Daniel Cowen, GMBA Class of 2017 & Christina Chong, GMBA Class of 2016

The SEM Career Development Center (CDC) has been reinvigorated this year with a whole new team dedicated to bringing the best career services to Tsinghua MBA students. In addition to CV workshops, interview advice and job postings, the CDC has arranged a number of sessions with prospective employers to give us a unique insight into post-MBA working life, and for employers to gauge the interest from the new MBA cohort. The great events this semester included two very different sessions with McKinsey and another with WGL. 

David Wong, Founder of WGL

15th – 16th October 2015: McKinsey 

The first CDC event from McKinsey was along the lines of a traditional campus recruitment evening, but with added panache that only a company like McKinsey could deliver. In a packed Shunde Audience room, ten McKinsey China employees, many of them graduates of Tsinghua University, delivered a great presentation on what McKinsey is about, what kind of people they look for and why it is one of the most dynamic and exciting places to work. Information on what to expect in the recruiting stages also included role plays on good and bad interview practices, and useful details on how to crack the case interview. The presenters broke formation from the standard McKinsey PowerPoint slides to give examples of where their work had directly brought them into contact with some of China’s leading firms, and the positive impact their work has had on Chinese businesses and society. Top companies all over the world count numerous McKinsey alumni among their senior executives and China is no different. 

This event was followed up with a much more intimate session with a Tsinghua IMBA alumnus, Mike Wang, who is the Head of Recruitment for McKinsey Greater China. Mike focused on how to get into management consulting as well as investment banking, where he had also worked extensively. This gave students a much more personal connection to McKinsey as a company and a clear vision for how the Tsinghua GMBA education can lead to a variety of different careers at a company like McKinsey. 

20th October 2015: WGL 

David Wong, the founder of WGL, is a seasoned recruiter with 10 years of experience in executive search in Asia for Hong Kong based businesses. With excellent knowledge of the market and a superior response time, David is regarded as one of the leading recruiters in his area. Since 2012, he has held different career talks for undergraduate, master and MBA students in HK, Shanghai, Beijing and the UK. He has highly increased students’ chance of getting into financial institutions. 

On 20th October 2015, David Wong held a seminar on Career Development in Finance Industry for Tsinghua MBA students at Shunde 418. During the 2-hour session, David shared his insights of the banking industry - detailed explanation of the structure and mapping of the banks, the necessary skills set required to get into financial institutions, and how the banks work and cooperate in reality. He also touched on topics such as identifying the differences in banking corporate culture and ways to climb the career ladder in a large multinational corporation.

At the end of the session, the students were able to get a clear roadmap on the availability and options in different job positions, and understand what skills they would need to acquire for future career development in the finance industry.