Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Tune in, turn on, drop out?

Following an earlier post, one of the DL programme members came back to me with thoughts on why people drop out and don't complete their MBA.

The question raised went back to why students embark on an MBA in the first place. Is it because (a) they feel they ought to or (b) because they want to. The follow-on question was whether drop out rates are higher for those who were in the first category.

I don't know whether that is true, though it's an interesting thought. My own view is that you may well feel more motivated to get through the hard times on an MBA if you have paid for it yourself, or if you strongly believe you have chosen to be there. However, I don't think that is the whole story. I would be interested to see whether there are other factors at work and the extent to which someone is equipped with 'tools' to cope with the stresses and strains of study.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

January e-newsletter

Hello all,

Two 'thank yous'

This month I'd like to start by thanking all of you who responded to my mid-month email drumming up leads and contacts for future DL intakes. You generated 22 names and they have all been passed on to the marketing and recruitment teams. I'll be hosting a DL information seminar here on the evening of January 31st and I hope that a few of those new names will also be able to make it along.

Staying on the recruitment theme, earlier in the week we attended the University of London Careers Service MBA Fair, in Islington, London . Henley had a good day and it was interesting to note how many managers came up and told us that someone they knew was studying or had studied at Henley and had recommended it.

Another thank you I must make is to those of you who have recently spent time being interviewed by journalists writing about one aspect or another of the MBA. In the last 12 months Henley has done very well in getting mentions and features in the UK media, and the best are those that feature students and alumni. A great example of this was the spotlight on Roman Stepantsev from Intake 33, who was featured in an MBA supplement in the Independent.

International study tour electives

I mentioned in the November newsletter that places were available on the Modular and Evening MBA international management visits in March. I failed to mention that in order to qualify for a place you need to be in Part Three, apologies. But the good news is that places are still open for Budapest, Cape Town and St Petersburg.

Remember that participation and assignment submission (unless you are studying for the Project Management MBA) counts as an elective - International Business Environment. If you'd like to know more, send me an email.

Call For more help and ideas

Since you are such a rich source, here are a few other requests - each aimed at enhancing some aspect of the MBA for others:

1. Although most people find a dissertation research topic and question from within their own organisation, there are always others who are looking for a new challenge, or require a different business problem. Do you have a topic, or does your company have a project, that would be ideal for another person to take on for their Dissertation? Let me know, and perhaps we can look at ways of matching - initially via this newsletter - people to projects.

2. As you know, we have an International Stream MBA, a group of Members who come for one-week chunks of workshops, and who are geographically very widely spread. To make their experience here more valuable, I have been discussing with the Subject Area Leaders how - beginning with the new intake in June - we might integrate a company visit with their workshop week. This, therefore, is a call for ideas on suitable companies within a reasonable (i.e. 30-40 radius) of Henley, where we could have access to senior management, some company data, and a great visit. Such a visit (I think more or less a whole day) would then be followed up in College and revisited during the year when the students come to studying the modules introduced. Please let me know if you have any ideas and I will follow up.

Dissertation clinic

The next Dissertation Clinic will be held on March 15th at the College. Clinics are an ideal way for you to become unstuck, if stuck is what you are, in your thoughts and actions regarding the Dissertation. They are most useful if you have not yet formulated a successful proposal. Contact your course administrator for more details.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Judge Florentino V Floro Jr in session

There have not been many posts made lately - my defence (mostly) being that I am still participating on the Virtual Tutor Course at Henley, and that contains its own Learning Journal - an internal blog - and most of my energy has gone into posting entries there. I doubt too many of those would make sense outside the context of the course, so I have not duplicated them here.

However, it is important to keep the momentum going, even if it purely for the habit and not for the having something interesting to say.

In one of those side-alleys that the Internet can lead you down, a reply to a post I had made on the Virtual Tutor Course (someone had referenced the expression "You don't have to be mad to work here...") led me to someone else's blog with a similarly named entry.

Here is the link: http://geeklawyer.org/blog/2006/07/28/you-dont-have-to-be-mad-to-work-here/

What you find there is a very strange, but apparently quite true, series of posts about a judge in the Philippines.