Yutong Gu, GMBA Class of 2017

The Tsinghua MBA Alumni Mentorship Program (“AMP”) is a jointly coordinated project that helps connect current MBA students with alumni to foster personal growth. AMP offers an opportunity for alumni to contribute to the MBA program by providing mentorship to students and gives students a channel to receive guidance on their studies and career development by interfacing with alumni. AMP is organized by both Tsinghua SEM’s MBA Office, which is responsible for inviting and selecting representative alumni for each year’s cohort, and the class committees for each of the GMBA and part-time MBA classes, who are responsible for working with alumni to host value-adding events for students.

For the Tsinghua-MIT Global MBA class of 2017, a total of 17 mentors currently working in a wide range different industries and positions, from a manager at GE to an HR director at an investment firm, were assigned to the cohort. The alumni engagement team of the GMBA Class Committee, led by Yutong Gu and Wayne Ma, organized a dozen events during the first academic year of the MBA program. Those events included industry information seminars, a career counseling workshop, and company visits. The first major organized event was the AMP Kick-Off Seminar, where a majority of mentors returned to campus to join students in the Shunde building, each introducing themselves to the class and meeting students face-to-face for the first time. After the introduction, students were divided into three sector groups, namely, Finance, IT, and Consulting & Industry, based on their individual interests. In each of the groups, students talked directly with alumni whose backgrounds in those sectors offered a more nuanced understanding for students to refine their career objectives.

Another well-received event was the career counseling workshop. To open the workshop, two mentors, Li Pandeng and Yang Ning, held a talk covering general job search and career development advice. Afterwards, six mentors offered one-on-one meetings with students to discuss their career choices and strategies. Students were matched with alumni whose experience aligned with their own career goals; during the meeting, students were able to pose direct questions and receive personalized feedback from alumni on how to best achieve future success. Many students felt that this workshop helped them gain further clarity regarding their career plans.

For the forty international students in the Global MBA program, many of whom are living and studying long-term in China for the first time, there is no doubt that life and career can sometimes hold confusion and difficulty as a foreigner. Given his own background of shared experience, American Jonathan Krive held a seminar reflecting on his own past experience in China as an international MBA student at Tsinghua SEM and as an expat working in a large Chinese investment firm. After the seminar, many of the international student participants expressed being impressed by Jonathan’s ability to relate to their own shared experiences and challenges.

Over the course of the school year, apart from on-campus events, other gatherings such as dinners and company visits were also organized. AMP was positioned to provide first-year GMBA students a direct troubleshooting channel to vet many of their concerns; conversely, mentors were also afforded a means of engaging with new and emerging talent at Tsinghua SEM, spurring a number of meaningful alumni investments of time and attention. As AMP continues to develop, it serves as a key avenue for Tsinghua’s MBA programs to reflect the larger community’s shared dedication to student and alumni growth as well as an abiding tightly knit culture across generations of SEM stakeholders.