We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and to show you personalized content. By continuing to use this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
More information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.

Asia School of Business

Menu
Menu
Edit Content
Innovation

Month: January 2019

As admissions representatives, we are sent hundreds of resumes and statements of intent from prospective MBA candidates every year. In this article, we share what makes some exceptional applications stand out while others fall flat. Overall, admissions teams evaluate applicants based on the qualities they are looking for in their MBA candidates. Most schools look for similar qualities such as leadership, teamwork, and creativity, as well as some unique qualities based on the ethos of the program. With that in mind, let’s talk about the resume.

Your resume is a tool that helps convey your personal success and impact to the admissions team. When we read a resume, we look for the impact you’ve had in an organization beyond the day-to-day tasks in your job description. We look for ways that you have demonstrated the qualities we’re looking for, and we often source interview questions from your resume to give you the chance to demonstrate your strengths. That said, you should make sure everything you list on your resume is something you are ready and willing to discuss in detail.

For example, if you pad your resume with startup experience that isn’t meaningful just because you believe it fits with our culture, you run the risk of falling flat in your interview when we ask you about it. Along the same lines, I would warn against over-quantifying when it isn’t necessary or meaningful, especially if you cannot explain how you arrived at a number.

Finally, make sure to follow the instructions for resume formatting as they differ for each school. Following directions not only makes our job easier but also impacts our evaluation of your overall application. Let’s now talk about the statement of intent, which we and some other schools call a “cover letter.” Unlike with the resume, there are few tips that apply universally to the content in a statement, as every school will be looking for different things. The most important piece of advice when writing your statements is to customize them for every school. Before you write, research the culture of each school and determine what you think sets that school apart.

Tailor the statement to why you believe that particular school is a fit for you over any other school. Don’t just summarize facts about the school to prove that you’ve done your research, but make a connection between what the school provides and your background and career goals. As with the resume, determine the qualities you want the statement to convey, such as leadership or teamwork, and provide evidence of them without explicitly stating that you have them. This evidence should be a mix of qualitative and quantitative information, and not simply restate what’s in your resume, video, or any other part of your application.

This article was originally published on BusinessBecause, a network helping MBA students make connections before, during and after their MBA.

ASB Assistant Professor Melati Nungsari began her research of matching markets in an unconventional way: through signing up for dating websites. “I was on all of these websites just to see how they worked, from Star Trek Dating to Farmer’s Only to JDate. I covered all cultures, religions, and races pretty well,” she says. “Before this, no researchers had looked at online dating at all.

Ten years ago, it was nonexistent.” Her recent working paper covers the tradeoffs between quality and fit in matching markets including, but not limited to, dating websites. In it, she argues that placing a higher weight on fit over quality results in a better match for you while simultaneously benefitting everyone else on the platform. In these markets, there are two types of traits by which people evaluate matches: vertical traits (quality) and horizontal traits (fit).

Vertical traits are those that everyone evaluates similarly, such as school rankings (a higher ranking being more favorable). Horizontal traits, on the other hand, represent preferences that are valued differently by different people, such as a preference for cats over dogs. Melati’s research is also unique because it presents a more realistic version of matching markets than previously seen in the literature.

“Past papers simplified these markets, assuming that people only cared about one vertical trait. In this paper, we consider a multidimensional array of traits and how placing weight on different traits creates interesting externalities.” Some of these externalities are straightforward, such as rivalry externalities. When students place a lot of weight on a vertical trait like school rankings, there will be increased competition for a relatively fixed number of spots, forcing many to accept poorer matches as a result.

But there are also less obvious externalities such as intramatch externalities, which assume that you only choose matches based on maximizing the match value to you rather than your partner. Though you may be searching for the highest-quality partners, you are more likely to be rejected if the partner finds that you are a low-quality match. Melati identifies three ways to correct for these inefficiencies: pricing, segmentation, and curation.

Pricing works by limiting self-selection into certain markets, preventing low-quality participants from lurking indefinitely in hopes of finding a high-quality match.  Per-match pricing can also be effective on some platforms, especially where there is a high level of curation. Segmentation occurs when platforms cater to a specific market with similar preferences on both sides.

When horizontal traits are important, segmentation is an effective way to enable connections between participants (think back to the Star Trek Dating platform). On the other hand, segmentation is less effective when applied to vertical traits, which gives rise to “elite” platforms such as BeautifulPeople. Why? “Because people lie,” Melati says.  “They lie on applications, on dating platforms, and when selling on eBay.

For example, if you’re running a school that only caters to rich people, more people will lie about their income. But you would never lie about your preference for cats over dogs, because people don’t uniformly value cat lovers.” She also sees curation, or restricting choice, as effective in some matching markets.

For example, marriage-minded dating platforms such as Match and eHarmony don’t allow their members to see the full range of potential matches, instead offering up small “batches” of potential matches for consideration. This has three benefits. First, it allows platform designers to maximize the total value of matches in the market by presenting participants with higher fit matches they may not have otherwise considered.

