Current INSEAD students taking questions

cojazzh

lol. Seriously, will take this into consideration.

redwavezheng

Happy moon festival, guys!

inseadsh

Thanks, man. We dont have moon cake here, but anyway, the Chinese students will have dinner together.

garonne

Thanks a lot, guys. You've done a great job for all CDer.

nnm and sino,

How has been the begining of MBA life? Which campus did you choose to start? Fonty or Singapore? Please come more often to CD and share with us your campus life.

inseadsh,

Thank you for you first hand information of academics and networking activities in INSEAD. Since we all know that INSEAD MBA is a very tough one year program and job fair start very early each year. could you please bring us more information related to job searching?   

Bon appetit for your moon festival dinner!

sinocheetah

aha. I am Jan 08 intake, nnm is on Singapore campus

I will share more when coming to fonty.

sinocheetah

INSEADSH, the girl in the last pic looks smart u may still have chance.

inseadsh

Garonne, to answer your question, i think you know INSEAD has 2 intakes every year: Dec intake and Jul intake.

As a july intake (like most of us here), we started job hunting from day 1. The most critical part is to prepare for finance interview immediately after the program starts. So it is kind of tough to study all the courses but at the same time you need to spend tremendous amount of time building up your network in the finance area, talking to insiders and devouring Vaultguide interview skills. Based on my personal experience, INSEAD career service was helpful here in a sense that they leveraged quite some outside resources such as alumni to help us demysfying the investment banking. They also organized workshops such as CV workshop, mock interview, M&A case study...etc to help you get prepared for the tough selection process. But my feeling is that what they did is far from enough. To cut-through the clustter, we really need to dedicate to the preparation and sacrifice a lot (such as traveling around in the weekend, parties...etc) because we will not only be competing with the peers and P4s, but also top MBAs from other schools. It's pretty much a personal choice if you want to have fun or do your homework at this stage.

As a Dec intake, what you need to do from day 1 is to secure an intern. Career service will organize on campus recruitment presentations and open house events to bridge companies and students. However, in terms of the time you spend on preparation, it's quite the same as Jul intake. The good thing is that when you get an intern from a top IB, there's a huge chance for you to get a full-time job there afterwards (70-80%). As for consulting, I feel INSEAD students embrace a strong competitive edge because basically all the top 10 consulting firms are quite active recruiters here. For example, Bain will organize the first big party in a Chateau as a welcome party for every batch of new students; McKinsey gives students a lounge music CD as a small gift and organizes one-one coffee chats to whomever interested in them. Furthermore, they grant every INSEAD participant priviledge to get access to their premium Quarterly report so we can collect data and research report when we need.

Please excuse me if my answer appears to be a bit wordy here. I would like to share more upon your interest.  

bolei

sorry, was travelling around in China.  so missed a lot of the questions.

inseadsh, nice pictures by the way.

cojazzh, you did not meet me at the world mba tour.  i was out of town and was not able to be back in time for it.  that's also probably the last time that you will see karla in shanghai.  a new guy will take over marketing in china.  she will be covering the rest of asia.

i graduated in jul 2006.  for insead alumni, if you are in based in china and are on the mailing list, you should have seen the email from me a while ago, introducing myself.  i'm working for a non-profit entity of insead based in china.

inseadsh has basically covered a lot of stuff about job search and career services.
jul intake - unless you intend to do IB, you have time to prepare yourself for the job search in march/april.  it is slighly harder in that sense because you are being recruited out of cycle for most of the companies especially if you are intending to work in america.
dec intake - you are thrown right into the job search for an internship...and then after that internship, you are going for the fulltime position

the key word is networking.  and that is essentially what you need to do.  mine the insead alumni directory.  ping the alumni in the companies that you are interested to work for.  if all the above conversations among the insead alumni has not convinced you, well, let me say it out loud, insead alumni do not bite.  we are friendly and helpful people.  insead has a knack of bringing helpful friendly people to the mba program, unlike some other american schools.  i do not want to name names, but yeah, i have interacted with alumni from those schools...lets just say that you can easily tell the difference.

valeriejia

Hello, glad to meet all of you here! This is the first time I come up to this forum recommended by my friend... I have been working for 2 years + and plan to study for an MBA program soon..

Quite interested in INSEAD, but not sure whether my working experience is too little...

Possible to share with me about the career prospect of the graduates from INSEAD? Is it easy to find a job in Europe or US? And what kind of firms are normally targeted? Thanks..   

inseadsh

以下是引用valeriejia在2007-9-23 11:14:00的发言：

Hello, glad to meet all of you here! This is the first time I come up to this forum recommended by my friend... I have been working for 2 years + and plan to study for an MBA program soon..

Quite interested in INSEAD, but not sure whether my working experience is too little...

Possible to share with me about the career prospect of the graduates from INSEAD? Is it easy to find a job in Europe or US? And what kind of firms are normally targeted? Thanks..   

Hi, Valerie, i suggest you to download the career report of INSEAD so you can have a general idea of what INSEADers are doing after MBA. The link is as follows: http://www.insead.edu/mba/careers/statistics.htm

If you compare the career report for different years, you will see that less INSEADers land jobs in consulting these years whereas more getting offers from finance companies. (20%-30%) For the future applicants, this is a promising transition because INSEAD is turning to be a more well-rounded school than before.

Basically, if you want a job in the U.S, please apply to the U.S schools. I'm not saying that there's no chance, but most of the companies have different recruitment groups for different regions. You'd better have an answer why you want to work in the U.S but not study there before application.