Hi PGs, I have been a PGite since 2004 and currently a full-time student of MBA at HKUST Business S

MBA
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Hi PGs, I have been a PGite since 2004 and currently a full-time student of MBA at HKUST Business School. It intrigues me that HKUST Business School isn’t even known to most people , so the ‘desi’ community here decided to do a campaign, throw s…

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Hi PGs,
I have been a PGite since 2004 and currently a full-time student of MBA at HKUST Business School. It intrigues me that HKUST Business School isn't even known to most people , so the 'desi' community here decided to do a campaign, throw some light and hopefully clear your doubts regarding the school, the education, the degree, the business climate of Hong Kong/China, the placements, the alumni clubs
What this thread may not specialize answering?
I have N years exp, GMAT score etc...what are my chances?
Most International applicants know that the criteria is hard to state. I would like to point out that the youngest person is 24y and the oldest is 3X and the average age is 28years. So, the least experience is 3years and goes all the way to 10+ .
Please look into the school's website too for admission deadlines, process etc and also numbers like GMAT range, % ratio of students based on background, gender, experience etc.
HKUST Full-time MBA Program

HKUST Full-time MBA Program
Some Facts
*Hong Kong is a great place for Finance-related jobs
*Program can be completed in 12months or 16months
*English is the language of communication in HKUST Business School and Chinese is not mandatory. I am learning Chinese!

*The class size is just 75 students .
*The diversity of students is a key differentiator and it is the highest of any B-school in the world.
*Most faculty members have PhDs from leading universities. My Economics prof has a PhD from Univ of Chicago, worked as Chief Economist - IMF HQ at Washington DC. My Operations Mgmt prof has a PhD from MIT just for e.g,
*We are 6 Indian students here and most have IT or technology-related background.
*The students are very cordial and have a professional outlook towards competition.
*HKUST Business School is rated #20 worldwide by EIU 2007
*The Executive-MBA degree is rated #1 in the world.
*Some blogs, but are not be Bschool specific
http://mbahkust.blogspot.com/
http://hebbarr.blogspot.com/
http://prathaps.blogspot.com
Current Students: Randhir, Sushma, Shirish, Arthi, Mohit and Prathap
Regards,
Prathap

PS: Application related queries once the app has been submitted can be posted to the following mail id - the admissions team will reply to it. "HKUST MBA Program" [email protected]>.
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Hi Everyone,

This is Randhir - a brief about my profile. Ex IT Project Manager from a leading IT Services company (take a guess?) with nearly six years of experience. Worked for about 2.5 years in US and now having the time of my life here at HKUST. Like Prathap, I'm also an Ex-PGite. Almost ended up not app'ing to HKUST since there was almost no mention of the school in any of the forums. Now here to change that. :-)

As much as this forum is about bringing in greater awareness of the school itself, I'd like to make this more a Q&A; session for future aspirants. I got quite a few inquiries over the past few weeks from quite a few folks and answering the same questions n number of times is not very efficient. So we will encourage aspirants to post most of their questions here and you can generally expect a turn-around time of 24-48 hours (exceptions may be exam times of course).

Question: This school has been consistently among the top three schools on most rankings over the past few years. Why no one has heard about it in India?
Answer: The simple reason that the Indian Alumni Network at HKUST is very small. Unless you know people who've done their MBAs here, getting to hear about it is difficult since the school doesn't do enough marketing in India - we're trying to convince them to change that :-)

Question: Is your profile is good enough for this school?
Answer: Its all in the packaging. I'd say if you have 2+ years of quality experience without any major lacunae in your acads, you are sort of ready for an MBA. With HKUST, I'd say you'd be able to better appreciate it if you had around 3-5 years of work-ex - my personal opinion. But like Prathap said, we do have classmates with 2-3 years of work-ex too. So you are the best judge of whether you are good enough.

Bring on the questions.

Randhir

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Campus Pics

HKUST Campus - a photoset on Flickr

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Dear Randhir and Pratap,


It is nice of you to share your experiences with us however Ask "a college" are initiatives with editorial consent. It is great that you've made it clear in the title itself that you are students. However it may deceive users who've known "ask" thread as threads with consent. Please Contact editor and seek permission if you want to continue with this.

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@Randhir and Pratap,

Please keep in mind the theme of the thread. Keep the focus on answering the queries.

All the best.

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Sudoku,

Permission has been sought before the message was posted. Still waiting on Editorial consent.

MOD: Point taken. The first couple of posts were merely to avoid generic questions and give people answers to common and open-ended questions we get like "How is the school?", etc.

Regards,
Prathap and Randhir

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Hi,

Some queries from my side -

  1. I have read that a lot of focus at HKUST is in finance domain. At the same time I read at the HKUST's website that they specialize in China business, Financial Services, and IT Management. But looking at the elective courses, i find very few subjects actually concentrated in technology domain. I look forward to taking a blend of IT and general management courses at HKUST. So how beneficial will a HKUST MBA be in my case?
  2. Can you also give me an idea about the job prospects for an Indian after completing the MBA course at HKUST? Also ,is it really easy for an Indian to live in Hongkong (considering the cultural and language differences.
  3. Thirdly, looking at curriculum, I find most of the subjects concentrating on China economy. Seeing that, will HKUST MBA be able to provide a global outlook?
Looking forward to you response.
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Hi,

I want to know how many applications does HKUST receive every year.

