What makes an ideal NUS MBA candidate?
We spoke to Professor Jochen Wirtz, Vice Dean of MBA Programmes, on what makes an ideal NUS MBA candidate, what the NUS MBA culture is like, and how our graduates stand out to recruiters. Here’s a transcript of the video.
What makes an ideal NUS MBA candidate?
Like any good business school, for us, it’s not about filling a class. For us, it’s really, how do we get the best mix of students together who can add a lot of value to each other? And obviously to get into NUS Business School, you would have to be incredibly smart. That shows through a great first degree and/or a great GMAT and/or a great career development so far. So this is what we are looking for. This is sort of the foundation.
And on top of that, when I interview, I really look at: do you have energy and are you curious? If you don’t have energy, you’re not going to move things. We want to have future leaders here in our MBA. So we need you to have the energy. And if you’re not curious and you just sit there, you’re not going to develop yourself. So we are offering you a platform to play with here, to explore, to test drive, to network, to experience. So you need to have energy and you need to be curious to make the most out of it.
So I’m always very confident that the students we admit, are incredibly smart and also have the potential to really be future movers and shakers in whatever area they choose. And here we love diversity, so I really love to have people who come from nonprofit, from healthcare, from a legal background, from all different corners of this world.
To me, it is not the individual. It’s really the mix of the student body that makes it so incredibly rich. And us being in Singapore, being able to recruit from globally, allows us to put a class together that is an absolute joy, with positive energy and a fantastic learning environment. And that is for everyone, that is for the students as well as for faculty.
What is the NUS MBA culture like?
Our focus is really on a transformative education experience, and that automatically means if you are a potential student who is so concerned about getting an A or an A-plus, you’re in the wrong business school. So our focus, really, we want to help you to become the best you can be in your chosen area. And the nice thing about the culture overall in the programme, is that everyone understands that. We have a beautiful club, it’s called Sandbox. And Sandbox is where people, it’s completely voluntary, but they stand up and talk about something that’s very important to them, has really truly moved them, and I’ve seen people laugh and cry in those talks where people have shared incredibly personal stories and challenges and things they’ve overcome. And to me, it changes how people and how students look at each other. Even faculty go to these talks sometimes. So if you know what people struggled with – so we’ve had single mums in the MBA programme, we’ve had people with massive health challenges pulling through being in the MBA programme, people who have completely failed in a startup and so on – and now you meet these people, you know so much more about them, you connect and relate to each other in a very different way. It is not competitive anymore. It is really then collaboration, helping each other, understanding each other.
We even changed the grading system at the business school. We used to have grades “A plus”, “A minus”, “B plus”, and so on. And then everyone is fighting for an “A” to an “A-plus”. And what it does, it inhibits risk taking and it spoils our culture. It makes it more competitive. So now we have a very simple grading structure – it is distinction and it is merit and then a few people get a pass and that is it. You can then focus on how do I learn the most from the subject. And the other thing we want to encourage people: we had in the past, sometimes heard, “Oh, Prof shall I really take the subject, I’m not very good at it, but I think I should learn it, but I don’t want to spoil my transcript.” Now I tell people: “Look, you know, who cares? Go for a pass, go for merit, but plug this hole you have here and fix it and get the skills you need.” So this new grading system is really aligned with our culture of development and helping you, and not anymore in ranking our students and then giving a “Plus” and “B-minus”.
How do NUS MBA graduates stand out?
Of course, I talked to many, many employers who recruited our students, and what they really appreciate is that, they are, of course, technically incredibly competent. They’ve got a world-class, rigorous MBA curriculum here, and they know their stuff simply because also we focus, we don’t try to do too much, we focus on the core and our students master that incredibly well. And on top of that, thanks to our experiential and transformative learning, they’re quite incredibly good in all of the soft skills. So they’re effective in an organisation, they can run projects, they can drive change, they understand what other potential blockages are for running a project, where they can find allies for their projects. These are skill sets that sometimes take a little bit of sinking in. It’s not that you can hothouse many of those things. Our students, many of them, would have had leadership positions running clubs. If you run clubs, you’re dealing with peers. You can’t tell people: “do this”. You have to craft a value proposition for them to be on your side. And I think for many of the things, the same is when you run the MBA Consulting Project, a lot of the stuff we are doing is getting students to be active on projects and in initiatives and to drive those. And if you’re a business, you don’t hire an MBA to run operations for you in general. You want the MBA to come in and help you shape future strategy for your business. And I think this is something where our students truly shine.
