Chinese MBAs Visit For Short-term Immersion Course

Smith’s Office of Global Initiatives hosted 75 Chinese MBA students from Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management in Beijing – one of China’s premiere business schools – for two weeks last month in College Park. The students, most of whom had never been to the United States, traveled to Maryland to experience business education in an American setting.

The two groups were on campus from July 7 to 19 and attended special courses with Smith faculty Rosallina Ferraro, Xiaohui Gao, Brent Goldfarb, Mary Harms, Sunil Mithas, Janet Wagner, Liu Yang and Jie Zhang.

Site visits included the Calvert Foundation, UMD’s Confucius Institute, QVC, World Bank, the US Naval Academy and the Maryland State House. The first group was pleased to be invited to dinner at the home of Mary Zastrow, a supporter of the Dingman Center. John LaPides, a member of Dingman’s Board of Advisors and an Annapolis native, hosted both groups for a crab cake lunch in Annapolis and a tour of the capital city.

One group of students with an entrepreneurship focus participated in workshops and company visits, arranged by the Dingman Center, that exposed them to entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland and across the DC area.

The workshops explored current trends in the startup space including Lean Startup Methodology and Blue Ocean Strategy. Visits throughout the week allowed the students to see operations first-hand at some of the region’s emerging startups and incubators such as Honest Tea, Street Sense, and Bethesda Green. By the end of the week the group was able to refine their business model using the business model canvas. 

Guanghua School of Management has been an official Smith exchange partner for four years and is the site of Smith’s annual China Business Plan Competition.