain realizations about yourself, discover certain things. Not all of us make the same career decisions so what does it say about you? Are you making the next career step based on finance, on maybe opportunity, I’m an opportunist, I’m aware of that. Or maybe security, power status. For us there is no one correct way of making your decision but are you aware of the way you make decisions and how maybe all of the above let’s you prioritize as well. But also are you aware of your own networking skills, your presentation skills, your interviewing skills. These are all the softer skills that has also touched and looking at during the MBA. It’s not just about the academic rigor. I don’t believe you can grow professionally if you don’t also grow personally.”

The program is small, 120 students which allows for individualized career planning, Rudolph said. He talked about sustainable business as a core value that runs through the curriculum at the Rotterdam School of Management, “It’s only recently become a buzz word. Sustainability and corporate responsibility it’s on the agenda of every business school and every company. But it’s something that Erasmus has been educating for a very long time. It is about creating a career for yourself but more over in answering the future of others around you. So it’s when we talk about sustainability I’m really not referring to tree hugging. It’s about sustainable business. That is what is important so that the whole approach in every single course, when we talk about leadership as well it’s the decisions that you make as a future leader. Are you thinking of the implications are you corporate responsible, are you thinking about sustainable business over time. Are you thinking about the shareholders? What about the stakeholders?”

International business schools including the Rotterdam School of Management tend to form the curriculum on a more collaborative model than the US programs, Rick Rudolph, “My assumption is that the American schools are more competitive in nature where if you want to be on the dean’s list you have to out-play, out-perform a little bit so there is a lot of information withheld where you withhold if for yourself. While in Europe and Erasmus particularly they have a collaborative learning approach so they believe that a lot of knowledge resides within the classroom already so it’s about facilitating that and asking you to share your knowledge with others. 50% of your grade will be determined through group efforts, group assignments and so on. So this means that you are dependent upon others. This forces you to basically share your knowledge, or impart your knowledge on to someone else who is not as knowledgeable as you to contribute more to your grade so to speak. And so there’s a lot of facilitation in that and they believe with all of the knowledge in the classroom you know that you can share so much with each other and if we made it a competitive environment that knowledge would not be shared.”

SDA Bocconi is a 13 month MBA program in Milan, Italy. Because the program is so concentrated, representative Tyler Henderson said it fosters a collaborative atmosphere, “It’s difficult from the beginning we don’t pretend it to be otherwise but what it also yields is a very close relationship with your classmates because you are really dependent upon each other because you may have a specific knowledge in one area and you need to know something about a certain other area right so you need to kind of quickly figure out who people are, what they know, what they can offer, and how you can help each other and we’re really trying to create a much more cooperative environment. We’re not really trying to drill home a super competitive program which really wouldn’t fit in a class of only 110 and I think you’ll probably, if we were a class of 1000 it’d be something different because you’re really trying to differentiate yourself in a certain way, not so much the case in 110.” Henderson said there are big pluses to being based in Italy’s finance center, “Bocconi University is a very old, large, private university located in central Milan that is focused on finance and commerce and economics and SDA Bocconi is the management school within Bocconi University. If you’re studying business it makes sense to be in the Italian finance capital, right? Yeah.”

IE in Madrid, Spain counts its entrepreneurship program as a strength. IE’s Director of North America, Jean-Marie Winikates “I mean I can just tell you one thing that really excites me about IE and why I love working with them because the school was actually founded by Diego del Alcázar when he was 23 right after the Franco Regime ended he decided that there was a need for a business school that would be independent and independent basically from politics as well as religion and so he founded the school and was really an entrepreneur at the time and still very involved with the school and he’s been really forward thinking in terms of development of the first entrepreneurship department. He has been really innovative in terms of putting together our accelerated programs for one of the schools touching a 13 month MBA program.”

President of the San Francisco IE Alumni Organization Mark Olandorf said he chose IE mostly for its entrepreneurship program, “One thing that I liked about the school is that it is so strong in the entrepreneurship and it is something that they value greatly so much so that they have or at least when I was there and I’m almost positive it is still going on they have a business plan competition and it is something that you can go and you actually end up presenting to venture capitalist on the board and you can then potentially go ahead and get funding for a cost if you end up winning the competition. Along with the venture lab and being able to get all sorts of inclined help from all sorts of resources that you have through the school.” Olandorf shared with MBA tour attendees his reason for going overseas for his MBA, “I chose to go to business school outside of the United States because my thought process was the world is going very global or is already very global to the point where people are needing that all encompassing help and whether your mom and pop shop down in the corner you’re touched globally by suppliers or whatever to a multi-national.”

