As part of this, UNIDO is offering up significant amounts of grant funding for student projects that address these issues.
Any group of students can put together a team, present a proposal, and then get funding to do research. Project groups that receive funding have to present their findings to UNIDO at the conference the following spring.
We've had a number of teams that have done some pretty unusual things. I think my favorite, personally, was a group of our MBA/MPH students who got funding for a study in
sub-Saharan Africa. They were examining how to roll out a training program to teach village women self-detection methods for cervical cancer.
The program encouraged women not only to use these methods, but to participate in programs to provide care for them if they detected evidence of cancer.
We had a team of women who spent the summer in Africa, meeting with elders and with village women, exploring culturally appropriate ways to roll out this kind of project.
And then there was another team that included MBA students and electrical
engineering students. They went to northern China to study the feasibility of using a new type of LED device to provide lighting in places that do not currently have electricity.
And then, finally, some of our specific specialization programs do a lot with Experiential Learning. For example, our Center for Responsible Business, which is the corporate social responsibility program, has placed student teams with a number of companies who are doing research and identifying, for their companies, ways in which they could be more socially responsible –
how they can change what they're doing to improve the level of social responsibility, and how can they measure it, for example.
As part of that program, the Gap, Inc. is providing a number of fellowships to students who are participating in this research. In the past, we've had students doing CSR projects for Hewlett-Packard, McDonald's, Levi Strauss, and other companies.
Those are also great opportunities that are both extracurricular and experiential, but also part of the curriculum.
I think it goes well beyond what most people think they would have an opportunity
to do through business school.
Can you talk about the student-initiated courses?
Each year, we have student-initiated courses. Any student can propose one of these. All they need to have is a group, generally about 10 other students, who express interest in the same topic.
The group of students get together and write a proposal for a student-initiated course. Typically, we do a minimum of two of these each year.
Once we have a group of students, the program director will meet with the students and look at which of these projects has the most interest.
They then assign a faculty advisor who works with the students to structure the course. Frequently, because these are often highly specialized topics, the faculty member and the students work together to set up, in essence, a set of projects and a speaker series that will compose this course.
To give you an example, one of the courses that ran very successfully last year was a sports marketing elective course. They had speakers come in from a variety of different areas. They had someone who came in from the corporate side, who works for Adidas. They had someone who worked for Nike in their marketing program for soccer products. They had someone come from the Golden State Warriors representing a sports team, talking about their management issues. They had someone from the 49ers and
from the Oakland A's. So, basically, they had speakers who came in to address different aspects of sports marketing. Ultimately, some of the students
who were in that course actually received job offers from organizations that presented this part of this course, which is not unusual.
Other courses that have been student-initiated in the past have included a wine industry course, where they had people come in and talk about how supply chain and marketing are critical in the wine industry. Another person talked about financial structure of wineries and how it may be different from other types of companies.
Do most Haas alumni stay in California?
Well, it varies from year to year. In an average year, about 60 percent of our graduates will stay in California for their first job after the MBA.
Is this a problem for those who don't stay in California? Is there a
problem with not having a strong alumni network outside of California?
No, because we actually have a pretty widespread alumni network around the world.
A significant number of companies from other parts of the U.S. – and from other countries, even – comes here to recruit students. Of all of the job postings that we have for our students, about half of them are not West Coast opportunities. Students who are interested in working in other parts of the U.S. or other countries have many opportunities to do so.
The percentage of graduates remaining in California is more a reflection of what they are choosing to do.
Every year, a number of new students tell me that they are planning to return to the East Coast after they finish.
But by the time they graduate, they have changed their mind. In part, this is because they become aware of new opportunities – or maybe they decided that they like California or the Bay area, or they're attracted by another opportunity in another part of the world other than where they came from.
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