Student Projects

School of Management International Business Assignment

As part of the MBA programme, students undertake an international project which can involve carrying out local company visits or consulting for a non-profit organisation in a developing country. This gives the students the opportunity to apply their learning in an international context. Thanks to alumni support for the Annual Fund we are were able to send our students on a wide variety of interesting projects.

Malawi

“Malawi is truly the warm heart of Africa - the hospitality we experienced while in Blantyre was unsurpassed and we are very grateful for the opportunity to stay and work in such a vibrant city in a beautiful country. The skills that we have learnt while on our MBA, with some local insight and adaptation, were directly applicable to the businesses we worked with - both for very small and large international companies.

The IBA reiterated that working with businesses ‘on the ground’ is the best way to learn and to contribute and we were blessed to be able to directly impact the economic development of this exciting country.

Everyone we met and interacted with had an entrepreneurial spirit. They all had more than one job and more than one cell phone! It was an honour to be around people who wanted to make business happen and it was fantastic to feel the energy for commerce that we all share.

The International Business Assignment was a fantastic opportunity for us to contribute what we know from the MBA and our prior experience to our business partners, but most importantly it helped us to better understand how to make a difference in the world of business in the future.

We have all made fantastic connections and lifelong friends. We are very grateful to all our alumni who supported the Annual Fund and helped to make the IBA such an important and valuable experience.”  Kate Sutton MBA 2014

Sri Lanka

“Our projects were of a wide variety, ranging from a packaging factory to a golf course. All the host companies were very welcoming and willing to share an experience of their company, culture and Colombo itself. It was an intense working experience, but a great opportunity to put our MBA learning into practice and well received by the management. The full-time MBAs took a trip up to Kandy (Sri Lanka’s second city), taking in the elephant sanctuary, spices and a tea plantation along the way.

From a personal perspective, I found the IBA field trip to Sri Lanka to be one of the highlights of my MBA year and a tremendous learning experience.

Visiting a country can certainly give you a greater appreciation and knowledge of a culture. However, actually going to work inside a company for a week was much more immersive experience and was a chance to discover more about actual working practices, attitudes and challenges. Our team also got to know some of the management and learn about their interests and activities outside of the office.

As the group was broken into smaller teams, each with their own company project, there was the chance to discuss experiences and getting a wider picture of the business environment in Sri Lanka.

The consultancy project was a chance to put our MBA coursework into a real context. While we had an understanding of the macro context from Economics, we used models from the whole range of the MBA when actually putting together our report. We also found useful parallels with some of the cases we’d covered in class which suggested solutions. This re-emphasised that the theory learnt at Cranfield has practical uses and implications.

Doing a consulting project for the first time was also a chance to learn new skills. In interviews we had to work out not only what to ask management, but how to ask questions to elicit the most revealing response and compare different answers to find the real situation. We also had to negotiate and manage expectations as well as produce a report and presentation in a very tight time frame, useful skills for our future careers.

The project also gave a great sense of satisfaction that as a team we’d identified issues that were holding back a company, developed practical solutions for them and persuaded management that our advice was worth following. Finally, Sri Lanka was an amazing place to visit, from the food, the ocean, the chance to see elephants and visit Buddhist temples and other historic sites.

I’d very much like to thank alumni donors who helped make the 2014 IBA possible and recommend supporting future cohorts on their international adventures." Charlotte Ryland MBA 2014