I was initially going to put in my application at HKUST but the high average work experience makes the school a difficult bet for me.

The average work ex at the school is 5 years and currently i have 2.5 years of work ex.

Pleas also mention the average GMAT

Regards.

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gareebon ko koi scholarship milega?

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The dreamer Says
gareebon ko koi scholarship milega?
There is a merit and need based scholarship offered by the school of upto 75,000 HKD (1HKD ~=~ 5 INR). I and a couple of other Indians got that. Others got a slightly smaller schol.

Let me know if you need more info.

Regards,
Randhir
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Hi,

I want to know how many applications does HKUST receive every year.

I was initially going to put in my application at HKUST but the high average work experience makes the school a difficult bet for me.

The average work ex at the school is 5 years and currently i have 2.5 years of work ex.

Pleas also mention the average GMAT

Regards.


I do not have information on the overall number of applicants that HKUST gets. But I believe they get a lot of applications from PRC (Mainland China). I talked to Admissions director a few days back and it sounds like Indians have a much better chance of getting in - Ratio seems like 1:5 for Indians (and possibly other countries too) whereas it is around 1:10 for PRC/Hong Kong.

Even though the avg is 5 years, it is highly skewed by the few people with 10+ years of work-ex. Among us Indians, there is one girl with around 3 years work-ex ( you should be around that by the time you join in and all the others in the 4-6 years work-ex range.

This school places a lot of emphasis on diversity. Focus on that in the application and you should have a good chance if you can build a good story in the app. But if you haven't started on the app - meeting the R1 deadline might be a little tough. Even though I got in in R2 last year, I recommend most people to go in for R1 just to improve your chances of getting in and give you more time to prep yourself for the gruelling year ahead.

GMAT is not a big deal at all - I think the GMAT range is 550-760 in our class. Its the overall package. 550 for an Indian might be a little low unless you have an exceptional app. :-)

Regards,

Randhir
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Hi,

Some queries from my side -
...
...
Looking forward to you response.
Dear sick_mind,
PFB the answers to your questions. Will edit this post with more info once I get a chance to take a look at the IT courses on offer.

I'm actually in India on a one week vacation (for my brother's marriage). Will try to answer a few questions. I'll provide further updates once I get back to HK.

HKUST does have a finance focus - that is mostly driven by the industry domination in HK. But the school does provide an IT specialization and there are some good names among the faculty. HKUST provides some of the top facilities to Faculty and this enables them to get the best faculty from schools around the world. As regards the courses offered, I know there are a few good ones and if they are providing a specialization, it generally means they are offering some amount of variety in terms of courses.

My brief experience with HKUST has made me believe that the choice I made was the best one. There are still a few question marks around internships and jobs until you actually land a job - but then unless something dramatic happens, you should end up with a good job before or just after you graduate - looking at past trend over the last few years.

The school is obviously CHina focussed. Quite a few of the cases are China or HK focussed. But China and India are where most of the greatest things are happening. And the global outlook to a large extent comes from the perspectives you get from your classmates from around the world. Diversity is surely among the highlights here. My class has students from 23 different countries - from countries like US, Canada, UK, France, Latvia, Middle-East, South East Asian countries, Australia and NZ.

If you are guessing that the school is overly focussed on CHina from the courses offered, don't worry. Most of these are electives which you probably will not pick anyway. These are for the westerners trying to get a perspective on China. 😃

Have I answered all your questions?

Regards,
Randhir
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Hi,

Thanks for taking time to answer our queries. I am currently preparing my MBA applications and was looking at HKUST and had a few questions about IT management specialization.

Post my MBA I would love to join corporate strategy planning team of an org. I am currently in IT industry and so post my MBA I prefer joining IT industry in this particular area. I am looking at an MBA to help me for this shift. My questions were mainly related to this.
1). How many pple generally pursue IT management specialization every yr. at HKUST? This is because if there are too less people is there any disadvantage or advantage to it?
2). Is such a career shift from delivery side to corporate strategy side possible with HKUST MBA?
3). Will I get these kind of opportunities at Hong Kong? Because I see that Hong Kong is a major financial hub not sure about IT majors (I could be wrong).

Thanks,
Muthuraman.

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Hi,

Thanks for taking time to answer our queries. I am currently preparing my MBA applications and was looking at HKUST and had a few questions about IT management specialization.

Post my MBA I would love to join corporate strategy planning team of an org. I am currently in IT industry and so post my MBA I prefer joining IT industry in this particular area. I am looking at an MBA to help me for this shift. My questions were mainly related to this.
1). How many pple generally pursue IT management specialization every yr. at HKUST? This is because if there are too less people is there any disadvantage or advantage to it?
2). Is such a career shift from delivery side to corporate strategy side possible with HKUST MBA?
3). Will I get these kind of opportunities at Hong Kong? Because I see that Hong Kong is a major financial hub not sure about IT majors (I could be wrong).

