Dear All,

It’s that time of year when we start the process for selecting the person to be awarded the 2015 Cranfield Australian Alumni Scholarship.

You are receiving this information as you are on our database as having registered interest in the Scholarship. Please see below the dates for the Cranfield Admission Test (CAT), which you may sit as alternative to the GMAT.  We are making the CAT available in Sydney and Melbourne. There is no cost to sit the CAT but you do need to book it.  The CAT will be followed by an evening Alumni Reception to which you and a guest are also invited.

All the “welcome information” for registrants is here.

 

These are the things you need to do by Wednesday February 18:

1. Book to sit the Cranfield Admission Test. 

You can sit the CAT or the GMAT. Further information – about the CAT compared to GMAT, practice tests and to BOOK to sit the CAT – can be found here.

2. RSVP for the evening “Meet the Alumni reception”

Alumni drinks will be hosted by CAASF President Stephen Williams MBA 1994 in both Sydney and Melbourne to which you and a guest are invited. This will give you the opportunity to meet with Alumni who can tell you about the Cranfield experience and what life after Cranfield is like. Please click here to RSVP.

3. Update your status information

See directions in the footer of this page.

Sydney | Monday February 23 2015 The Drawing Room, The Langham Hotel, 89-113 Kent Street, Sydney 3.00 Arrival 3.15 to 4.15 CAT Administration 4.15 Coffee and light refreshments with time to ask any questions you may have 5.30 to 7.30 “Meet the Alumni” reception

Melbourne | Tuesday February 24 2015 The Winston Room, The Hotel Windsor, 111 Spring Street, Melbourne 3.00 Arrival 3.15 to 4.15 CAT Administration 4.15 Coffee and light refreshments with time to ask any questions you may have 5.30 to 7.30 “Meet the Alumni” reception

  

Please note: 

• You are able to use a calculator for the CAT. You will need to bring a separate one as your phone must be surrendered during the test.
• If you cannot get to Melbourne or Sydney for the CAT, please email me directly and we will try to work something out.

Any questions or issues? Please don’t hesitate to email me.

Best wishes,

Alex Chapman MBA 1988 | Vice-President, Cranfield Alumni Scholarship Foundation

 

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Updating your information

You are receiving this email because you are registered in our database as Scholarship Year: {!Contact.Scholarship_year__c} and Last known Status: {!Contact.Pipeline_status__c}

Could you please indicate any changes by return email with AMEND in the subject line and in the first line indicate if:

A. You are no longer interested in applying for the Scholarship but are happy to become a Friend – which means you will receive the announcement email each year to forward to friends and colleagues

B. You are no longer interested in applying for the Scholarship and wish to be removed completely from the email list

C. Still interested in applying (but maybe not sure about timing)

D. Planning to apply (please specify possible year)

If you can’t read this email, click here. To unsubscribe, please reply with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line

Dear All,

This will be a long update – apologies in advance – there is a lot of news, especially for the 100+ Cranfield Alumni we have recently welcomed to our community.

Save the date – Monday 26 May 2014

The Award Dinner for the Eighth Cranfield Australian Alumni Scholarship will be held at The Langham Hotel, Sydney (formerly The Observatory) on Monday 26 May. Our Patron John McFarlane will present the Scholarship to the winner. As in previous years, the Scholarship Foundation AGM and The Insiders View – an informative presentation by one of our Alumni – will precede the Award dinner.

President’s Lunches and Alumni events

In early February, Stephen Williams hosted the second Annual President’s Lunches in both Sydney and Melbourne. These were once again, a resounding success, and achieved our aim of bringing together Alumni, key media and business leaders to help get the message out about the unique nature of our Scholarship – now in its eighth year. The results – a short, positive write-up in the Australian Financial Review, the commitment of the attendees to promote our Scholarship to their organisations and increased awareness of the Cranfield brand.

The lunch dates marked the start of the formal selection process for this year’s Scholarship with the administration of the Cranfield Admission Test (CAT) in the afternoon followed by an evening reception for the broader Alumni community, which gave prospective Scholarship candidates the opportunity to meet with Alumni from all Schools. A successful Alumni event for Brisbane was held in late February.

