With 80 percent of its members gainfully employed just two months after graduation, The Fletcher School’s first Master of International Business (MIB) class has set a high bar. This robust success—and diversity of paths pursued—should speak volumes to potential students and employers alike about the program’s future.

The MIB degree represents the confluence of traditional business skills—including rigorous quantitative finance, management, and marketing courses—with their international context. Dorothy Orszulak, Director of Corporate Outreach for the Fletcher School, says the program and its graduates meet the market’s need for internationally business savvy talent in an era of rapid globalization, while also reflecting the “continuous interests” that make Fletcher so unique.

As the second class of MIB students return from their summer internships, and the third class arrives on campus, recent MIB graduates offered advice on how the unique program fueled a successful career search.

Andy Albeck, who now works for as a business development consultant for Control Risks in New York City, saw the MIB as an untested opportunity. “Fletcher has an established name and a balanced, interdisciplinary curriculum, as well as a diverse group of professionally-minded students. The MIB in many ways simply crystallized the private-sector track within Fletcher, which MALDs had been pursuing all along.”

Having worked in credit risk management and financial consulting, Albeck had been looking for a career shift with a more international application. He planned to apply to Fletcher as a MALD, but when he visited the campus, he was immediately drawn to the MIB’s hybrid nature—the core focus of an MBA but with an international relations flavor. “I was sold on what the program had to offer,” he says emphatically.

Albeck advises incoming students to gain exposure to as many people as possible within the Fletcher community. “Join clubs, be active, and be engaged. Fletcher is all about the people—the friends you make and the richness of backgrounds and experiences they bring to bear.”

For Albeck, speaking to his peers and advisors helped him weigh his options at a critical time and a career crossroads. Fletcher’s diversity enabled Albeck to identify opportunities he might not have otherwise considered, determine whether the career might be a good fit, and actively pursue leads. “Ultimately, you get out of this program what you put in,” Albeck adds.

Tatiana Popa, a business consultant for Pfizer, chose Fletcher's MIB program for its elegant combination of business acumen and broad understanding of the global environment driving business. Popa is grateful for the diversity of international issues she encountered and sees this reflected in the careers her classmates have pursued after graduation.

“MIB students are equally prepared to work for international organizations, NGOs, and the public sector at various points in their career, as demonstrated by their internships and employment,” declares Popa.

Popa secured her position with Pfizer through a combination of Fletcher network contacts and the relevance of her thesis on the pharmaceutical industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. The writing process—and final product—gave her a critical edge in the recruitment process and she encourages incoming students maximize the thesis requirement.

“Start writing your thesis early so you can leverage your work for your job search,” she says. “Write about something unique and add value to an under-explored field, by using the multidisciplinary perspectives you develop through your Fletcher education.”

Like Popa, Frank D’Agnese encourages the incoming MIB class to make the most of their thesis and not see the requirement as the bane of their existence. “A handful of our graduates got jobs based on their thesis,” he notes. “Pick something you’re interested in and it will naturally flow into job exploration.”

D’Agnese, who now works in corporate strategy at Boston’s State Street Bank, sees the MIB’s multidisciplinary curriculum as a key differentiator from traditional MBA programs.

“It was really beneficial to have non-business students from completely different backgrounds to share their perspectives in the classroom with us,” D’Agnese says. “And international affairs studies provide an intellectual challenge that allows you to hone analytic skills that can be brought to the business world, including understanding global actors and their strategies in a political economy.”

Reflecting on his job search, D’Agnese advises the second-year MIB class to be as specific as possible about what they want to do. “This makes it easier to target employers and tap the alumni network,” he says. D’Agnese has a second suggestion: “Dedicate more time to job exploration. Carve out time and talk to someone doing a job you find interesting—you may end up finding a job you never knew existed.”

This sense of exploration and diverse experience pervades the MIB and Fletcher mentality. Two teams of Fletcher students—Masawa and KoffeeLink—won awards for social entrepreneurship projects in Tufts $100K Business Plan Competition this spring; both team leaders continue to nurture their projects, and their fellow team members have built on the experience to secure positions in diverse industries.

Masawa founder Joshua Haynes now works on his project full time in Washington, DC. His Masawa teammates include Shailesh Chitnis, who is writing for The Economist before starting as product manager for Cisco’s cloud computing services in London in September, and Darius Hyworon, now working for P&G in Toronto.

KoffeeLink founder Hayden Kwast is based in Boston and is using seed funding to develop his project's website and move it toward a bright future. Toru Mino, who worked on both the Masawa and KoffeeLink projects, is now a consultant at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a think tank housed at the World Bank.

Other post-MIB avenues include consulting (Deloitte, Booz & Co), financial services (BNP Paribas, Banco Santander), multinational corporations (Unilever, Chicago Bridge & Iron), and government and non-profit organizations (Presidential Management Fellowship [PMF] program, Department of Energy, World Bank, ACCION, and China Beijing Environmental Exchange).

With its first graduates placed in such diverse realms of the international business arena, it seems clear that the MIB program has arrived and will continue to meet a deep need for talent in a plethora of sectors.

Article by Elise Crane, Fletcher 2011, Re-printed from The Fletcher School's website: http://fletcher.tufts.edu/news/2010/08/features/mib.shtml