Candidate Info: using the MBA to your advantage

One of the tricks to receiving the best education in any programme (at any level) is to make the system work for you, such as asking a lot of questions; get to know the lecturers (and staff), so they may share inside info or create opportunities, and so forth. Our programme caters to this kind of informal interaction. One option that our students leverage is using our international exchange and capstone consulting project to create career opportunities in another part of the world. I'll offer three current examples.

• We have a student (no names) who came to us (in NZ) from Europe, did his international exchange at Duke University in the States and found a client for his capstone 540 project in California, through our network. His project focuses on evaluating the market for investment products and designing a hedging strategy in India. How's that for geographic diversity.

• A second student has a background in performance sports and applied for an international exchange in the U.S., where his "dream" employers are located. While he's in the States on a student visa, he will connect with one or more of these companies for his 540 project.

• I third student has expressed an interest in pursuing his career in London and will apply for an international exchange and hopefully attend Aston University in Birmingham. Again, we will make a connection with a potential 540 client while in England on a student visa.

Note: Students are permitted to negotiate compensation for his / her project with the client, but this does require the student to procure a work visa.

Note: Two of our students recently returned from an international exchange at Duke and reported...Duke and London Business School students were envious of our 540 project: not even an option at other schools.

Otago MBA: week six update

We're in week six of eight and Term One is rapidly coming to an end.  Weekly reports from our lecturers indicate that all students are performing well and will successfully complete this term's courses.  

• Julia Richardson (Organizational Leadership) has scored students' reflective mid-term module assignments and she has one more lecture before students take over the class to present "Elective Topic Workshops," an assignment in which student syndicates (teams) design corporate training programmes for topics not previously covered in class.  

• Beth Rose (Statistics and Decision Tools) has finished delivering new material and students are actively analyzing data pertaining to a complex business problem, an individual level assessment.  

• Paul Hansen (Economics) will still introduce students to the topics of Behavioral Economics (e.g., bounded rationality, prospect theory, judgemental heuristics / biases) and Game Theory, as students concurrently complete syndicate-level applications of multi-criteria decision making with 1000minds software.

•  Term One final exams begin on 31 May.

One additional note: Our students returned from their International Exchange at Duke University

and report that they performed well (i.e., "with relative ease") in Duke's MBA

courses after completing our Otago MBA core programme.