Success Guaranteed

From Shanghai to State Street, students in Suffolk's Global MBA program gained critical real-world business experience this summer by fulfilling their internship requirements.

When Sawyer Business School grad student Paul Miney landed a summer internship with State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), working under chief economist Dr. Chris Probyn, he dove into his task of helping prepare internal economic reports and presentations. 

But the Ireland native, working at State Street to fulfill the internship requirement for the Global MBA program, didn’t stop there. He made a point of seeking extra projects, meetings, and readings in order to make the most of his opportunity there.

“Don’t be satisfied with what they give you,” he says. “Be proactive, and you’ll get even more out of it.”

Miney was one of six Global MBA students fulfilling their internship requirement this summer. Students must seek an internship opportunity outside of their home country, in line with the program’s mission of achieving a more global perspective beyond what you already know.

With the support and connections of Suffolk faculty and alumni, three students took full-time positions in Boston and three found opportunities in Shanghai, Singapore, and Glasgow. They blogged about their experiences throughout the summer.

“For the students I’ve worked with, all of them said the internship experience was one of the reasons they chose Suffolk,” says Heather Hewitt, assistant dean of graduate programs at the Sawyer Business School. “It was going to get them in front of some senior level managers within a global organization, to be mentored by them and to contribute on some real projects that could impact decisions and strategies within the company.”

Indeed, Miney was drawn to the Global MBA program by Suffolk’s reputation for international business and finance and the promise of guaranteed job experience. With a scientific background, including postdoctoral work in chemistry, he sought an MBA to give him firmer footing in the management roles he found himself gravitating towards.

The State Street internship was a perfect fit. Miney was tasked with helping compile internal economic reports, examining data from the G7, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and the Next 11 (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, South Korea, and Vietnam) countries. 

“I had a real interest in understanding how global economics would guide the course of a company,” says Miney.

The work leveraged his penchant for writing, analysis, and research, bringing Miney’s entire academic and career experience full circle.

“There’s a big overlap between engineering and finance,” says Miney. “It may not be very obvious, but when you drill down you’re using a lot of mathematical terms and graphical formats, looking at relationships between data.”