There we were, my classmate Inbal and I, standing out at the front desk, trying to talk our way past the receptionist. The woman couldn't figure out who we were, and we didn't really want to tell her because we thought she might call security.

What were we doing at the front desk of a Nestlé plant in Shanghai's Jinqiao industrial park? Was it as part of a school project to startle and aggravate executives at random multinational companies? I guess you could say that. More specifically, we had been hired by International Finance Corp. (part of the World Bank) to study how large firms in Shanghai select their suppliers. (All of my classmates did similar seven-week paid consulting projects for other companies.)

Maybe I have given you too many details, but the key point is that we wanted to find purchasing managers to interview. We had already gotten a lot of interviews through my group's personal acquaintances and by contacting CEIBS alumni. (CEIBS alumni network, we discovered, is stunningly powerful.) But we thought we could get even more interviews if we also put on suits and went door-to-door at various industrial parks.

One reason the Nestlé receptionist was so perplexed by us is that cold-calling doesn't really occur in China. If you want to meet with someone new, you usually have to find a mutual acquaintance to introduce you. The one thing we had going for us was that we had printed up some official-looking questionnaires with the World Bank logo on them.

So, our talk with the Nestlé receptionist, all in Chinese, went something like this:

Me: Hello, we would like to speak with the purchasing manager!
Receptionist: Yes, what is your honorable surname?
Me: I am Tai Li and this Israeli woman is Miss Lu Ling.
Receptionist: What time is your appointment?
Me: We have no appointment! We are CEIBS students hired by the World Bank to do a consulting project.
Receptionist: Umm…
Inbal: Look at our nice questionnaires!
Receptionist: They are indeed beautiful. Let me see if the purchasing manager is available.

The purchasing manager was in a meeting, so the receptionist decided to patch us through to the HR department. Here, our luck turned. The HR woman yelled at us, and told us our methods were really inappropriate. At that point, we slunk away from Nestlé, vowing never again to eat one of their products. Anyway, within hours we had set up or conducted interviews at several other companies, suggesting that cold-calling in China is not impossible.

This Group Consulting Project (GCP) was one of my best experiences at CEIBS. (The projects are more intensive than I have described. My group, for example, put together a presentation and 100-page report for our sponsors.) One thing that makes these projects, in a way, better than internships is the greater opportunity to get experience in a new field.

For example, my team did a business-development project. I don't have any relevant experience, so if I had applied for an internship at IFC in that area, I probably would have been rejected. But because the GCP project is done in groups of 4 to 6 students, all I had to do was form or join a group with the right collection of skills. If your post-MBA strategy is to switch careers, the GCP is a good way to get experience in a new area. A second advantage is the large selection of projects from which to choose -- our career office found about 80 this year for 20-plus groups. Almost every group got its first choice.

When our projects finished up and we returned to campus in September, we discovered the new batch of MBA students had changed a great deal since last we saw them. Two months earlier, they had been insecure and skittish. "Is CEIBS really as hard as we've heard?" they would meekly inquire, when they summoned the courage to talk to us directly. Now, they bestrode the campus like the future captains of industry they probably are.

The first-year students are truly blessed. First, they didn't have to start school under quarantine in their dorm rooms (due to SARS) like many of my classmates did. Second, they benefit from all of the bounty that CEIBS now offers: a beautiful, just-finished gymnasium with weight machines, cardio equipment, basketball and badminton courts, and snooker and ping pong tables. Then there's the new campus snack bar (with make-believe Western food and a giant flat-screen cable TV) and new classrooms. They also benefit from the many restaurants and bars opening in the neighborhood, food choices us second-year students could only dream of. At the same time, their workload has been significantly reduced from the brutal levels of our first modules.

The result has been a flowering of campus life among the first years: It's like 16th century Florence around here, but without the sculptors, painters, and debauched clergy. The new students have founded an excellent school newspaper, and numerous student clubs. They have more time for bar-hopping and Frisbee. They still work hard, but now there's some balance.

Actually, the workload has dropped for us, too. And many of us have channeled the extra time into finding jobs. For some, no extra time was needed, as employment has come ridiculously easily. The most extreme example was by a classmate who attended CEIBS' Beijing job fair. I still can't believe this story, two months after first hearing it from the woman herself:

At the job fair, each student gave a two-minute introduction to the assembled recruiters. When this particular student finished her two minutes, the head of a modern hospital chain walked up to her and offered to make her the general manager of one of his company's hospitals – this was despite the fact that my classmate had no background in health care. The guy didn't even interview her before he made the offer, which included a generous salary, free housing, and a driver. There were no obvious extenuating circumstances for the offer (e.g., her father is not President Hu Jintao's daughter). And it wasn't a scam: The guy's company is well-known and growing fast. He simply liked what she had to say during her two minutes.

This, of course, was not typical, but many of my classmates have been almost as quick to find jobs. CEIBS is one of the world leaders in terms of percentage of graduates who have jobs by graduation. On the other hand, the international students haven't had nearly the same amount of success. Even my classmates from Hong Kong and Taiwan, fluent Mandarin speakers, have had a tough time.

In my next and perhaps final entry, I will further chronicle our job-search attempts as graduation arrives, and see if there's a happy ending for me and my classmates. I don't want to give away too much, but there will be some laughter, some tears, and some important lessons learned. Also, one of my two Japanese classmates will be eaten by ants. But the other one will get a nice offer from Bain.