Alliance Manchester Business School graduate Xingbo Wu shares her experience of completing her MBA programme in lockdown
When I travelled from Shanghai to Manchester in 2018 to begin my full-time MBA, I don’t think anyone could imagine what our world would now be like at the time of my graduation, July 2020. I certainly didn’t expect that my graduation would take place virtually, graduation ball and trips would be cancelled, and my MBA would be completed during the lockdown, when I was unable to leave my place except buying daily essentials.
Back in 2017, I made the decision to apply for the full-time MBA at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS). I wanted to go further in my career and work internationally. I already had eight years’ experience working in two different large Chinese digital marketing and public relations (PR) agencies and my last role was Account Director. I had strong skills in digital, social media marketing and PR, as well as account management, delivering strategical digital marketing plans and conducting diverse digital campaigns for 30+ international brands across automotive, FMCG, tech and fashion industries – but I wanted to learn much more general business skills that an MBA has to offer.
When looking for programmes, the AMBS MBA resonated with me. First, it is a global MBA, with international electives and study tours, and an extremely diverse cohort, which would be perfect to internationalise my career. I knew I would meet talented people from a whole host of different career backgrounds and nationalities, making friends with them, and learning so many new perspectives and creative ideas from them.
Secondly, I knew it would give me a ‘big picture’ outlook on business, to see beyond just one function. The AMBS MBA programme offered key modules in global leadership, consulting, operations, accounting and finance, which I did not have a huge amount of experience in previously, so perfect to develop my business knowledge.
One of which, the business accounting and finance module, which included a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) simulation course, was incredibly useful. I’ve never had any training in finance. These courses allowed me to develop my financial knowledge. The M&A project empowered me to learn how to analyse possible acquisitions for an acquiring company and multidisciplinary skills particularly in strategy, finance and negotiation were developed.
Extracurricular activities
Outside of the modules and electives, the AMBS MBA also offered some fantastic extracurricular activities, which have given me valuable experience, including an amazing exchange experience at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) at Erasmus University, incredible company treks to Google in Dublin, Facebook in London and Amazon in Manchester, and not to mention several networking events, outdoor challenges and brainstorming activities in the Lake District.
Personally, however, I think the main differentiator of the AMBS MBA, is the focus on ‘learning by doing’, which is highlighted in its three real-life consultancy projects covering 900 working hours, to tackle real business issues. These three mandatory live consultancy projects have given me the great opportunities, to sharpen business acumen and develop knowledge through hands-on experience across different industries.
The first one was a non-profit project, where we worked with non-profit organisations on a variety of issues, the second one was with a relatively local commercial business based in UK. The third project – International Business Project, was the one we acted as a global consultancy team, to firms based anywhere in the world. Companies involved were from all over the globe – Brazil, Dubai, India, for instance – and so the project offered the potential to travel too. There was a huge focus on internationalisation in this project, but it clashed with the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, where there were mass travel restrictions, and global business was extremely uncertain.
Completing a project during lockdown
It is worthy to highlight this third project in detail, the one we completed it during the lockdown.
The whole project process was divided by several milestones. First, we had to bid for a client from a list of companies as a team with other MBA colleagues. Teams presented their initial proposals to the clients they had chosen to pitch before, on bidding day. Successful teams won their projects and remaining teams had to bid again to secure a project. Then after that was the executive stage. Teams negotiated the budget and approved it with clients on Interim Presentation Day, another milestone. Thirdly, teams conducted their primary research and secondary research, and finally delivered the final presentation and final report to the clients.
My team and I successfully won the project offered by the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC), a research and development facility at the University of Manchester, which focuses on driving the commercialisation of graphene, advanced carbon and layered material applications. The project aimed to provide a strategic market study to find potential market opportunities for GEIC in the Energy Storage Device (ESD) space – this project involved identifying and interviewing potential collaborators around the world.
Our team was incredibly diverse, with six members from five countries; China, Thailand, India, UK and Peru. This diversity was the key to our success as it allowed us to conduct interviews in our mother tone when travelling to India and conducting the phone interviews with Chinese experts, so we were able to get much more valuable information. At the beginning, we identified the US, China, South Korea, Japan, India, Germany and France as the potential markets for GEIC to focus on and explore future partnership opportunities in.
However, due to the unexpected Coronavirus situation, in the end we were only able to travel to the US, India, Germany and France. This meant that 30 interviews were held face-to-face and 15 were conducted by conference call with Chinese, Japanese and South Korean companies. It was an intensive experience to re-schedule the interviews and re-do the budget with the clients, within just one week, but was also a valuable learning experience, helping us to be more resilient.
Facing difficulties
We had to work very efficiently when we faced difficulties. Initially, we were frustrated at the lack of replies by email, so we had a group meeting and changed our executive plan. We started to utilise LinkedIn as our main contact tool, to find people who we thought might be a good fit to interview for the project. We made 640 initial contacts in total, with 126 replies showing interest. In the end, interviews with 35 companies were secured. Thanks to the dedicated teamwork, we went beyond our target number for interviews, resulting in enough data to better analyse and write up our final report.
The result was successfully helping GEIC find potential partners with detailed contacts for further communication, which might generate new revenue streams. We also achieved all the deliveries within a tight timeline, dealing with all the uncertainties under the Covid-19 situation. The team also had the opportunity to better understand the energy storage devices industry.
I have learned so much from this international business project and it was just one way that the AMBS MBA fosters fantastic innovation and entrepreneurship skills in its participants.
Now that I have completed my full-time MBA at Manchester, and have fully graduated, albeit virtually, I am keen to explore opportunities in digital marketing or public relations agencies in a senior management position or transfer my skills to apply for in-house marketing or public relations roles. I’ve been passionate about marketing, advertising and public relations for so many years and hope to continue working in this industry, to launch more exciting marketing communication campaigns, which will add value to business. I believe the knowledge and the experience I accumulated from my full-time MBA at AMBS, shall help me to do so.
Xingbo Wu is recent full-time MBA graduate from Alliance Manchester Business School – she graduated in July 2020.
