Two Sides of The Same Coin

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Dr. Paco Sandejas, managing partner of Narra Veture Capital, gave a little talk last August 12 (Tuesday) here at the Asian Institute of Management about the whole venture capital scene in the Philippines and techno-entrepreneurship.

Talks like these plus the New Products and Services Development (NPSD) class under Prof. Jay Bernardo really inspire me to take a plunge (or even a dip) into the ocean that is entrepreneurship. I say ocean because it's deep and vast, and not to mention rich, but also filled with sharks and venomous jellyfishes.

I can follow a thread that goes back to our Development of the Enterprise (DE) class under Prof. Titos Ortigas, where the entrepreneurial spirit of our class was being kindled, or rekindled. And for a certain degree, it worked for me.

I still have some trepidations about venturing now, given there is a full blown financial crisis in the world happening. But we have always been reminded how the Chinese view a crisis-- the Chinese word for "crisis" is "weiji," which is composed of "wei" (danger) and "ji" (opportunity)-- whenever there is a crisis, there must be an opportunity somewhere nearby.

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Two very well known banks plus a consulting firm have given company talks and pre-placement interviews and I must say the career placement activities on campus have been gaining steam. The good thing is, there are more companies that will be presenting in the next few weeks. The Career Management Services and our student reps have been busy getting companies to sign-up for company presentations and join the upcoming Recruiter's Night.

This is quite good news because it seems the demand for MBA's from the corporate world is still there, despite the global economic downturn. I've heard that the previous MBA batch has very good career placement numbers and more than 80% have already nice dandy jobs since graduating last May.

While nothing really is handed to you in a silver platter, there are some encouraging indicators that there are nice jobs waiting for our MBA class after graduation. It really depends on how you play your cards, and your success could go down to a flip of the coin.

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