Internship takes Global MBA Student Across Southeast Asia
Suffolk Global MBA students like Jason don’t just learn about global business. They experience it with hands-on, immersive training. In addition to the required Global Travel Seminar, full-time students also complete a three-month professional internship outside their home country.
“I always dreamed of living and working abroad later in life,” Jason said. “The GMBA presented a unique opportunity to provide the training and credentials to accomplish this.”
At AFP, Jason served as a marketing associate for the company. Initially, he conducted market research to find out if PVC flooring was a viable product in China's burgeoning senior living market.
Later, he spearheaded a marketing project to look into the same opportunities in Southeast Asian religious buildings. Jason spent the last nine weeks of his internship traveling to China, Malaysia, and Indonesia to conduct research and find a mosque that would accept his company’s product.
“We found an iconic mosque project in Malaysia to use our flooring, and they even included our story in a documentary and book about the project,” he explained.
Having never visited China before, Jason didn’t know what to expect.
“I was fairly concerned about the language barrier,” he said. “I don't speak Mandarin, and even after three months, ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ are still about the only phrases I can muster.”
But after only one month, Jason was pleasantly surprised at the trust he received from the upper management of his company.
“The managing director saw it fit to give me ownership of and responsibility for opening a new market segment in a region to which I had never traveled for business and knew very little about,” he explained. “Having upper management accept some of my recommendations and then ask me to implement them inspired a great deal of confidence in me.”
Set to graduate with a Global MBA degree this December, Jason has just one goal on his mind— land a job that will jumpstart his global business career.
“I would love to have a job that has several of the attributes of my internship,” he said. “I'd like to work on projects opening new markets through both primary and secondary research, and I want to travel internationally.”
Jason is now applying his experiences abroad toward achieving that goal.
“My experience abroad was good for internal networking within the company, but it also gave me a good platform for extending that network to headquarters here in the U.S. I will definitely keep in touch with everyone—not only as part of my network, but as my friends.”