Melbourne Business School

Melbourne Business School (MBS) is a subsidiary of the University of Melbourne. Part of the stake also owned by the school alumni and business community. Each year, international students registered to MBS and made up more than a half of the student body. The diversity really makes MBS as an internationally reputable business school.

By having more than half as international student, campus offered variety of activities and clubs that we can participate with. I am actively engage in some of the clubs and chosen as the secretary of Resource Interest Group (RIG) and member of Entrepreneur club. Other than that, I also join cultural clubs such as :

• ASEAN club, consist of mainly south-east Asian student with activities like Chinese New year celebration, International food festival, karaoke, learn mahjong etc..
  
• Indian Culture (InCult). Hmm, it was definitely Bollywood movies and spicy taste Indian cuisine.
  
• Latin Networking Group. With the purpose of learning Salsa lesson, I joined this group and the result is now I have confidence enough to dance salsa :)

These are culture groups for relax and networking purposes.

Before I started the academic term, I had three weeks of pre-term class consists of career workshop and world of management (WOM).

The career workshop provided tools to prepare the student in their future career such as find out our career desire, tailor the resume and cover letter, hone interview skill, and learn how to dress up professionally.

The WOM classes aimed to lay down the fundamental thought of leadership and management before we step further into core class. In WOM, we learnt personal management, managing diversity, working in groups and, the most interesting course, managing stress.

Study term was quite challenging. Having few years in career and leaving classroom, I should re-adjust with the fast academic pace. In classroom, students are in race to ask many questions to the lecturer and classroom atmosphere is really stimulating. Some professors put class interaction in class as subject grade, which impulse all students to contribute more in class. I have to study core courses that I have never learnt before such as accounting, finance, and marketing. For some students, these subjects could be dreadful because they have to cope up fast and get inline with the course requirement.

Student should engage with his syndicate group to discuss group assignments. Syndicate assignment is really challenging especially when concerns with different personal characteristic.
Each person in my syndicate has different background: IT, insurance, accountant, banking, consumer goods, army and none of us have the same nationality. We used to interact with different sets of situation during our career and thus may reflect to our personal characters. Sometimes we spent so many times to argue and debate until consolidate and reach conclusion. Syndicate group is a perfect learning experience and good tools to understand people behavior and working with that.

I like being a student because I can learn new things and apply them in particular case without distressing the result will be. Unlike in real business life when you have to face consequences of having improper decisions. This is something that I learn while time goes. I believe when I finish study in MBS, I will ready to apply my knowledge.