The MBA Tour, Taipei 09/16/2006

The MBA Fair event came to Taipei last Saturday (Sept. 16) in Grand Hyatt Hotel and I went there to collect information from the school reps and heir alumni. I collected a few brochures from Schulich, Cranfield, Berkeley Haas, Manchester Business School, Esade Spain, St. Gallen Switzerland and Indian School of Business, apart from a program comparison sheet made by the event organizer. Meanwhile, I have the following interesting discoveries to share with my readers.

- In the Taipei MBA Fair, I discovered that Cranfield and Instituto de Empresa actively provided the 'Highly Skilled Migrant Workers' (HSMP) programme provided by the UK government as part of the career prospects for their MBA graduates. In the HSMP program, graduates who successful completed their MBA (and MBA only) study in the top 50 qualifying MBA programmes in the world are eligible for a one-year work permit in the UK afterwards. As far as I know, the HSMP programme is a point system in which 65 is a pass and a MBA diploma from the 50 qualifying programmes would give the applicant enough to quality for a 12-month work permit after their MBA.

- Manchester Business School (MBS) is also listed as one of the top 50 qualifying programmes. However, their alumni was quite honest with me that finding employment in the UK post their MBA was not easy. The Taiwanese MBS alumni I spoke to possibly didn't know about the HSMP programme when he graduated. He told me his Chinese classmate managed to find employment in Germany, though, after sending out 1,000 resumes. What a spirit!

- Esade currently only has 7 Taiwanese students (3 graduated and 4 study-in-progress). So far none of their Chinese or Taiwanese alumni have managed to stay and find work in Spain after their MBA study.

- Cranfield has zero Taiwanese student/alumni so far, despite their reputation and high rankings in Europe. Having said this, Cranfield does have a considerable amount of alumni from China. About 20 students graduated from their master's and MBA programmes in 2004 alone. In year 2005, 93% of Cranfield MBA graduates got a job offer and was employed via heir career office upon graduation and this number includes non-EU students.

- As Taiwan is heavily influenced by the US, I was not surprised to see good schools like Schulich or Cranfield have visibly less visitors to their booth.

- Another school not in Europe but is campaigning pretty hard in an ambitious way in the fair is Indian School of Business (ISB, http://www.isb.edu/). I personally am not attracted to the idea of studying and living in India but it is definitely something interesting to keep a close watch on for the next five years. They were quite aggressive when selling the school to students in the fair, offering very competitive total fees, personalized career service, strong industry connections and prestigious affiliation with the big three - Kellogg, Wharton and London Business School.

This is the info I can remember from my memory. After quite a lot of research online and prioritization of my own life goals, I have decided to apply to Europeans schools mainly. Next month I will begin my GMAT prep course and I will post my thoughts on battling this exam in due course.

Cheers - Jen