Thanks,
Muthuraman.


There are a few ppl in our batch looking at Corporate Strategy as one of the options. There are also a few alumni who have been able to make a switch succesfully from IT into Corp Strategy. There are a handful of people in our batch looking at that area. There are plusses and minuses to having fewer people looking at a specific area you are interested in. The plus is that you have less competition. THe minus is probably that you have fewer people to work together with in getting into the specific positions.

Hong Kong besides being a financial hub is also a regional center for a few other industries like Logistics as well. And most of these will have IT arms. So you should have options of getting into these industries when you pass out.

Hope my answers help.
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Thanks for the reply.
I had gone through the HKUST MBA website and found some generic information about HKUST MBA program as such. Info. what I found was mostly about courses.

But I wanted to something out of the study structure because I believe in MBA learning outside the class is also important.
It could be something through clubs, case studies and maybe adding some lectures by industry top notches. I couldn't find any info. about this in the website. So if you could throw some light on this aspect it could be helpful. Esp. it would tell me how I can grow outside the classroom by participating in different activities.

Is there also something unique about HKUST program? Like I was looking a program details other day and found that every MBA student has an mentor who is doing EMBA from that college. I found it to be very interesting. So is there something like this for HKUST? This info. would also help me customize my app.

Thanks!!!

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hi there,

i m looking to apply exclusively in asian b-schools and I really want to get in consulting post mBA. my GMAT is 710 and I have 2.5 yrs work ex (3.25 yrs by the time I join)

my queries

1) how are the consulting placements and where are they generally located?

2) how difficult (or easy ) is it to get Visa (or work permit) post MBA in Hong Kong? Is is very strict like US and EK or relaxed like Singapore?

3) By when does HKUST come out with its results if I apply in R1?

a last question - not relating to HKUST or MBA - is it really difficult for a pure vegetarian to survive? Considering the weird things I have heard abt Hong Kong cuisines, I am little sceptical about my living and surviving ing hong Kong

And I must admit you guys have done a great job by starting this thread... thanks a lot!!!

Jaimin

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Dear Sirs,
I have 2+yrs of work exp (it will ne 3 yrs till july 200 in my family owned textile manufacturing firm...

Now, I feel that a good insight on the asian markets especially china will help me in expanding my business in these areas and will help me while doing exports/imports with these countries... also, an mba will give me good network bulding opportunities and to get a good insight into a more professional way of doing business which i eventually plan to inculcate in my own family business...

i just wish to know that if hkust can help me in this direction
also if yes, then why hkust over ceibs, china...

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Thanks for the reply.
...

But I wanted to something out of the study structure because I believe in MBA learning outside the class is also important.

It could be something through clubs, case studies and maybe adding some lectures by industry top notches. I couldn't find any info. about this in the website. So if you could throw some light on this aspect it could be helpful. Esp. it would tell me how I can grow outside the classroom by participating in different activities.

Is there also something unique about HKUST program? Like I was looking a program details other day and found that every MBA student has an mentor who is doing EMBA from that college. I found it to be very interesting. So is there something like this for HKUST? This info. would also help me customize my app.

Thanks!!!


Teaching is by case-study method and cases are taken from the HBS and other archives generally along with China specific cases authored by our school faculty as well. I believe these cases are used in the Top US Schools too.

We do have Clubs like Marketing, Finance and Investment Management, Entrepreneurship and Private Equity, Consulting, and General Management Clubs and all of these are quite active.

Growth outside the classroom happens by introspection and to help you with data to introspect on you are challenged in every possible way - in terms of time management, handling diverse individuals from different ethnic and professional backgrounds.

I'm not sure of the mentoring program you are talking about. We do have a lot of interaction with our alumni - they conduct mock-interviews, we have monthly events where we get to meet different alumni over snacks and a few drinks and lots of other programs. But we do not have a lot of interaction with the exec-MBA as yet. Maybe this could be a potential area of improvement for the program.
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Dear Sirs,
I have 2+yrs of work exp (it will ne 3 yrs till july 200 in my family owned textile manufacturing firm...

Now, I feel that a good insight on the asian markets especially china will help me in expanding my business in these areas and will help me while doing exports/imports with these countries... also, an mba will give me good network bulding opportunities and to get a good insight into a more professional way of doing business which i eventually plan to inculcate in my own family business...

i just wish to know that if hkust can help me in this direction
also if yes, then why hkust over ceibs, china...


There is a person with exactly your motive but from Thailand in our class. I'm sure this program will help you get introduced to the Chinese market. For all you know, you might meet a potential future partner in one of your class-mates or maybe even from the Alumni of HKUST using the Alumni Services Team.

Why HKUST over CEIBS? I don't think I can answer that one since CEIBS wasn't one of the schools I looked at. I guess one good reason might be being in Beijing might need more language skills than being in HK. This could be a disadvantage as well in that you don't feel compelled to learn Mandarin when you are here whereas in CEIBS you might be forced into it. And if you want to expand your business to China, you better start learning Mandarin.