Second, it prevents the “paradox of choice” faced by participants who are overwhelmed with too many options. Third, platform operators can provide curation as a value-added service, and thus charge more for it. This research has implications for more than just singles. Melati believes platform designers can learn from these findings by paying better attention to the behavior of participants.

She urges managers to study how participants weigh the tradeoffs between different matches, as each person’s actions has consequences for every other member of the platform. Without knowing customers and their preferences well, managers could be missing out on crucial value-adding traits or matching methods. Worse, if participants are repeatedly presented with poor matches or feel they are lied to by others, the credibility of the platform will erode.

But what about the participants in matching markets? Melati advises giving more consideration to horizontal traits.  For example, when evaluating schools, evaluate the curriculum and teacher quality in addition to the rankings. Although horizontal traits are often more difficult to assess than vertical traits, she argues that it is worth the effort to investigate matches for fit as well as quality, because it will be easier to find an overall better match that is aligned with your preferences.

As far as dating goes, Melati hasn’t needed to put this advice to the test herself. “I was already dating my husband before I started this research,” she says. However, she recognizes the benefit of platforms as a convenient way to get better matches. “Our lives have become busier, so it’s harder to meet people. There are many people out there who genuinely want to find somebody.”

When Fiona O’Leary Sloan arrived in Lima, Peru at 2 AM, she realized that she didn’t have a bed to sleep in. “The only thing I had booked was my flight to Lima and my hostel,” Fiona says, laughing, “and I had booked the wrong days, so really I had planned nothing.”  For Fiona, the visit to Peru was the beginning of a months-long, worldwide journey that would shape her outlook and influence her decision to apply to Asia School of Business.

But it was far from her first blush with travel and its transformative effects.  “I’m thankful I had a mother who prioritized travel,” she says. “Because of that, I was exposed to a diverse group of people from a young age. It made me a better person, less judgmental.”  After traveling with her family throughout her childhood, Fiona studied abroad for the first time at the age of 16, which helped her become more flexible and adaptable to unfamiliar territory.  

Solo travel has never intimidated her. In many ways, she prefers it to travel with friends because it allows her to spend time with people from all walks of life.  Having stayed at over 100 hostels, she has formed friendships everywhere she’s traveled. When she returned to the United States after months of traveling, Fiona knew her next step would involve living in another country, possibly in the developing world.

Having already traveled around Southeast Asia, she applied to ASB for the chance to gain an insider’s perspective of business dynamics in the region.  “ASB is located in an important market that’s growing rapidly with a lot of entrepreneurial spirit,” she says. “Here, there’s the sense that you can go farther, faster.”  For some, this could mean being promoted faster due to the rising demand for talent. For others, it means more market opportunities for starting and growing businesses. 

For Fiona, it means that someone with her skills and interests has a lot more freedom to experiment with unconventional solutions to business, and societal, problems.  Long interested in social impact, Fiona received her first Master’s degree in Public Service from the Clinton School of Public Service. Though the program had taught her to measure and report on the social impact of organizations, she knew she would not be able to incite widespread societal change without also having business acumen. 

For her, business school was a natural next step.  She developed this mindset during her most recent job at an urban planning consultancy in Detroit, a for-profit company working predominantly with for-profit partners. Through her work, she witnessed how coordinating big contracts for small businesses could singlehandedly keep them afloat.  “I had been in the non-profit space before, and this made me realize that business often has a greater impact due to fewer restrictions,” she says.   

To Fiona, business and travel aren’t separate interests, but go hand-in-hand when it comes to developing the skills necessary for success. She values solo travel as a way to practice making immediate decisions with little information or counsel to cultivate intuition. She says that the groundless and uncertain nature of traveling often feels similar to navigating a startup environment. 

Much like business school, travel has a way of uncovering the hidden assumptions and biases that day-to-day decision-making ignores. When habitual ways of living and working are reexamined, there is a greater potential for unconventional-yet-effective solutions. Fiona argues that it’s all based on being in an unfamiliar environment. “Put me in a grocery store in the US and I’d buy the same things I buy every week, but put me in a grocery store in South America and I would walk out with some weird things,” she says. 

And at ASB, business and travel have become even more closely intertwined, with Action Learning projects taking place throughout Southeast Asia. Every semester provides an opportunity for students to step out of their comfort zones and learn about a new country, industry, or function, and often all three at once.  Students also work in different groups for each project with classmates from different backgrounds and nationalities, a unique aspect of the MBA program that Fiona says most shaped her outlook. 

Being able to share differences in perspective and gain exposure to foreign concepts has been invaluable for her as well as her classmates. In Fiona’s free time, she continues to seek new experiences by traveling throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. She appreciates the stark differences in culture between each country in the region despite their close proximities to one another.  

Whether trekking through temples in Cambodia or sampling Vietnamese cuisine, Fiona enjoys the wide variety of experiences accessible to her, noting that from Kuala Lumpur, these experiences are much more accessible and affordable. 

