We are hearing from some recent alumni who have begun to search for new career opportunities. For the moment, I am working with Debbie Fisher, Associate Director for MBA Student Services, in connecting our students and alumni with firms that are continuing to hire. Although the inquiries for talent have slowed a bit, we are still receiving leads every week. Many of these leads come from current MBA students and alumni of our program.
We are aiming to develop an event in early 2009 that will be designed exclusively for students and alumni of the The Richmond MBA. Our preliminary plan is to have a presentation by a career consultant first, followed by an hour or two of networking in which job seekers and recruiters can come together.
If you work in a firm that is likely to be looking for MBA talent in 2009, please contact me or Debbie Fisher. If you are a student or alumnus of The Richmond MBA, please continue to check the blog for additional details about this upcoming event.
The Richmond MBA was among the first part-time programs in the country to require all students to complete an international residency when that curricular revision was announced back in 2001. I recall some hesitation among a few members of the curriculum task force at the time the proposal was being discussed. They feared that such a requirement might keep certain prospective students from applying out of fear that their firms would not grant them time off to complete the residency.
We have now had more than 200 students complete the international residency during the last seven years and no serious issues with students or their employers. In fact, many of our alumni cite their time abroad as the highlight of the entire MBA program and several employers have told me how the students’ experience has contributed to new ways of thinking in their firms.
A couple of weeks ago my colleague Tom Cosse, associate dean for international business programs, announced the destinations for our 2009 international residencies. I am thrilled that our students will visit China for the first time in May. The focus of the spring residency will be Brazil.
In coming months, Tom will be working with our partners in each location to identify consultancy projects and build itineraries that will both challenge and enrich our students.
Business schools have begun sharing outstanding content in a variety of forms so that students of business, wherever they are located, can hear from leading minds on their own schedule.
Among my favorite resources for insight on entrepreneurship is the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and its entrepreneurship corner: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/. Here you’ll find video clips from CEOs, venture capitalists and others involved in entrepreneurial endeavors.
Notre Dame’s Mendoza School has archived several speeches on ethics and related issues. You can find them here: http://www.nd.edu/~ethbus/learningEnvironment/lectureSeries.htm.
Finally, the Sloan School of Management at MIT has an incredible collection of resources including lecture notes and assignments from dozens of courses offered there since 2003: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/index.htm.
I was particularly intrigued by the materials for a course on Data, Models and Decisions offered a year ago: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-060Fall-2007/CourseHome/index.htm.
With fall midterms upon us, it is already time to begin thinking about next year’s incoming class. In fact, a few students have already been admitted for Fall, 2009. Each brought outstanding credentials that made the admissions decision very easy.
I have been telling applicants that if they submit their materials by January 1, I will provide a decision by February 1, so keep that in mind if you are planning to apply. I am hoping to have about half of the incoming class admitted in that first round of applications.
I should also note that our first information session comes up in a few weeks. Seats at the session filled in a hurry, so we’ve established a second information session in January. These will be terrific opportunities to meet current MBA students and members of the staff. I will also provide a bit of information and answer questions about the admissions process and the curriculum.
I hope to see you in November or January. If you’d like a one-on-one meeting with Lois Vogle or myself before that, feel free to call or send us an e-mail.
My years in graduate school were spent in an interdisciplinary doctoral program on judgment and decision making. The faculty were drawn from a variety of fields including economics, management, psychology and marketing. In my second semester, I took a course on decision analysis that centered on the processes undertaken by those who face choices in environments of uncertainty. I’ve been thinking a lot about the lessons from that course while observing the volatility of the financial markets over the last several weeks.
One key element of successful decision-making is the ability to predict, with some level of confidence, what the implications of choosing one option or another will be. Appropriate data gathering aids us in simplifying these predictions and allows us to move along in our decision-making. As one’s accuracy in predicting consequences of potential choices rises, the decision process begins to resemble a relatively straightforward trade-off scenario involving the comparison of one bundle of consequences with another.
In times of great uncertainty, however, the process can be dramatically different. Calculating the likelihood of certain occurrences, especially significantly negative consequences, becomes the most important part of the decision. Decision makers are often trying to determine whether a given set of outcomes meets some threshold, which is usually tied to their attitudes about risk. If a decision-maker is unable to make this determination, because reliable data is too hard to find, the result is often inaction.
I’m not thinking only of investment decisions. The same kind of thinking might be found in job seekers this fall and next spring. I bet some of them are doing their best to gather information that will help them determine whether the firm they are considering will even exist in year or two. In previous recruiting cycles, this would not have been a part of the equation. Now that it is, the difficulty lies in establishing the likelihood of the firm going out of business. Suddenly, the stability of a firm or an industry carries a heavier weight and leads to very different choices.
