Miguel Sousa Lobo
Director, INSEAD Abu Dhabi
We always engage with the local economic system. When we run our career forum in the Middle East, we have about 50 different companies attending. Every year we conduct our management consulting practicum, where MBA participants deliver projects for local companies and organizations, both public and private. These have included global corporations, local banks, emirate-level and federal agencies, etc. We have a Career Development Center that seeks partnerships and potential placements for our students across the Middle East. Another way to source these opportunities is through research projects. We have done a number of such projects where we have engaged local partners, for example our project on the UAE’s aircraft manufacturing cluster involved a large number of interviews with industry here, as well as projects from our Center for Economic Growth. We have also done quite a lot of work on governance, a field in which we lead, in the Middle East and continue to develop our capabilities in this area. In 2016, we started bringing our full-time MBA students to Abu Dhabi for residential periods; we opened 45 places and received over 100 applications, proving the strong interest from MBA students in spending time in the region. The curriculum for this program included extensive engagement with local organizations and businesses, with rewarding results for both the students and the organizations that participated.
Dr. Alfred Bloom
Vice Chancellor, New York University Abu Dhabi
Our defined strategy begins with making contact with the best secondary schools in the UAE, the US, and around the world. We present the vision of Abu Dhabi to them, what makes NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) unique, and the core assets that make us intellectually exceptional in the educational landscape. NYUAD combines the best of a liberal arts education with a multidisciplinary approach to teaching that includes a commitment to the breadth and depth of each subject matter while instilling in students a global perspective. Our students also consider what is important in the world and what decisions are most reflective of the best ethical thought; they take on the most significant actions to them, their societies, and the institutions they represent. This means they are always thinking about what it means to do good in the world, which is what a liberal arts education is all about. We started with a class of 140 students in our first year and now have around 1,100 students. Another intrinsic aspect of our student population is its extraordinary international diversity; 14% of them are Emiratis, 13% are American, and 73% come from elsewhere around the world. Part of our education model entails not just understanding the differences between people but also finding out what they have in common in order to bridge differences and find common understanding.
Dr. Eric Fouache
Vice Chancellor, Dr. Eric Fouache
During the past 10 years of Paris-Sorbonne University in Abu Dhabi, we have attracted more than 900 students from 77 different nationalities around the world. We also established an alumni association to reconnect with the 250 students that graduate annually from our university. Our anniversary was a year of consolidation for our presence as the first francophone higher institution in the UAE, the quality of our programs, and the solidification of the role of our partnering institutions, Paris Descartes and Pierre et Marie Curie University. One of the features that make us an outstanding educational institution in the region is the variety of programs we offer and the great opportunities our educational background offers our graduates once they start looking for career prospects. We recently held a statistical survey to analyze where our students were residing and the labor market they belonged to. We were astonished by how diverse the results were, with our students looking for career opportunities in different sectors. Moreover, we were happily surprised by the amount of entrepreneurs that Sorbonne Abu Dhabi has graduated. We also promote different initiatives between France and the UAE to take the entrepreneurial capacities of our students to the highest level.
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