The 137 smiling faces on the video screen watched expectantly as Donald Lessard welcomed them - from half a world away -- to their new IMBA program launched by the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University (Tsinghua SEM)and MIT Sloan School of Management.

"We welcome you to the greater Sloan community," Donald Lessard, deputy dean of MIT Sloan told the incoming class of 2002 via a live videoconference from Boston. The students began their weeklong orientation into the program at Tsinghua on Sept. 11.

In 1996, Sloan established the MIT-China Management Education Project with Tsinghua SEM to train business graduate students for management careers in the global arena. Each year, more than 2,000 applications come in for the IMBA program, but only 120 students are admitted. In 1997 and 1998, the total enrollment per year was 40 students.

Lessard stressed that the program was not to be regarded as "the Sloan program in Tsinghua, but the joint program between Sloan and Tsinghua."

This particular program has earned an excellent reputation in China. The International Faculty Fellow (IFF) training method plays important role in the success. IFFs from distinguished Chinese universities such as Tsinghua, Fudan and Lingnan, spend a semester at Sloan developing core courses and electives that they then teach to students in International MBA programs at their respective schools. This system has proved more effective than the traditional way of sending some faculty abroad for teaching experience.

Lessard touched on ethics-related issues several times in his welcoming speech. Second-year student Ruomeng Guan said he liked the ethics courses taught in the program by Sloan faculty member Leigh Hafrey. Ruomeng Guan also spoke as part of the videoconference, saying, Hafrey "gave us great opportunities to think very deeply about ethics, professionalism and leadership.

Other Sloan professors who have taught in the IMBA program are Neal Hartman, John Acula, and Rudi Dornbusch.

Besides faculty members teaching short-term sessions in Tsinghua, other Sloan faculty, such as Lester Thurow, have used videoconferencing for courses with Tsinghua students.

Every spring semester, Sloan sends a team to visit the School of Economics and Management, helping the IMBA with team building, and to get new and valuable China experiences.

In his speech, Lessard also said that the IMBA could provide students with a special strength in terms of management skills, but they would have work on their own to put their knowledge to the best possible use after graduation. The mission of the cooperation program is to train the future business leaders in China with global vision. Actually, many big companies in China, not only the foreign enterprises and joint ventures, now recruit many graduates from this program. Many of the IMBA graduates get job offers from multinational employers.

This year's IMBA class has a distinctly international flavor, with five students from Canada, five from Indonesia, five from Singapore, two from Australia, two from Korea, and one from Cuba. The average age of IMBA students in the two-year program is 29.

Tsinghua SEM's associate dean Professor Zhangwu Chen, and Xiaojun Qian, director of the Tsinghua MBA program, attended the videoconference on the Beijing campus, and Eleanor Chin, program manager for the international programs of Sloan, in Boston.

(School of Economics and Management, 09/16/2002)