Exchange at UBC Sauder
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Ning Chen
Preparing for the exchange
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Documents
The MBA exchange coordinator Edenial contacted me early in March, a few
days after I got the acceptance letter from Aalto. In the email, she asked me to
send the MBA Exchange application form and supporting documents, as well
as the MBA Exchange Student Contract by email. Once they have your
completed application form, they will then assign you a UBC student number.
Using the student number, you could then set up a Campus Wide Login (CWL)
which is a universal ID you will use to access all student/academic related
programs, including course registration and campus housing. The instructions
are quite clear with specific deadlines and the coordinator is very kind to help
you.
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Visa
As a Chinese student, I need to apply for a visa for Canada. You have to send
all the documents and passport by mail to London if you want to apply in
Finland; or you can choose to deal with the visa issue back in China, in either
case, you need at least one month for the application process. A point worth
mentioning is that you should keep in touch with the exchange coordinator in
Aalto for the enrolment letter from UBC, which you will need for the visa
application.
Finns do not need a visa for Canada, if they stay there for less than six months.
If you plan to visit United States during the exchange in Canada, and you are a
Finn, you do not need a visa either. Yet for Chinese, again, you need the visa.
 You could apply the visa back in China or just in Helsinki and the latter is
more convenient. It could be very wise to have a US visa before your
departure to Canada cause the flight ticket is much cheaper if you transfers via
an American city. Of course, you can apply the US visa when you arrive
Canada.
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Other fees
You need to pay 213 CAN for the student health insurance called IMED and
120 CAN for UPass, which gives you unlimited use of buses, skytrain and
seabus transportation services across Metro Vancouver at a discounted rate.
You can go to the bookstore in UBC and get the UPass every month during
your stay in Vancouver.
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Flight tickets
The flight ticket to Vancouver is quite expensive, especially in August and
September. It cost me over 1200 USD for the return tickets from Frankfurt to
Vancouver. You’d better book the tickets early and pay more attention to the
airline promotions if you want to find a good deal. As I mentioned earlier, the
flight ticket can be much cheaper if you transfer via America.
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Buddy Programme
The Sauder MBA provides a Buddy programme for exchange students.
Specifically, the full-time MBA student at Sauder could volunteer and pair with
an incoming exchange student, helping him or her fit into UBC more quickly.
My buddy is very nice and helpful, and he gives me lots of suggestions about
course registration.
Usually, the exchange start at the end of August and ends in the beginning of
December. The summer in Vancouver is fabulous and I strongly recommend
you arrive a few days earlier to explore the campus and the city beforehand.
Likewise, you can stay a little longer after the exchange and enjoy the warmer
winter.
Exchange studies
I studied in the 2nd year full-time MBA programme, with people from every corn
of the world and various backgrounds.
The exchange semester lasts about three months, from September to
December. It is divided into two periods--Period 6 & 7, and between two
periods there is a reading week for break. Each period consists of five weeks,
followed by the sixth week called exam week. We are required to take eight
courses for the exchange, four for each period. Each course is worth 1.5
Canadian credits, equal to 3 ECTS.
There was a mandatory two-day orientation during my stay: all day interactive
workshops on August 29th, as well as Vancouver Tour and optional Boat
Cruise on August 30th. The orientation provided me a good chance to get
known other exchange students.
The MBA courses are based on four tracks—finance, consulting, product and
service management, business innovation. As an exchange student, you could
choose anyone you are interested. But for some finance courses, you are
required some earlier knowledge for that subject. All of them are taught in
English and at graduate level. Compared with courses in Aalto, those in
Sauder are more practical with more projects and teamwork.
Below I will describe briefly courses I have taken at Sauder.
 BA 563 Decision making for managers (1.5 credits)
Instructor: Dale Griffin
This course is designed to make you a better decision maker by helping you
understand your weaknesses and build on your strengths in decision making.
This is an Integrative course that links material from Economics, Operations,
Statistics, Marketing, Psychology, Finance, and Strategy. Good decision
makers know how to recognize decision problems, how to represent the
essential structure of the decision situation, and how to analyze the problem
with the formal tools based on decision theory.
Dale excels in the area of consumer behavior and is very knowledgeable. You
have to do your readings beforehand and pay full attention during the lecture.
The course is based on a book called “Thinking, fast and slow”, which inspires
me a lot. You will explore and move back and forth between formal economic
models of how we should make decisions and psychological, descriptive
models of how people actually make decisions to help you understand and
improve your native decision making. It is a mandatory course for all MBA
students and I really learned a lot from it.
Evaluation:
2 written assignments (15% and 30%, respectively)
Participation in class (25%)
A final open-book case exam (30%).
 BAEN 502 Growing and exiting a venture (1.5 credits)
Instructor: Blair Simonite
In this course students will become familiar with the management challenges
facing ventures as they grow and mature beyond the early stages. You’ll learn
to identify the issues and systematically apply practical, industry-relevant tools
to address them. Topics include growing customer acquisition through various
sales models; scaling operations; growth financing; leadership and human
resource issues for the growing firm; board evolution; and exit and other long
term future path strategies.
As an entrepreneur, you have turned your great idea into a startup venture,
and you have proven that your business model works and generates revenue
from real customers. Or perhaps you have joined the management team of an
early stage growth venture. In either case, the organization’s focus is shifting
to growth. This is exactly the course you need as it offers a big picture for the
organization to overcome new hurdles ahead, to successfully scale up for
growth, and to plan for exit and other alternative future paths.
Evaluation:
Class participation:
20%
Class assignments:
40%
Individual project:
40%
 BAHR 507 Negotiation
Instructor: Daniel Skarlicki
(1.5 credits)
The goal of this course is to help you develop both the analytical and
negotiation skills needed to meet the challenges faced by managers every
day.