The Scholarship pipeline

Since 2007, 14 talented Australians have benefited from our activities and studied at Cranfield for their MBA. Very soon, we will know the final number of students that our efforts may acquire for Cranfield for this year. The possible tally is seven, five of which are Australian citizens and thus eligible to be considered for our Foundation Scholarship. Once again, the selection panel will have its work cut out in selecting a winner for 2014.

Fundraising

Our Scholarship comprises two elements; course fees, contributed by Cranfield and a cash grant (in past years $20,000), funded by the Australian Alumni.

In awarding the Scholarship, our stated ethos is that beneficiaries must ‘pay forward’ the benefit they receive. This allows us to choose the best possible winner rather than a ‘worthy one’. Eventually this will mean the Scholarship will become self-funding. For now, Alumni support is critical.

Our fundraising efforts continue to be hampered by lack of tax-deductibility for donations in Australia. Happily we can now accept tax-deductible donations from UK-taxpayers via the University. Australian donations can be made here.

Please make a gift to support the work of the Foundation. Contributions of any size are genuinely appreciated.

Current and past Scholarship beneficiaries

I caught up with the 2013 cohort, Daniel George and Kevin Ha and found them somewhat bleary-eyed which suggests that they are working long and hard.

At the School of Management Alumni Awards Evening at the Royal Society, London in February, John McFarlane our Patron, Anna Baggoley (2011 Scholar), David Scollon (2012 Scholar) and Daniel George (2013 Scholar) – missing from the photo –  were all in attendance. I also managed to catch up with Aashlesha Venkatachalam and Adam Cox who are also presently working in London. Ben Elias is back in Sydney working on an entrepreneurial start-up.

News from Cranfield

During my visit to Cranfield in February, I was fortunate to meet with Sir Peter Gregson, CEO & Vice-Chancellor of the University, Prof Joe Nellis, Director of the School of Management and Prof Ian Wallace, Head of School, Defence & Security (Shrivenham). A core focus of all discussions was the Alumni community. Sir Peter also shared this presentation with me with highlights about the University.

I describe the University as having ‘got religion’ about the Alumni. Specifically, what we have achieved in Australia is now seen as a model that the University is keen to roll out to all Alumni communities across the globe. As Alumni, we can play a key role in funneling talented students to the University. The flip side of the coin is that a strong Cranfield brand is enormously important to help Alumni achieve their career/life aspirations. We can expect to see many positive changes as a result of Sir Peter’s commitment to re-engage with Alumni from all the Schools. Watch this space…

Sir Peter intends to make a major visit to Australia in 2015 – hopefully to coincide with our May Award events. For this year’s dinner he will be sending a video message for us to show.

Sir Peter describes the Cranfield Alumni as “one of the most influential networks in the world”. Based on the incredibly impressive Alumni that we are finding /connecting with on LinkedIn, it is clear that Sir Peter is absolutely correct.

We Alumni are the start and end of a virtuous cycle:

•  in which excellence and diversity in the student body leads to increased richness and quality of learning,
• this feeds the success of the graduates and the academic staff and the University as an outstanding academic institution
• in turn, this produces a stronger and more vibrant Alumni community to support and act as role models to attract outstanding students.

Creating a community in which Cranfield Alumni can come together, exchange ideas, share knowledge and experience, seems like a ‘no brainer’. LinkedIn provides us the means to find and reconnect with the Alumni. Our efforts to create a vibrant community can both enable and shape the University’s stated strategy to reengage and support the Alumni.

How you can support our Australian Alumni community

We have organized the Australian Alumni community around the principles of contribution and connection. Our Scholarship is our unifying purpose and the vehicle by which Alumni can contribute in ways that best suit them – small or large, time, money, effort or resources.  You can help by:

1. Attending our next event, the Award Dinner in Sydney, Monday 26 May

2. Finding Alumni

Please connect to other Alumni on LinkedIn and to any/ all of the Board and introduce us to Alumni that you are in contact with. We are keen to find alumni from all Schools. All the information you need to do this is here.

