Hi All, I am back again with one more experience sharing
post from the QS World MBA Tour in Bangalore that I attended this last
Saturday. The event was scheduled on 1st December at the Taj Vivanta
Hotel on M.G Road here is Bangalore. The event started at 1.00 PM on schedule.
To give you an idea of the scale of the event, 64 business schools participated
in this event. I had attended “The MBA Tour” in Bangalore some 1 month back and
that was more focused on US B-Schools. Here the representation was much wider
with many schools from Canada, UK, Australia and Europe presenting at the fair.
One thing that I didn’t like was that we were asked to PAY Rs 100 as
participation fee. Although they gave a complementary bag and an issue of QS Top
MBA Career Guide for early comers but it still didn’t make any sense to me. I
shall post the Review of QS Top MBA Career Guide later on in some other post
very soon. This post shall concentrate on the events during the MBA fair. A
word of sorry here, although I wanted to visit all the schools but given the
available time and my own focus on some particular schools I could not visit
the whole lot of business schools who were visiting and so this post has
limited information about the schools that I could visit.
Falmouth School of
Business: This was the first seminar as part of the MBA fair. The main theme
of the talk was that the business school puts a lot of emphasis on Creativity
and embeds it in the curriculum. They offer a Full-time (1 year) MBA in UK and
an Executive MBA program here in India wherein their faculties fly to India
regularly to teach and help students. One special feature is that they have
these Banks concept of talent management like Consultancy Bank. The
participants interested in Consulting have to submit their CVs and then these
CVs are mapped to companies. The mentor then helps the candidate in designing
the curriculum so that the gaps can be filled between what is available and
what is desired.
School of Inspired
Leadership: The Falmouth presentation was followed by the SOIL presentation
where the Alumni and a visiting faculty talked about the focus on Leadership given
by the school.
The above two seminars were followed by a panel discussion
on Studying in the UK. The panel
discussion was focused on the competitiveness of UK business education vis-à-vis
US business education. The representatives from the UK business schools
iterated that UK was still a great destination to pursue business education and
the situation was not as bad as being portrayed by media. Several concerns were
raised by prospective applicants about the post-study work visa issues in UK
but nobody gave a definite answer to it. Some students even shared stories of
people not able to secure work visa after graduating from London Business
School. So the picture of UK does not appear very bright as of now and with the
condition in Europe, it does not seem to get better anytime soon. My personal
opinion is thus to avoid UK for the time being.
MBA Fair
Talking of the post-study work visas, here is a great piece
of news that I came to learn in the fair, although I had a rough idea about the
same but it got clearer. If you do a 2 years (mind 2 years and NOT 18 months) MBA in Australia, you get
an automatic post-study work visa for 2 years. Moreover, for a permanent
residency in Australia, one needs to stay for 5 years. Thus, 4 years gets
covered if you do an MBA and then only 1 year is the sponsorship required by an
Australian company. Is that not great?
Similar is the news from Canada, if you do a 2 year MBA in
Canada, one automatically gets a 3 year post-study work visa. This was the most
important information that I could gather after talking to the representatives
from the Sydney Business School and
Rotman (University of Toronto). I then moved to the table of Goizueta
Business School, Emory University.
Goizueta Business
School, Emory University: Visiting this school was my most significant
outcome from the MBA fair. After finishing the above seminars, I spent my
almost entire time of 1.5 hrs at this business school. An alumnus of the Class
of 2007 was present at the table and was sharing his take about various aspects
of the Goizueta business school. The very energy with which he was talking
about the business school was amazing. I could understand how great a time he
had spent at the business school. He talked of the amazing alumni support. The
alumnus was in the finance consulting domain. He shared his experiences of how
the entire MBA thing was so much different in the US than in India. He could
feel the difference and much better confidence than his Indian counterparts who
had graduated from some top Indian b-schools. Goizueta is a great destination
for people looking for Investment Banking and Marketing. Goizueta’s Leadership
Development programs are great things and the alumnus kept on talking about it.
He also talked of the alumni mentor program and how supportive the mentors are.
One could contact the mentors at any given day at any given time and they were
always available for him. Talking of Atlanta (where Emory is located), he said
that Atlanta is like the New York of South and Emory is the best business
school in the region which gives Emory a huge advantage in terms of local
recruiting. My discussion with him then turned to Consulting and his experience
of it. I came to learn much more about consulting but all that will come in a separate
post on Consulting as a career.
So that is all from the MBA fair. On personal side, I am
planning to schedule my GMAT and will let you know when I do. I have to
kick-off my GMAT preparation too. Finally, it now seems that I am done with
attending MBA admission seminars and have drafted a plan of action for me. I
will post that and many other things very soon. Stay Connected..
