MBA – Semester 4 – Business Project Phase

This is a backdated post to summarize my final semester at Cardiff University in July 2012. I hope the information provided will benefit prospective students intending to enroll in the MBA course at Cardiff. Continuing from my previous post on semester 3, the business project phase is the last semester in our MBA course at Cardiff University.

Provided that students have passed all core subjects and meet other requirements (e.g. number of fails does not exceed 3, and the average score of all subjects is above 50%), they can proceed to attempt the business project.

There are 3 types of business project:

Live Project A – A project with an organisation pre-selected by the university (in Wales & England)
Live Project B – A project with an organisation selected by students (either in UK or any other country)
Dissertation – A project on a selected topic related to student’s specialisation

A number of my friends went to do Live Project A, and a few did Live Project B. I wasn’t interested in Live Project A. I was considering between going back to Malaysia and doing a Live Project B with my current employer (Accenture) or try to find any other organisation in the UK. In the end, I weighted my options and decided to pursue a full dissertation instead. I wasn’t keen on finding an organisation in the UK as it’s just another working exprience to me (some of the students haven’t work before, so they were very eager), and doing a project with my current employer will just be “back to work”. I opted for the dissertation with a focus on the Malaysian economy as this is the last opportunity I will get to enhance my understanding on the Malaysian economy from an academic standpoint. Besides, I want to treasure my last months as a student in the UK before heading back to the real world.

After I decided on my topic, next was meeting the supervisor. I was lucky that my supervisor happened to be knowledgeable about the Malaysian economy. He gave some pointers, and during my first meeting I was given my first task:

To draft the structure of the dissertation (the chapters/topics in your paper)
To draft a one-page introduction.

The structure of the dissertation is the most important part to kick start the entire process. After 1 week, I went to see my supervisor again. He gave some comments and recommended some changes to the structure. Once I incorporated the changes, I was able to start working on the paper.

I submitted my dissertation on 10 September 2012. I was a huge relief to finally submit the last assignment for my MBA.

I spent a few days hanging out with my MBA classmates while packing up and clearing my room. I went to London the following week and stayed there for another week before finally heading back to Malaysia.

For other MBA related posts, refer to the links below: