An International Outlook

The student body at York University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto is diverse in more ways than one. More Schulich MBAs have a background in tech and engineering than business, and former students of the arts and humanities make up a big slice of recent classes. More than half of the students are international, and 37% of those students are from Asia. More than a third of students are women. Many of Schulich's MBA students take night classes where they are mixed in with part-time students.

This all makes for an eye-opening MBA education, but it can also make the job tough for the school's career-services director, Joseph Palumbo. Palumbo recently talked about the changing needs of Schulich grads with BusinessWeek intern Kristin Dew. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation:

How does the student body diversity come into play when it's time for you to do your job?
You have to be an active, focused, energized, confident job-seeker that seeks opportunities, that doesn't sit back and wait for the company to come on campus or for the job to hit the bulletin boards. If you're an international student, you are even more under pressure to do this because this is perhaps your life savings that you've put into this program. Not only have you given up two years of income, but you've traveled a long way.

Do a lot of grads look for jobs in the U.S.?
Five years ago, most students wanted to stay in Canada and the U.S. While there's still a core group of people who want to stay here, more are looking to build their career based on where they've been. They have a Western education from a top-quality school, so they're going to go back to their home country and hopefully take their careers even farther because that's the edge they have (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/31/06, "India: A Hot Brand Climate?").

How has that changed your job?
Now we have to not only give them the tools to look on their own, but we're also supporting their career search globally. We attend the international MBA consortiums, but we also make frequent job treks to the U.S., Britain, India, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, France, and Japan. We're doing virtual global career fairs, job postings, and networking. We also have full-time offices in Beijing, Mumbai...

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