3. Branding yourself visibly as a Cranfield Alumnus

Join the official groups on LinkedIn to clearly identify yourself as a Cranfield Alumnus. These are the links to the Official School of Management Alumni and the Scholarship Supporters groups. For other Schools search for ‘Cranfield’ groups on LinkedIn.

4. Supporting us financially

In a separate email we will give suggestions – ranging from sponsorship & advertising to donations.

5. Getting involved, joining the Foundation and/or nominating for the Board.

We are always delighted to welcome new hands on deck. An invitation to become a member of the Foundation (for which there is no charge) and for Board nominations will come out shortly.

6. Promoting the Scholarship to your network

Please help us make as many people as possible aware of our Scholarship opportunity by forwarding the November announcement email to friends, colleagues and your professional network. You can also share this page about our Scholarship.

I look forward to seeing you at the dinner in May.

Alexandra Chapman (MBA 1988) on behalf of Stephen Williams (MBA 1993), President
and the Board of the Cranfield Australian Alumni Scholarship Foundation.

 

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You are receiving this because you have your details as a Cranfield Alumnus on our Scholarship database. To unsubscribe, please contact us here.

 

Hello! I’m a little late getting this blog started, having only just finished my last exam for Term 2 yesterday. However, my plan is to give a bit of background in this post and then I’ll then try to use the next few weeks to wrap up the events of the first two terms. Feel free to ask if there is anything you’re particularly interested in about the Cranfield MBA and I’ll post on it.

My original qualification is in mining engineering, although I also have a Masters in Applied Finance. I have moved into more financially-oriented roles over time, albeit still within the mining industry. My most recent role was with BMA (a joint venture between BHP Billiton and Mitsubishi) as a Senior Business Analyst in the Business Development department.

My journey to Cranfield began in 2008. I’d had a loose plan to “one day” do a MBA. The most likely option was a part time course at my alma mater, the University of Queensland. However, this was relatively expensive and the course has no international standing, which I considered quite important considering the time and expense of completing an MBA. I’d also looked at the NUS/UCLA executive offering. Though this had a bit better standing than Australian courses, it was fairly expensive, particularly considering the international travel requirements. In early 2008 an email was forwarded on through my company’s HR department, advertising the Cranfield Australian Alumni scholarship. The first scholarship had been awarded the previous year to Sarah Nicholson a BHP Billiton employee. The opportunity to be able to complete an international-standard MBA without the financial difficulties normally involved greatly appealed to me. So I booked in to sit the GMAT, achieved a quite good result and put in my application.

As far as the GMAT goes, I highly recommend GMAT 800 by Kaplan. It provides some hard example questions that you don’t normally get in other practice books. I’d also recommend getting a guide to verbal questions. There are a lot of grammar and sentence structure questions in the GMAT. Australian education systems seem to do a very poor job at teaching such things in primary school so I would suggest practice in this area is crucial. The questions can be quite technical, particularly the hard ones, so judging the answer by how it sounds is usually not the best option. Mind you, those who aren’t as comfortable with mathematics might not agree that this is the most difficult area.

The application process involved an interview with recruitment consultants Egon Zehnder, an interview with the Cranfield FTMBA course director, Sean Rickard, an interview with the selection committee from the Australian alumni and two essays (one for the Australian alumni and one for the school). Regardless of the selection process, the chance to get feedback from a high-level executive recruitment firm such as Egon Zehnder was invaluable.

Unfortunately, I missed out in 2008, although I did get offered a partial scholarship. However, between the application and the offer, I became engaged to the delightful, enchanting lady who is now my wife (and may also have edited this prior to posting) and had also been asked to be groomsman at a friend’s wedding. With both weddings planned during the Cranfield year, not to mention the cost of a future wedding to consider, it didn’t feel like the best timing to take a year off work and head overseas, so I had to turn the opportunity down. At that point I thought I might have missed my opportunity to complete an MBA internationally. However, in 2010, I was asked if I was still interested in going to Cranfield. With my wife due to give birth just three months before the start of the MBA year, the timing was not any better, however, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity again and put my name forward. The process was a lot less stressful the second time around as I’d already been accepted to Cranfield previously. In the end I was fortunate enough to receive the 2010 scholarship and the rest, as they say, is history!