Nicole Yoo

My mentor from the HKU MBA Mentorship programme introduced me to this company and is also my boss now. During the mentorship sessions I told him I wanted to learn more about marketing. When my mentor started his own business and posted pictures on his Instagram about one of the ongoing projects. I showed my interest in doing research on the brand and competitors. My mentor then suggested that I join his company as a marketer so that I can further develop and utilise my skill sets as a salesperson.

I had luxury brands’ working experiences, so I joined and utilized my knowledge and expertise for my current projects.

4 months, from February 2021 to May 2021.

My background was mainly in retail but now I have learned a lot of new key trends, marketing techniques and tactics.

I consider myself a numbers person. I enjoy looking at data and predicting the outcome for a business. With the internship experience I am able to understand the initial process of marketing before a sales deal is made. I appreciate that I have had this opportunity to learn about the whole process.

The internship experience has taught me how to leverage the expectations of Chinese customers by knowing what their purchasing patterns, shopping trends and lifestyle choices are.

I always wanted to be a Managing Director in the luxury retail industry. However, I only had sales experience in retail. With the internship experience I have now I am able to learn skills from different functions and this opportunity is invaluable to my portfolio.

Besides, I am grateful to work with my colleagues because they have shared local cultures and working experiences. It allows me to blend into any workplace in Hong Kong in the near future.

While you have worked in my current company, I understood the importance of exposure to the APAC experience for my final goal, being a Managing Director. Furthermore, I recognize the Chinese market’s profound influence on the luxury industry. Although I was hesitating whether to go back to Korea or stay in Hong Kong, I have now decided to stay in Hong Kong to have a chance to work as an APAC regional job.

My MBA journey has been very rewarding. Through a number of different training sessions I was able to build my own networking strategy and learnt how to find things in common that I could discuss with acquaintances.  Besides, I managed to build good relationships with the part-time students and alumni through different elective courses we studied together.

Most of our class subjects involved different kinds of case studies and giving our own recommendations for solutions. These experiences broadened my knowledge in different areas, and I have some new experience in industries I never worked in before, such as technology, IT and manufacturing.

There is one elective course I would like to highlight which is the ‘Insights and Lessons – Reflections of a CEO’. This was an eye-opening course where the professor invited some senior managers to become our guest speakers and judges for the final projects. They were very inspiring and taught us knowledge beyond my own conception of what the business world is. Other courses such as Strategy Marketing, Capstone project, Big Data, and Global Marketing also gave me new insights and made me think from other perspectives when it comes to business context.