This weekend “Orientation Weekend” for the new MBA class – was I in for a treat! I left home Friday just before lunch and returned home late Sunday evening. It was a weekend of team building exercises for the new class (130 MBA and 65 EMBA students, broken up into 15 teams of 13 people) to get to know each other and work together so that hopefully we will be able to study together better. We all met up at Fudan University and were bussed out to the southeast side of Shanghai where, and I still can’t believe, Fudan University’s business school has its own hotel and conference center, complete with two full-size soccer stadiums – not just fields, stadiums. It is a brand new facility/hotel, that besides our group and the workers there, was empty. I was blown away by how much money this place must have been to build and how under-utilized it seems to be used. I thoroughly enjoyed being there, but at the same time I kept asking other classmates why Fudan University would build such a place and they all responded similarly, basically “Why not? Fudan University is very famous in China and has a lot of money.” Ok, wow.
This is probably a good time to talk about my university and my program. I am enrolled at Fudan University here in Shanghai, which is widely regarded as China’s #2 university, second only to Peking University (Beida) in Beijing.
The MBA program that I am enrolled in is a University of Hong Kong (HKU) program that is taught at Fudan in a joint collaboration to unite the two economic capitals of China. I will graduate with an MBA from the University of Hong Kong and will have alumni status with both universities. This HKU MBA is a significant program. It was founded in 2001 with Columbia University in New York and the London Business School. The curriculum is derived from Columbia’s and LBS’s MBA programs, meaning that my textbooks will be in English, but most of the instruction will be in Chinese (the interview for the program was both in Chinese and in English). The Economist this past year ranked this program #39 in its world rankings of MBA programs: http://mba.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=2002rankings. BusinessWeek and the Financial Times will not rank this program until it has been in existence for a certain period of time.
My intention is to say that this is one of the top MBA programs in the world and since this year I am the only non-Chinese person in the program, I will have frequent interaction with 129 of China’s top up-and-coming leaders. It is truly a privilege that I cherish.
Fortunately for me, my roommate was a person that I had met in early-July when I went to a Karaoke bar with a group of MBA students after registration day (see past blog entries for that experience). His Chinese name is Tony and lived in California for a couple of years when he worked for Intel. His English is very good and he kept me going in the right direction the entire weekend! I was happy with how much Chinese I know – I was very comfortable in casual conversations, but once the program directors shouted out directions for the various tasks/competitions we had throughout the weekend, I was lost. Tony and others were very helpful were very helpful by either telling me in Chinese that I understood or telling me in English. So it worked out just fine.
The one picture here is a picture of my friend Eric and me. Eric is a great guy, I mean a great guy. We met back in April at the MBA interview – we were in the same interview group for the English portion and we just hit it off. Since then we’ve kept in touch and have formed a good friendship. Fortunately we both made it into the program! He just became a daddy himself to a little girl – Morgan and I will have to have his family over for dinner soon.
Throughout the weekend there was a lot of socializing time where I was able to talk to a heck of a lot of my classmates (and mostly in Chinese!). Everybody seemed very excited to have an American Air Force pilot in the program with them. Perhaps the most fun I had during the weekend was when my team got together on Saturday evening to play cards – we played a game called “Assassin” which they told me was wildly popular in China. We played from 10:30 until 2:30 in the morning. It is less of a card game and more of a social game – cards are only used to assign roles: 2 assassins, 2 policemen, 1 judge and the rest are citizens. After the judge oversees the game and allows the assassins to kill one person each round and allows the cops to secretly guess one time each round who the assassin is. Then during the round people accuse each other of being the assassin and at the end of the round the living people vote off the person they think most likely is the assassin. The game goes until the assassins kill everybody else or they are caught. At any rate, it was a blast with lots of fun discussion – especially fun is at the end of the game when everybody then criticizes each other for what they should have done. It’s a riot! And it was also nice to be able to hear everybody talk, I picked up on so much and could just feel the rhythm or their speech and the structure of their sentences. At any rate, in the eight rounds that we played over four hours, I was the assassin five times in a row and a cop twice (definitely breaking the odds). The first time I was the assassin I got caught in the last round only because my chair squeaked when I selected my target, but then the next game I or my partner and I won. No other assassins who played won, so I then developed this mystique that the American military guy is a great assassin. The next day I had people come up to me from other teams and tell me they heard about how good I was at playing assassin!! Oh how fun, it really was.
