Since last year IE Business School offers to its International MBA students the possibility to have a work period during their one-year MBA program. The program and its modules are redesigned in a way that gives a select group of participants the flexibility to pursue a working period during summer.

Please read this interview with Aditya Malhotra from India. Aditya started as a merchant marine officer in the energy shipping sector, he moved on to business development and Strategy with a shipping company accumulating work experience of about 7 years prior to the program.(at age 27). Completed his BS from BITS Pilani, a distinguished technical university in India prior to going for the IMBA. As a career switcher, he wanted to further his career in areas of Finance and Strategy with an ultimate entrepreneurial aspiration. After graduation, Aditya joined a financial services company involved in Reinsurance in Switzerland.

Aditya, in which company did you do your internship?
Adara Venture Partners, a Spanish VC firm based in Madrid.

What was your motivation to do an internship in such a short and intensive 1-year program?
As a career switcher, it gave me an opportunity to get my foot in the door for entering the area of financial services and making the most of my time by using the 6 weeks of vacation in a more effective manner. Having said that, it is a challenge to get an internship with the one year programme since people have far less time to put in for applications and interviews since the program starts in Nov and most internship interviews are in Dec- Jan when the workload is very high.

How was the online experience? Did you enjoy learning in this way?
The online learning was an interesting way to learn, something that I wasnâ??t used to. However it did prepare me well for the business world where today I regularly use virtual chat rooms to have discussions with different offices. You tend to learn how to listen and value people viewpoint through virtual sessions and text based discussions. It also gave me the opportunity to interact with people from different sections which otherwise would not have been the case. There were times that we could actually put our day to day business observations into the discussions and see what the professor and others had to say about it.

There were certain times when there are certain limitations to this methodology-based on the subject, or if the class size is too small and in case of presentations. It however does not work for courses with numerical requirements that well. On the whole it was an enjoyable experience.

How was your day-by-day during your internship period combining studying and working?
The workload changes on a daily basis and this is very clearly reflected in the discussion forums. When people are freer there tend to be more active postings on the forum whereas there are days when you are busy in the office and it does eat up on your free time to log in and read all the posts and make comments. There are times when you tend to feel left back and short of comments if you have lagged in the discussion or have not been regular. Thus, it does require a significant commitment on a daily level from each student who is part of this method.

Thank you very much, Aditya, for this interview and good luck in Switzerland.

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