MBA Tour San Francisco

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Update July 20th, 2009: This show is now live. Listen now and be sure to attend one of The MBA Tour's Upcoming Fairs
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I had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall at The MBA Tour's International Schools tour stop in San Francisco last evening at San Francisco's Hyatt Regency. Representatives from eight business schools from Europe, Latin America and Asia were on hand for informal, roundtable discussions with about a hundred prospective applicants. Each school visited each table, so I was able to hear every presentation and the follow-up Q&A.

How do some of these programs differ from MBA programs in the U.S.?

Several of them are intensive, one-year programs with January starts, putting you into your summer internship mid-program and coming back in the fall for your final semester. (The word on the street is, don't plan on much sightseeing! But on the other hand, what better way to experience a country than to study and work there?)

Most programs were small, with classes of 100 to 200, which school reps said allows for individualized study and career focus. All of the schools have a truly international student body, with larger percentages of international students than students from the host country. Instruction happens in English, with either requirement or opportunity to take language courses in the native language of the country in which you're studying.

Rick Rudolph, from the Rotterdam School of Management's Erasmus University, and Anna Farrus from Oxford's Said Business School both emphasized the value of a diverse student body, diverse in both their nationalities as well as their career interests and core beliefs. Rudolph talked about how learning with a truly international cohort forces you to more objectively examine your own assumptions and learned cultural biases. Farrus said Oxford actively seeks to create a student body of people from widely varied work backgrounds to stimulate lively and rich collaboration and debate, in and out of the classroom. Both mentioned the collaborative thrust of their MBA programs' cultures, as opposed to the sometimes highly competitive culture of some large North American business schools.

Michael Ji and his colleague Angela Qian of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Shanghai and Beijing gave a fascinating window into China's entrepreneurial environment.

Tune into MBA Podcaster in the coming weeks for my full podcast feature on the MBA International Schools Tour.