Gregory Green
In the past three months Melbourne Business School has launched a new MBA program, hosted a dinner for 700, entertained a Prime Minister, and welcomed 113 new MBA students through its doors.
You could say that winter here at the school, has been hot.
The new MBA program is a 16-subject Professional MBA offering a new, intensive weekend study mode. The 700-strong dinner was the annual MBS Women and Management event and the Prime Minister was Timor-Leste's Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão, who launched the MBS Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership for Social Impact.
Of the students who started here on 18 August many were international.
US-student, Gregory Green, is already well into the thick of things. He's nominated for the Student Representative Council, joined the Melbourne University Entrepreneur Club and has plans to join the Wine and Philosophy Club, and the Squash Club.
He says he is particularly keen to participate in the Melbourne University Entrepreneur's Challenge, a competition that judges the commercial viability of novel business ideas.
Gregory graduated with a computer engineering degree from the University of Evansville, IN. US, in 1998.
He spent three years working for an ISP that provided telecommunications services for distance learning schools, four years for the State of Tennessee doing network design and special projects for state agencies, then another three years in the healthcare industry as a network designer/team leader.
Deciding in 2007 that it was time to explore new horizons, Gregory packed up his life, sold his townhouse, two motorcycles, Ford Explorer and home entertainment system, and travelled around the world, visiting 22 countries in 10 months. Commencing the MBA marks the beginning of his next great adventure.
Gregory chose to do his MBA at Melbourne Business School because of the automatic entry it gave him to the international market.
"The British Government recognises Melbourne Business School graduates in its Highly Skilled Migration Program, which means I can get a business visa to work in the UK," he says. "As a US citizen I can already work in the US and Canada. And hopefully, after I get Australian Permanent Residency status, I can work in all of Oceania."
Together with the rest of his MBA cohort, Gregory has just completed the mandatory, week-long, intensive ‘World of Management' subject and is about to start normal classes next week.
"Normal classes means I attend one three-hour class per day. Each class studies one subject."
Gregory admits he doesn't have any firm plans for the future after his MBA. He says that he's considering doing some consulting work, but that he has a number of business opportunities in mind. One of these involves providing a service that establishes prompt telecommunications networks in disaster-struck areas.
"In areas where a disaster like an earthquake or tsunami has hit, I'd like to go there and quickly establish a network that would support communications between emergency services, instead of them relying on their own piecemeal networks."
His first impressions of Australia? "I like the fact that there's a particular pub associated with every school at the University of Melbourne. I don't understand everyone's beef about Vegemite. It tastes fine to me. And I miss Mexican food. Australia doesn't do Mexican food well."
