Stanford Business

AUGUST 2006


MBA Career Planning Takes to the Road

You could say Andy Dunn was working on the railroad. A guest of TZG Partners, a business initiation firm in Shanghai, the first-year MBA student spent part of his spring vacation working on a sales and marketing plan for a luxury train that someday will roll through China from Beijing to Lhasa.

Dunn was one of 27 students who visited companies this year as part of the Career View program, in which students spend their spring break shadowing alumni at work. His host company, founded and managed by Ben Tsen and Josh Brookhart, both MBA ’98, builds new businesses in China specializing in the real estate, hospitality, and leisure industries.

For Dunn, visiting TZG was a rewarding experience. He got a taste of the business and of Shanghai and had the chance to meet and socialize with Business School alums almost every day. “It was pretty altruistic of them,” Dunn said of Tsen and Brookhart, admitting he couldn’t have made much of a difference to the project in his brief time there.

But for TZG that wasn’t the point. “We find the Career View program a good way to stay in touch with the Business School,” said Tsen. “It allows us to get to know the students and for them to get to know us. For the students, it is a way to get an in-depth view of one type of business model in China. For us, having an outside perspective on our project companies is useful.”

Career View is sponsored by the Stanford Business School Alumni Association. To learn more about it, go to alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/students/career_view.html.