Sean Carpenter

Why an MBA in Brazil? We asked Sean Carpenter, an American who is currently pursuing an International MBA at the Fundação Instituto de Administração (FIA) at the University of São Paulo (USP).

So, why Brazil?

When I was looking into MBA programs, I wanted to attend a school abroad. I had a desire to work in an emerging market, one of the BRIC countries, but I didn’t have a strong interest to live in Russia, India, or China. When I saw this program, I thought it was a great idea, especially since my undergrad degree from Georgetown is in Latin American Studies. So, I visited the school and talked to professors, and thought, this is a good thing. My goal is, after graduation next year, to find a job, and to live and work here.

My whole thing was, if I want to learn the language and learn the culture, and to learn about doing business in Brazil, I need to be there, live it, and do it. Sometimes, I think people will go to schools in the U.S. or Europe and they come to Brazil to do business, and they just aren’t as successful as they could be because it’s a different way of doing things here.
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Marina Heck

São Paulo’s Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo da Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-EAESP) is one of five business schools in the OneMBA consortium. The OneMBA is an Executive MBA program where students attend classes and residencies on four different continents. Marina Heck, FGV-EAESP professor and OneMBA associate dean, explains the growing interest in emerging economies like her native Brazil.

How much of the OneMBA program is focused on acquainting students with emerging economies?

The program started with the idea of allowing international students to exchange their better practices. This client has been changing a lot recently, because interest in going abroad – specifically going to the United States or Europe – has decreased. We have been getting more calls from people interested in learning the Brazilian way, because they are interested in Brazil or other emerging economies.

And in Europe, we don’t just go to Rotterdam (where Erasmus RSM is located) for the residency; we go to Rotterdam AND Istanbul, because we think that Turkey is an exceptional example of a country that wants to be in Europe, isn’t yet, but is almost there. There are all these challenges that Turkey is facing that is very interesting to study from the business point of view.

When we go to Asia, we also spend a few days in India. We don’t have a member of the consortium in India, but we have a partner school that hosts a three-day residency there.

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Greg Hallman

How are MBA programs preparing finance-focused students for working in a crisis and its aftermath? We asked Greg F. Hallman, finance lecturer at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

What are some ways the current financial downturn has affected the content and teaching methodology in finance at McCombs?

In my view, the financial downturn has actually made teaching finance a little easier.  At its core, finance is the study of risk and return. The past couple of years in the market have given todays students a perfect illustration of risk and the downside to investing.  Now when we teach them that expected return is a payment for risk, I believe they can better understand the risk/return relationship.

The market’s performance has also made very clear the fact that no matter how good our models are we cannot see the future. This has, of course, always been true, but the troubles suffered by the big and generally smart banks have shown that even with a decent model of the market’s behavior unlikely events can and do occur to wreck the best laid plans.

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Markus Rudolf

The financial crisis has taken center stage in business school classrooms around the world. Rightfully so, says the finance chair at one of Germany’s leading business schools.

How is the financial crisis affecting the way you teach finance?

One positive thing about the things that are going on right now is that we can learn a lot from them. You can empirically analyze how markets react in extreme scenarios. This is something you find in our lectures. Our lectures are focused on recent developments anyway, but this year we are teaching a lot about the financial crisis.

Of course, we also have conferences where we invite academics, as well as professionals. One example was the Campus for Finance New Year Conference recently where we had a lot of CFOs and CEOs here, one Nobel laureate, and a lot of professors. We were talking for three entire days about the financial crisis – what the reasons for it are and what can be improved in the future in order to avoid these developments that we have right now.

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