Developing your management style

Emily Situ

General Manager of RF Thunder Hong Kong and Guangzhou office, Ruder Finn Group
MBA graduate 2005

Emily began studying in July 2004, and graduated in November 2005, after taking additional courses to expedite her MBA.

The first thing that surprised Emily about studying at Federation University, was the diversity in age of her classmates. In China, she explains, when you study an MBA, everyone will be pretty much the same age.

Studying with a mixed group of people was an experience that she loved: “When you can study with people of a different age, they can share their working experience. That’s something really great, and you cannot get that from the people around your age.”

Prior to studying her MBA she worked as a marketing officer for a Hong Kong government organisation in China for four years. She is now the General Manager for a large agency, where she manages the business for South China and divides her time between Guangzhou and Hong Kong. It’s a large role and one she “couldn’t have imagined taking” before she had her MBA.

When she decided to take a career break to study, she considered her options carefully: “I was attracted to Federation University by one slogan: ‘come to Ballarat and you can experience the real Australia.’”

Emily found considerable value in choosing to study in regional Australia, and enjoyed the community and the way of life: “Ballarat is so different to where I grew up in China. There were only 80,000 people there at the time, and in the office building I worked at in Guangzhou, there were 30,000 people in and out each day.”

She especially liked that the class sizes were small and the learning was personalised, which made a big difference, and enabled her to form meaningful connections: “I’m still in touch with some of the teachers I met. We update each other, and I ask them for advice in my career.”

“The MBA doesn’t teach you particular skills like learning a computer program, it’s about helping you to think strategically, which helps you develop a management style,” says Emily: “The Federation University MBA was the most memorable time in my life so far.”