Winter Term @ MBS

Three days into Term 2 at Melbourne Business School, and it's clearly obvious that there's a different vibe around the place compared to last term.

- the international students have started to complain about the Melbourne winter,

- the second year students have pretty much disappeared and will be graduating next week, save for a handful who have just come back from their internships,

- everything's getting very serious on the career front with interview preparation and resume writing workshops a plenty, and

- we're all disallusioned by the news that ZERO job offers resulted from on-campus recruitment for the 2nd-year students, and only 10 of the 120 or so 2nd-years have indeed secured any form of full-time employment.

Not everything's grim though...

- around 50 of us are eagerly getting organised for our respective exchange experiences at international business schools later in the year,

- the 20 or so of us heading to the U.S. for exchange are very pleased to see that the Australian dollar is finally recovering from its undervaluation against the greenback (my personal target is $0.63 by August), and

- the Melbourne University Entrepreneurs' Challenge is hotting up, with workshops for idea generation and team building this week.

We're also about to start the applications process for summer internships at the local management consulting firms. I'm still in two minds about whether to do an internship as part of the MBA. Under the U.S. b-school system, MBA students typically do an internship over the Northern Hemisphere summer between the first and second years of their MBA. In Australia, with the 16-month MBA, the internship is conducted during what would be the student's fourth and final term. After completing the internship, they then return to the business school for the winter term to complete their final five subjects. The problem with this at MBS is that there are very few electives available during the winter term at MBS, since the majority of the students at the school at the time are 1st-year students working on their core curriculum. The lack of subject choices is counteracted by the convenient tax situation in that the internship is likely to be the only income earnt by the student over the entire financial year, and as such, one gets to keep around 80% of the money earnt, rather than the usual 50% for high-income earners...