This is an intensive course, taught in three days. You will take part in all kinds
of live negotiations with the classmates and horn your negotiation skills. After
every live negotiation, Daniel analyzed these different scenarios in details and
helped you develop relevant negotiation strategies. Overall, I found it quite
interesting and useful.
Evaluation:
Class Participation
Feedback
Final Paper
20%
40%
40%
 BASC 521 Project governance and management
Instructor: Robert Goatham
(1.5 credits)
This course explores the underlying dynamics of project failure and proposes
strategic solutions to ensure an organization’s project delivery capabilities are
reliable and effective. Arming students with the insights needed to structure a
project for success, the course provides the foundational knowledge needed to
manage and oversee the project side of the business.
The course reminded me of the course “Introduction to Project Management”
taught in Aalto. However, the course is more practical, especially with the
discussion in class. Most MBA students have prior project management
experience and their opinions are very valuable.
Evaluation:
Individual assignments:
Team assignment:
Team Presentation:
Participation:
40%
20%
20%
20%
 BAMA 503 New product Development
Instructor: Tim Silk
(1.5 credits)
The course uses cases and a project to teach students the processes, tools,
and best practices used to develop new products and services. Topics include
reasons for new product failure, new product adoption, stage gates and project
management tools, idea generation, design trade-off decisions, concept
testing and forecasting.
Like Dale, Tim is also a top professor in consumer behavior. He is very
energetic and sometimes funny. He is my favorite professor and his course
inspires me a lot. With lots of cases and project, the course is very practical,
exposing you to the situations and challenges frequently encountered by NPD
managers, teaching concepts, tools and best practices used in the industry,
and developing your conceptual, analytical, and decision-making skills. The
final project could be a big challenge which lasts all over the period.
Evaluation:
Class Participation: 10%
Take-Home Case Exam:
45%
Team Project: New Product/Service Concept Presentation:
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BAMA 513
Internet Marketing
Instructor: Paul Cubbon
45%
(1.5 credits)
This course teaches you how to utilize fundamental marketing principles in
developing a systematic approach for critiquing, designing and implementing
an eMarketing programme.
Again, it has a strong practical focus and involves online software analysis.
Students are required to develop an eMarketing programme for a company in
the real file. Actually, we did the presentation to our client directly. In addition,
we are encouraged to explore specific areas in eMarketing freely through
writing a blog.
Evaluation:
Article/book report or interview 20%
Class participation
10%
Team project
30%
Reflective learning paper 20%
Blog
20%
 BAIT 513 E-business strategies
Instructor: Ron Cenfetelli
(1.5 credits)
This course is intended to explore e-business and its strategic and operational
impacts on business. Overall, it is a managerially focused, instead of a
technology focused course. While it maybe a little general and theoretical, it
poses several interesting issues and different perspectives into e-business.
Evaluation
Participation - 25%
Three business case memos - 45%
Final Week Presentation - 30%
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BASM 580B
Consulting simulation
(1.5 credits)
Instructor: Nancy Blair
Like “Negotiation”, it is also an intensive course taught in three days. The
purpose of this course is to provide students a simulated lifelike consulting
experience. This provides participants with a firsthand experience of the
intensity, creativity, problem-solving challenges, changes in direction and
deliverables inherent to a consulting assignment.
In the course, we worked collaboratively in a group and applied a
cross-functional approach to solving a M&A issue for a large bank in Canada.
We framed and structured the client problem, performed research and analysis
to develop recommendations and presented our findings in the class. As our
project was about M&A, I felt quite pressured with limited knowledge in
finance. However, I did work with intelligent people and learned a lot from
them.
Evaluation
Case Presentation 30%
Case submission 35%
Peer assessment 25%
Participation 10%
Free time and other information
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Fabulous Vancouver
Known as the best city to live in, Vancouver has everything you can imagine. A
coastal seaport city, it is a perfect combination of nature and modern life. The climate
is very comfortable but it can be quite rainy during winter. That’s why it is also called
“Raincouver”. It is very easy to fit into Vancouver, the most ethnically and linguistically
diverse cities in Canada, especially for Asian people.
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High living cost
The living cost is similar, or even higher than that in Helsinki. For the housing, I chose
campus housing and it was like 2500 CAD from Aug 31st to Dec 19th. It would be
cheaper to live off campus. To save money on textbooks, you could share with other
students or even look for the ebook online. Also, you need to pay for printing and
scanning.
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Travelling in Northern America
There are so many places to visit in Vancouver: Stanley park, Capilano suspense
bridge park, Gastown, Grouse mountain etc. It is paradise for outdoor sports as well:
surfing in Tofino, skiing and snowboarding in Whislter, hiking and so forth. Or explore
a bit further to Victoria, the capital of BC.
With the US visa, you could travel to US easily: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
San Diego or even Hawaii. The return tickets from Bellingham—an American city near
the border---to Honolulu can be as low as 300 USD.
Final comments
The exchange to Sauder is one of the best choices I have ever made in my life and I
highly recommend it to you. The leading faculty, modern facilities on campus, friendly
and diverse students, cozy accommodation, breathtaking views of nature, great
restaurants and bars, comfortable climate and immigration culture…
That’s UBC. That’s Vancouver.
Aside from the knowledge I learnt at Sauder, what I appreciate more is the unique
experience to study with MBA students and live in Vancouver. As a student with little
work experience, I learnt a lot from my classmates, among who were IT consultants,
marketing managers, engineers, teachers etc. Networking plays a big role in the MBA
programme and the lack of social skills is exactly what I need to concentrate on and
fix. All these experiences really broadened my horizons and made me more
open-minded and independent.