Yale SOM’s Resources, My Unique Academic Experience

After completing my MBA at Fudan University in Shanghai, I wanted to augment my education with something broader and more interdisciplinary than a traditional business degree. Yale SOM’s mission of educating leaders for business and society really resonated with me, especially as I decided to pivot into fintech and explore how business intersects with larger questions of societal impact. The Master of Advanced Management program stood out for its flexibility, allowing me to access a wealth of resources through Yale and the Global Network for Advanced Management (GNAM), a consortium of top business schools around the world. Rather than confining me to a single perspective, the program enabled me to engage with ideas and experiences across disciplines and institutions.

The MAM year has been full of experiences I could write about at length—courses, conversations, clubs, and connections that have each added something to how I think. In this piece, I want to share three of those stories in particular: a Global Network Week at Oxford, a course at Yale Law School, and a data science course at Yale College. Each one reflects something distinct about what the MAM makes possible when you are willing to design your own path.

Immersing at Oxford through Global Network Week

One of the most memorable experiences of my MAM journey was participating in a Global Network Week at Oxford. The course—Psychology, Economic Decisions, and Financial Markets, led by Professor Pedro Bordalo—pushed us to think critically about how internalized biases shape financial decisions and real-world markets. Behind every transaction, investment, and business strategy, there are assumptions, incentives, and psychological patterns that influence how people act.

Being at Oxford also gave the learning a different texture. Our campus tour was led by Oxford students, who walked us through the college grounds and shared what studying law in that environment actually feels like from the inside. Walking through university buildings that have stood for nearly a thousand years, studying in rooms where generations of scholars have worked, and sharing evenings with classmates from business schools around the world—these experiences do not appear on any course syllabus, but they are part of what makes the Global Network so special.

In just a few days, our cohort built real connections. I was struck by how quickly a group of people from different countries, industries, and professional backgrounds could find common ground and transform from strangers into genuine friends. The Oxford community itself was generous in opening its doors to us: faculty, students, and GNAM organizers all contributed to making that week feel like a real immersion rather than a brief visit. That week reminded me that education is not only about what we learn, but also about who we learn alongside, and how those relationships change the way we see problems.

International business transactions at Yale Law School

SOM students have access to courses across the university. In my last semester, I enrolled in Professor Amy Chua’s International Business Transactions course at Yale Law School, which quickly emerged as one of the most rigorous and formative academic experiences I have had here.

The course does not ask you to memorize rules. It puts you inside real cross-border transactions and trains you how they actually function. Professor Chua treated sovereign debt, project finance, cross-border M&A, letters of credit, and national security reviews not as abstract categories but as live problems with real consequences. The course helped me understand that an international transaction is not simply about making a deal. It is about understanding risk, incentives, institutions, and the legal and political systems that sit behind every negotiation.

What made the course exceptional was Professor Chua’s curation of a fantastic guest speaker roster. Each week, she invited people directly connected to the cases being studied to sit in front of a hundred students and engage with hard questions. When we studied major legal disputes, she invited representatives from opposing sides in separate sessions. Hearing the same set of facts framed through completely different but internally coherent arguments showed me that many real-world problems are not black and white, and the most important skill is learning to hold that complexity without rushing to a simple conclusion.

The course also engaged directly with U.S.-China relations and national security through cases involving companies like TikTok. As someone from China, I found it significant how often my home country appeared across Yale’s courses—not only in the Law School, but in finance, computer science, and international relations classrooms as well. The level of serious intellectual attention directed at China’s development, technology, and global role is something I had not fully anticipated.

An introduction to data science at Yale College

As someone with a professional background in fintech and cross-border markets, I wanted to close the gap between intuition about data and the ability to actually work with it. Alongside the law course, I enrolled in YData: An Introduction to Data Science at Yale College.

This course used Python to teach programming alongside data analysis and inferential thinking. It was accessible to students without a computing background, but still extremely rigorous. Weekly assignments, individual problem sets, and group projects kept the pace consistent throughout the semester. Through the course, I built strong mental habits, learning to ask myself what data is actually telling me, where it comes from, what assumptions are embedded in it, and ultimately what insights it can yield. For my future career in fintech and global business, this kind of technical literacy matters in a concrete way. It allows me to ask sharper questions, communicate more effectively with technical teams, and understand how data can support better decisions.

Adding it all up

The MAM curriculum I built reflects both where I have come from and where I am trying to go. My background spans financial services, fintech growth, and consulting. The law course gave me a structural and legal lens on international transactions that I did not have before. The data course sharpened tools I use every day. Oxford expanded my network and reminded me that rigorous thinking comes from many different places and traditions.

None of this would have been possible in a program that kept me inside a single school’s course offerings. The MAM’s flexibility, and GNAM’s global reach, made it work. The program is only one year, but it gives students access to an extraordinary range of perspectives: law professors, undergraduate instructors, guest practitioners, and a global cohort of classmates with genuinely different professional histories. For students who arrive with real professional experience and a clear sense of direction, the program provides the tools to build something genuinely unique.