Low Pay, Fast Gains From Fudan-MIT MBA

For Chang, the alumni network was a primary reason for getting his degree at Fudan SOM, which was among the first nine business schools in China to start offering an MBA, in the early 1990s. “The MBA is a way to get you able to have a conversation about business,” Chang says. “It’s important everywhere. In China (the Fudan network) is strong. We’ll see if it helps me to find a job in the U.S. – I’m not sure how much brand appeal this program will have in the U.S., but we’ll find out.”

Often, foreign companies seek employees who can help them enter the massive Chinese market, Sun says. Fudan’s iLab, mandatory for second-year MBA candidates, builds industry connections while putting students to work with companies to solve strategy problems, often involving market access. Student groups complete about 20 such projects per year. The Finland government Funding Agency for Innovation, called Tekes, just wrapped up an iLab project that linked Fudan MBA candidates to Finnish companies.

“The Fudan students, they bring us the knowledge of how to do business in China,” says Ulla Hiekkanen-Makela, head of marketing for Tekes. “They also bring the contacts that are really valuable for the Finnish companies who are looking to do business in China. It’s a win for the students because they get practical experience in working in an international project and how to deal with people from a different culture. Everybody’s giving and everybody’s gaining. We are happy that the Finnnish companies can work with so skilled and motivated students.”

The projects help students understand management roles through experience, Sun says. “The consulting job is always to diagnose the problem, to have the question first, then to diagnose the current status, to measure the resources of the company, the challenge, and then, after the research and discussion, and some interviews, to give possible solutions to the companies,” Sun says. “We firmly believe this is exactly the decision making process which for MBA students they must master during the two years of study in school, because they are going to be in management, they are going to make decisions, which is the main reason the company pays them higher than other people.”

Combining the rigor of an MIT-boosted MBA program with immersion in a foreign country does not make for an easy two years at Fudan, graduates say. “It taught me how to just work harder than I’ve every worked in my life at any academic endeavor,” says David Schuessler, who has since midway through B-school led a marketing and sales foray into China by a U.S. admissions prep company. “I think that has a lot of parallels to working on startup: you need to work like a dog, all the time.”

INTERNSHIP OUT OF ALUMNI MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

Schuessler’s first internship, in a global industrial products company’s Shanghai office, arose out of the Fudan program’s alumni mentorship program, which pairs graduates with first-semester students according to areas of interest. At school in the student groups mixing foreign and Chinese MBA candidates, the students would sort out roles according to their abilities in areas such as statistics, corporate finance, and writing, Schuessler says. Schuessler, who graduated this year, had also spent time in China before entering the MBA program, teaching business English in the Henan Institute of Education.

Since childhood, Schuessler had always wanted to be a businessman. He obtained an MS in marketing from Florida State in 2011, and like Drillette, soon headed to China to teach English. He intends to stay in the country working, and has developed reasonable facility in Mandarin, mostly through day-to-day communication, he says.

MBAs wishing to work in China find strong brand recognition of the Fudan MBA, Schuessler says. “That’s part of the benefit for us for going here, it’s far more recognized by the locals,” Schuessler says.

Chinese Fudan-MIT MBA student Danqing “Danielle” Gu came into the Fudan international MBA program with a BA in statistics from Fudan, intending to switch careers from working in a credit rating agency to doing risk management in a finance company. Her international MBA will open up broader job opportunities than a Chinese program, she believes. “My previous work was not in an international environment,” Gu says. “The first thing I learned was to communicate with international students. I learned to express myself better.”

Gu also traveled to MIT for an iLab project, and spent a week at Sloan, which “actually I consider better than us,” she says. With three Sloan peers, she and another Fudan MBA candidate advised a Chinese cotton-trading company on marketing strategy. “We learned to communicate across cultures,” she says.

DON’T MISS: GETTING AN MBA IN CHINA: AN AMERICAN IN SHANGHAI; FROM NORTH CAROLINA TO RUSSIA, WOULD-BE MBAS DESCEND ON CEIBS; A BOOT CAMP PITCH FOR GETTING AN MBA IN CHINA