And now for something completely different, the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing and Shanghai, China offers a very different experience than the European business schools. Cheung Kong, China’s first private business school offers a one year, English only MBA program. The class is very small, 60 students. One- third are from overseas and two-third are Chinese. Most of the international students intend to work in China after the program, a difference from the European schools in which students often return to the US. Michael Ji, Cheung Kong’s Marketing and Admissions Manager described the curriculum, “The curriculum that we offer, just to give you a little background about the academic curriculum, it’s US based MBA curriculum because a lot of our professors come from US business schools like Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, Yale. So a lot of these people they would take their text books that they use in the US business schools to build our full-time faculty. And because of that you know we use a lot of US case studies as well but we also use a lot of Chinese case studies that the professors have done themselves. In terms of that we are a US based curriculum but our schedule is similar to a European business school in that we’re only a one year business program.”

Why study in China? Michael Ji, “China is a growing market right now, especially since the recession hit actually China has been doing relatively well through the recession and a lot of these people are kind of thinking long-term, they’re thinking where are the opportunities going to be at in the next five to 10 years. Obviously Europe suffered quite a lot from the recession, and a lot of the countries like Spain, Italy, Ireland, England have been hit quite hard by this. The US a lot of layoffs as you can see and there are not a lot of job opportunities so a lot of these international applicants are really telling me they are really thinking about this like where is the opportunity going to be at in the next five to 10 years and obviously Asia will be various specifically China it’s a growing economy right now, it’s becoming a big player in the world so they will like to learn as much as they can in China in the next four to five years and then hopefully they can bring that knowledge back home afterward and then work for a company that does business and offers with China.”

Ji detailed the advantages of Cheung Kong’s dual campus program, “In the fact our MBA program will be taking place in both Beijing and Shanghai it’s just a big draw for international students as well, a lot of them have been giving me feedback because we are the only business school in China to offer this kind of dual campus policy. And China is a very large country, just like the US and if you study in one city, it’s good but you’re only learning one side of China so you know Shanghai is sort of like New York, Beijing is sort of like, Beijing I don’t know if I can find a US to compare but it’s like you know if you’ve been living in New York all of your life you can’t say you understand US because New York is not a very well representation of the US. So you have to go to other cities to really get a well-rounded picture of the country. So by offering classes in both of these cities, I’m not saying it’s an option like you have to maybe like half of the year in Beijing, half of the year in Shanghai you take class, you’d get to see both aspects of China. Beijing is sort of like the political, cultural capital of the country and Shanghai is sort of the financial center. So you get a well-rounded picture of China after the one year of study. So it’s a very attractive option for a lot of international applicants who wishes to study in China.”

Ji’s colleague tried to paint a picture of just how different the Chinese business climate is, it’s an emerging entrepreneurial environment with many first generation entrepreneurs, it’s a frontier, the wild east you might say, “It’s a different world. When you decided to have an experience in China just be careful that it’s not only the technical or knowledge that comes, it’s a lot of things other than that. Even the market is something new and the good thing that even the market is new it keeps on growing and probably in some sense repeating the way that the world that America knows.”China offers a business environment that is ripe with opportunities and risks. It’s just the kind of climate in which entrepreneurs with the love of cross-cultural challenges will thrive. “If you want an easy life, don’t go to China. It’s not easy at all.”

At the end of the marathon evening the entire group moved to their cocktail reception where I got to talk with one of the attendees, Kimberly Murphy sums up her impression of the event, “I think everybody gave a great presentation and the one over-arching message was that you know it’s the program’s internationally are generally more focused on practicality and looking at you know the world in a global place and that’s really important in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years when just how the business world is changing and how they are adapting to that and integrating international perspective to a MBA.” Other business schools represented at the MBA Tour’s International Business Stop were INCAE Business School in Costa Rica, England’s Manchester Business School, IE based in Madrid, and Bocconi University in Milan.

For more information, website links, a transcript of this show, or to register for your bi-weekly MBA Podcast visit mbapodcaster.com. Look for us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest news and insights in the world of business school. This is MBA Podcaster. I’m Catherine Girardeau, thanks for listening. And come back next time when we explore another topic of interest in your quest for a MBA.