Even after she graduates from the MBA program in April, Fiona has vowed never to stop traveling, especially in the developing world. She hopes for her next role to have an international focus so that she can continue to gain exposure to new environments. As she says, “Travel in every way has been my most important teacher, because it’s taught me about myself.” 

We’re excited to announce that our new and refreshed website is live!

We embarked on this project last year with the intention of creating a more positive digital experience for our audiences. We wanted a site that would be mobile responsive, that meet the highest standards of accessibility for our audiences around the world, and yet be “light” enough to function usefully in a world of highly variable levels of bandwidth and processing power.

Our new structured content provides easy and quick access to information on our school, everything from our unconventional and extraordinary faculty and students,  programs and application details, corporate collaboration and sponsorship opportunities, upcoming events and career opportunities with the intention of showing our audience the best of what ASB has to offer. We have also made a conscious decision to use more visuals in our content to make browsing easier.

We hope that we are able to achieve what we had set-out to do when we first started this project. We will continue to constantly fine tune and update our website with the latest information, news and blog entries to keep you updated on the latest at ASB. We hope, you’ll enjoy the new user experience. If you have any thoughts on the new website, we would love to hear from you.

Have fun exploring!
Yours truly,

Ee Siew Pek
Director of MBA & Admissions Marketing

It seems everybody wants to work in a startup these days, and the same goes for business schools. Sean O Ferguson was working as the associate dean of MBA programs at a leading school in Hong Kong when he was offered the chance to join a new business school venture, a collaboration between the Central Bank of Malaysia and MIT Sloan School of Management.

Asia School of Business (ASB), located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, enrolled its first MBA class in September 2016. Sean joined the school as associate dean and director of the MBA program at the beginning of this year—before the first class had graduated. “It’s been great to go to a startup culture and a place where there’s a real blank canvas,” Sean says. “We can explore and test out new ideas for what the future’s going to look like in management education.”

Sean relished the opportunity to bring his business experience from the US—where he worked as an assistant dean for the MBA programs at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business—and apply it to the fresh environment of ASB. Indeed, Sean’s own background influenced his decision to move to Asia—and he says that ASB is looking for students who share the same adventurous attitude to learning and innovating.

“Being of immigrant heritage, my parents came to America seeking opportunity. So when the Hong Kong school reached out to me in 2012 I thought, well I’m going to seek opportunity in Asia,” Sean muses. “We need students at the Asia School of Business who want to be a part of the transformation of the Southeast Asia region,” he explains. Specifically, Sean says, ASB is looking for students who are ‘frontier-minded’.

“The students who come to ASB want to be where the commercial world is going, not where the world is,” he adds. “They want to be on the front line, where the action is really happening, not the ivory towers of Hong Kong or Singapore.” The MBA at Asia School of Business, dubbed ‘MBA 3.0’, has been developed with the help of faculty members from MIT and includes the same rigorous learning experience that Sloan School of Management is famous for.

“If MBA 1.0 was war stories, and MBA 2.0 was case studies, our MBA 3.0 is really built on action and applied learning,” Sean explains. Experiential learning forms the heart of the MBA 3.0 curriculum at Asia Business School, and students will have five opportunities to participate in real business projects across Southeast Asia during the 20-month program—”this is unrivalled in the industry!” Sean quips.

Malaysia’s GDP is expected to grow by up to 5% per year, PwC notes in their 2017 report on Kuala Lumpur’s business environment. Because of this rapid growth, Sean says that MBA grads within the ASEAN region (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) will have plenty of career opportunities once they graduate. In 2016, a report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development named Malaysia one of the top 10 economic destinations for multinational enterprises, and Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, GE, and GSK all have hubs in the country—making it an attractive location for Action Learning.

“The first Action Learning project is in Malaysia, but the remainder take place all over the region,” Sean explains. “At the moment, I have second-year MBA students in Myanmar, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand. “We have a very cross-culturally sophisticated student at ASB, who has been in the region, experienced what’s going on here, and has a better sense of how to relate to the different markets,” he adds.

A business school with its own DNA

Though the school may be a collaboration with MIT, Sean is adamant that Asia School of Business offers its own value proposition for students and is an original interpretation of what is relevant for MBA candidates in Asia. “The best analogy for this might be that I have my father’s DNA, but I’m not my father. While our DNA is MIT, I would say who we are is uniquely ASB.” The MBA’s cohort also has a unique DNA makeup—70% of the class is from outside of Malaysia, including students from developing countries such as Turkmenistan, Botswana, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. But, though diverse, Sean says these students are linked by their desire to work in an emerging region.

“In Hong Kong and Singapore, it’s a relatively soft landing for international students. While they are Asian-inspired for sure, it’s not like Kuala Lumpur, where you’re on the frontier,” he says. “We talk about impacting the emerging world and the economic transformation of Asia, these are things that really resonate with our students. “What we’re looking for are people who see that the MBA at Asia School of Business is an investment in themselves—something that will make them unique and different for the rest of their career.”

This article was originally published on BusinessBecause, a network helping MBA students make connections before, during and after their MBA.