The Oxford MBA Summer Options

As part of the Oxford MBA programme you have three options to spend the summer months - and to gain the two credits required for the programme. People contemplating the Oxford MBA read on. Others, pardon the detail.

The first of these is the Summer Consulting Project (SCP). This involves doing a short 6-8 week consulting project (pretty obvious!) for a company, building on and consolidating the academic learning from the course and combining it with past experience and general skills to present a solution for a real-life problem faced by the company. The SCP, which is worth two credits, involves working at the client site or remotely, presenting a practical solution for them, and writing a more academic 15,000 word piece for the formal assessment. The projects are typically sourced by the school (though you can source your own, subject to certain criteria being met), and students are often compensated for their work.

The second option is to take two 'summer elective' courses, each worth one credit. Each course consists of eight three-and-a-half-hour lectures condensed into one week, often accompanied by individual and group assignments. Some courses run concurrently (i.e., in the same week), and so depending on your choice of electives you could be attending 16 lectures in one week and working on the related assignments and practical work. Or you could choose one in the first week of the summer, and one in the last.

The third option is to write an Individual Academic Thesis on a subject of your choice. This is the most academically oriented option of the three, and therefore the least preferred option for most MBAs.

So, what did I do this summer, and what would I recommend to future students of the Oxford MBA? I elected to do the summer electives, and took both my electives in the first week of the summer. Of course this meant an extremely hectic first week - 50 hours of lectures in the week accompanied by several assignments. But it also meant that once I had ridden through that week, I was more or less done for the summer! There were still a couple of assignments left, but I could do them at relative leisure. And why would you want to do this? If you want an easy-going summer, wish to travel, spend time with family, or just utilise the time to look for a job. This option works particularly well for those opting to do internships over the summer, which are not academically assessed and therefore do not count towards the course. For such students, the practical option is to take the two electives and to then spend the rest of the summer completing the internship.

And who should do the SCP? Students who wish to build on what they have learnt in class during the year, those who wish to work for the company they are doing the project with, or those who wish to travel to different countries at the expense of that company (trips this year included those to India, China, Gambia, and Hungary). The report or presentation for the company, and the 15,000 word academic submission can make this pretty demanding in terms of time, though, and people may find they have little time left for anything else. Long term benefits depend on individual motivations, and I have found people in my class to have benefited in varying ways and to different degrees. There are some who are glad they took that option, others are more ambivalent about it and are unable to come up with concrete reasons for why they would recommend it. The process used to award the school-sourced projects is complex, however, and it involves bidding for the project(s) of your choice. The project that is right for you, therefore, is not guaranteed, but you commit to any other project you bid for, and are awarded. It is hard to come up with a process that is fair to everyone, and I'm sure the school and the projects office are working hard t improve on it all the time. Self-sourced projects, however, are not bid for and are therefore guaranteed.

The academic thesis is almost definitely for the more academically minded student - for someone who wishes to dig deep into a subject with a view to entering the world of academia or continuing academic / research work in the future. If you wish to work in the traditional avenues of industry, consulting, or finance, this may not be for you.



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