hi there,
i am looking into the ibce program at university of south carolina. i have good sat scores and am interested in studying abroad during university. was hoping that someone could provide me with their experiences/ suggestions for applying.
is the program worth the commitment?
thanks a lot!! jaxgirl97
Hi! I’m a current student in the IBCE program, and I think it is definitely worth the commitment so long as you fully understand the scope of what it is you’re committing to. Frankly, IBCE is amazing**. To understand why, I’d split it into two segments: the college experience, and the impact on job-finding.
The college experience is unlike any other, because the experiential learning opportunity is stretched over a long enough time that you can truly come to understand the Asian cultural and professional environment. You’ll get to travel all across Asia, make connections from around the world, and have closer access to professional opportunities than you would have otherwise (HPAIR Tokyo, Citi International Case Competition, etc.) On the fun side, Hong Kong (and Asia in general) is booming with exciting events, concerts, and shows, and you’ll never be bored! At USC, you get direct admittance to the IB program, which is the best in the country. You’ll have equal amounts of the chill, relaxed pace of the Southern US, and the exciting hustle-and-bustle of Asia’s biggest cities. It’s like two college experiences crammed into one.
As great as the college experience is, it’s the impact on job-finding that can really make the program worthwhile. A number of people in my batch got their internships because they talked up the program - myself included, and many of them are international internships. It’s really gratifying for recruiters to look at your resume and say they’re impressed with what you’ve done in IBCE - it really does set you apart from other students. Of course, this is more likely to be true if you actively participate in things, but IBCE provides you with so many opportunities that as long as you take advantage of even a handful of them, it’s easy to have a talking point for anything an interviewer asks you. We’ve had a number of alumni land amazing jobs out of college, and others who go on to top-notch grad schools.
** Caveat time. IBCE is amazing if you do your part to make it so. It will provide you with all the opportunities under the sun for an exceptional college career, but admin will not hold your hand and spoon-feed you along the way. You need to have a good sense of independence, an open mind, an ability to deal with environmental uncertainty (after all, you’ll be living in a whole new country!), and a willingness to proactively pursue opportunities that come your way. Also, don’t underestimate the commitment; this program does span your whole undergraduate career, and you will spend half of it abroad. It’s really an amazing, unmatchable experience - just be clear on what you’re signing up for! I hope this helps, and I really hope you decide to join our IBCE family!! 
–sdtosc
This goes for anyone considering IBCE or the International Business Chinese Enterprise program.
Here is a miniature flow chart.
Do you have a rich family and connections which will help you land a position at a huge investment bank?
If the answer to that question is yes, do this program, otherwise, DON’T DO IT.
The program provides you no additional benefits to further your career or improve your chances at landing a job. If you think this program will help you get a backdoor into the USC IB program, you are right, it does, but you need to value the costs. Think about this:
Your first year, you are allowed to do what you want at USC, get involved in clubs, join a fraternity or sorority, make friends, and maybe meet the love of your young life. None of any of these things will matter or do anything if you stay in IBCE. After the first year, you get one month off to pack and they ship you to Hong Kong to start taking Chinese classes. You do nothing but Chinese for two months. I wish I could say this strongly improved my Chinese skills, but it didn’t. (I will get back to this.) You get one more month off, if you are lucky, and then you begin classes. You have to take 2 Chinese classes per semester, which allows you significantly less time than your peers to take the necessary course work to graduate. Oh, and those Chinese classes you take don’t actually count towards anything, other than satisfaction for your power hungry advisors. Ok, so you get done with the year and you get six weeks off, and then have to take a mandatory program in Taiwan, which is nothing special and is a thousand dollars, and a month of your time. If you weren’t in this program, you could take this time for an internship.
Now you are back at USC for your third year… Remember that stuff you did Freshman year? Good, because you are the only one. No one else cares. Many of your friends are highly unlikely to remember you because you are coming back after not seeing them for a year and now have very little in common. Many of the clubs you were in barely have a spot for you because they expect continuity. You have nothing. During this time, you will apply to internships, only to realize you have no experience to speak of because you spent both the summers you would have gained experience “learning Chinese”. Do you think anyone cares about that? Nope. You are a dime in a dozen, they have so many applicants who have also taken Chinese. You want to speak highly of your time in Hong Kong? Well, all you have really done is go to and come back from class and maybe get a tutoring job so you have alcohol money. You don’t got nothing. Now you will go to a second rate internship (UNLESS YOU USE YOUR FAMILY CONNECTIONS TO GET SOMETHING AT A FANCY PLACE.) which won’t offer you a full time position.
