What's the MIT Sloan China Lab Experience like?
The questions from prospective students keep rolling in. This link provides a basic overview of the program.
You start off taking Yasheng Huang's Economy of China and India, which a good class. It's primarily cased focused on the business and economics of doing business in China and India. The comparison between the two makes for an intereresting contrast.
I did both China Lab and India Lab (you don't have to take the class the second time). For India Lab, I went to Delhi to work with an educational foundation. But I'll focus on China Lab since you asked about that.
For China Lab, I went to Guangzhou (I speak Cantonese, but had never had any working experience there). There's a good write-up of what some of the project teams were working on here in the China Daily:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2008-04/22/content_6633471.htm
For me, it was a great experience. My project partner, Lana Dam, was a pleasure to work with and we worked together the next year in India. The project was extremely challenging, but rewarding. I was worried whether I'd be of much value since I knew nothing about fashion, but we ended up being pretty useful I think. They were thinking about entering the US market, so we did a bunch of market research, and then we took some of the clothes back to the US to do a focus group and gave them a lot of feedback.
I should add that the networking with the Chinese students was a lot of fun. When I was doing it, they came for only a week, which was too short. Last year the program was re-structured and they had more time to enjoy the experience and spend with the students. They were also amazing about taking us out in the city. Very hospitable. They had something wonderful (dinner, karaoke, tourism) planned for us almost every day. I still keep in touch with a number of the Chinese students.
Comments