Classes start on September 14th, so I still have a little bit of time left before I have to really start working. I’m looking forward to working with a great group of people!
Tim
This is probably a good time to talk about my university and my program. I am enrolled at Fudan University here in Shanghai, which is widely regarded as China’s #2 university, second only to Peking University (Beida) in Beijing.
The MBA program that I am enrolled in is a University of Hong Kong (HKU) program that is taught at Fudan in a joint collaboration to unite the two economic capitals of China. I will graduate with an MBA from the University of Hong Kong and will have alumni status with both universities. This HKU MBA is a significant program. It was founded in 2001 with Columbia University in New York and the London Business School. The curriculum is derived from Columbia’s and LBS’s MBA programs, meaning that my textbooks will be in English, but most of the instruction will be in Chinese (the interview for the program was both in Chinese and in English). The Economist this past year ranked this program #39 in its world rankings of MBA programs: http://mba.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=2002rankings. BusinessWeek and the Financial Times will not rank this program until it has been in existence for a certain period of time.
My intention is to say that this is one of the top MBA programs in the world and since this year I am the only non-Chinese person in the program, I will have frequent interaction with 129 of China’s top up-and-coming leaders. It is truly a privilege that I cherish.
Fortunately for me, my roommate was a person that I had met in early-July when I went to a Karaoke bar with a group of MBA students after registration day (see past blog entries for that experience). His Chinese name is Tony and lived in California for a couple of years when he worked for Intel. His English is very good and he kept me going in the right direction the entire weekend! I was happy with how much Chinese I know – I was very comfortable in casual conversations, but once the program directors shouted out directions for the various tasks/competitions we had throughout the weekend, I was lost. Tony and others were very helpful were very helpful by either telling me in Chinese that I understood or telling me in English. So it worked out just fine.
The one picture here is a picture of my friend Eric and me. Eric is a great guy, I mean a great guy. We met back in April at the MBA interview – we were in the same interview group for the English portion and we just hit it off. Since then we’ve kept in touch and have formed a good friendship. Fortunately we both made it into the program! He just became a daddy himself to a little girl – Morgan and I will have to have his family over for dinner soon.
Throughout the weekend there was a lot of socializing time where I was able to talk to a heck of a lot of my classmates (and mostly in Chinese!). Everybody seemed very excited to have an American Air Force pilot in the program with them. Perhaps the most fun I had during the weekend was when my team got together on Saturday evening to play cards – we played a game called “Assassin” which they told me was wildly popular in China. We played from 10:30 until 2:30 in the morning. It is less of a card game and more of a social game – cards are only used to assign roles: 2 assassins, 2 policemen, 1 judge and the rest are citizens. After the judge oversees the game and allows the assassins to kill one person each round and allows the cops to secretly guess one time each round who the assassin is. Then during the round people accuse each other of being the assassin and at the end of the round the living people vote off the person they think most likely is the assassin. The game goes until the assassins kill everybody else or they are caught. At any rate, it was a blast with lots of fun discussion – especially fun is at the end of the game when everybody then criticizes each other for what they should have done. It’s a riot! And it was also nice to be able to hear everybody talk, I picked up on so much and could just feel the rhythm or their speech and the structure of their sentences. At any rate, in the eight rounds that we played over four hours, I was the assassin five times in a row and a cop twice (definitely breaking the odds). The first time I was the assassin I got caught in the last round only because my chair squeaked when I selected my target, but then the next game I or my partner and I won. No other assassins who played won, so I then developed this mystique that the American military guy is a great assassin. The next day I had people come up to me from other teams and tell me they heard about how good I was at playing assassin!! Oh how fun, it really was.
Classes start on September 14th, so I still have a little bit of time left before I have to really start working. I’m looking forward to working with a great group of people!
Tim
1 comment:
Wow, sounds completely amazing! After this you will be able to do whatever you want, think of all the cool opportunities. Tell the girls we miss them.
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