Now it’s time for your senior year. All of the places which recruit will be back at USC, but you are in Hong Kong, where you have to the 12-hour time difference, which along with the distance makes it borderline impossible to land any position at all. You are trying to get a job post college so you don’t need to move back in with your parents or mooch off of them to go to graduate school. But you can’t. No one who has looked at your resume is excited to hire you. Yay.
Oh and you know those Chinese skills which would give you distinction? It sucks, because Hong Kong doesn’t speak Putonghua (mandarin). They speak Cantonese, and if you try Mandarin, they ask for English. So you get zero exposure, and nothing to benefit you there. If you were in mainland China for a longer stretch of your education, I would say that would be good, because you are actually immersed in Chinese Language and the people around you are more likely to pick up more of the language.
Ok, so now let’s talk about the advisors. They make you sign a contract to keep your GPA above a certain number, and that you understand you will attend the first summer of language classes. After this, they will say you are required to pass the HSK IV or the second “optional summer” is now mandatory. So you know that your future prospects are in danger and you ask them to do something. What do they offer? Drop the program or do as they say. That’s it, that is all. If you don’t drop the program, your future is screwed. If you don’t do this program, you won’t get in to IB which could well be the reason that you came to South Carolina, and you just wasted your opportunity to go to a better opportunity. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Carolina, but with my GPA and SAT scores coming out of high school, I could have gone to better schools with better opportunities with less stress, if I had known.) Congrats. You are screwed. So many people end up dropping anyway in hope they can salvage something out of nothing. That is why the retention rate is close to 20%.
Now you have no job, no great opportunity to land a job, and you are forced to go back and pay more money to USC because they are the only place that will accept you to graduate school. You look back and realize that your huge mistake was doing IBCE. Don’t be that guy, don’t do IBCE.
I wish I could speak to someone who has gotten through this program and didn’t fit criteria one (Family money/connections) and ended up being as successful as the advisors make it sound. Then again, those people would be successful regardless of whether or not they did this program.
My daughter is in the IBCE program and I 1000% agree with everything ibceparent posted above. I would not deter a student that is interested in IBCE but had little experience in the Chinese language as my daughter took only one year of Chinese in high school before joining this program. That being said, you must be a motivated person to learn at the pace which will be required but it is possible to be successful in IBCE without an extensive background in the Chinese language if you are willing to put in the work. 6-7 hours a day, 5 days a week of intensive Mandarin training is enough to drain even the smartest kid. And even after 2 summers of this intensive language study as well as continued Mandarin courses each semester my daughter still wonders if she will ever be fluent. But she can hold conversations in Mandarin and navigate herself in foreign countries entirely on her own which is nothing to be taken lightly for an 18-20 year old “kid” forced to learn about the world. She wouldn’t trade it for anything and what an experience she has had. She has already traveled to 7 or more countries, taking side trips that she has funded on her own by working as an English tutor all while continuing to make the grades required to stay in this program. I will reiterate what was said above and that ANYONE considering this program MUST be independent and responsible - it is NOT for someone that is skittish about being out on their own, needs constant reminders to make smart decisions and can’t learn on their own. Western education is different than what will be experienced at CUHK. There is no hand holding and despite the advisors trying to prepare you - often you have to figure things out on your own. Remember though, there are 20+ other students going through it with you so you are not completely alone.
True, there have been growing pains but this program is paving the way for other universities that are trying to model this experience and they are consistently making improvements and as of now there is nothing of its kind offered elsewhere not to mention that the Darla School of Business has ranked as the #1 International Business School for several years running. It is a very competitive program but once accepted these students become close friends and learn how to work together, all coming from varying backgrounds, ethnicities and social classes. The one thing they all have in common though is the motivation and drive they all inherently have and I am thrilled my child is surrounded by people of this caliper. A recent visit for parents weekend revealed the Wall Street Journal as well as other various business journals laying around her apartment and listening to them all speak together about what was on their agenda for the coming week blew me away. I thought geez - when I was their age, I was definately thinking about things of a more trivial nature. They have had such broad experiences already that their eyes and mind have been enlightened and I can tell you we have been nothing but satisfied with the growth we have seen in our daughter (despite sleepless nights and worry from a mothers heart) because she has learned to survive in the world on her own. She knew when looking for colleges that she wanted more than just a semester abroad and that is the main reason this program appealed to her. She wanted to major in International Business and see the world and she has already experienced more than I could have imagined. It hasn’t been easy - she has had to be strong, we have had to be strong, she has missed her friends from home and her siblings but she knows that she is learning outside of the classroom at a pace that others can only dream of. Of course as her parent, I hope this makes her marketable so I have a nice return on my investment - so to speak. I am fairly confident she will be seen as a valuable, competitive addition to any company lucky enough to have her talents. However, I can tell you even if she doesn’t land her dream job at graduation she is farther ahead in life simply by experiencing the world and she is a better person for it.