Strategy, operations, consulting and BD work — hand-placed across four capitals. We match commercially-minded students with the founders, country managers and chiefs of staff who run real companies in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Bangkok, then handle the visa, the housing and the introductions.
Asia is where the commercial decisions that shape the next decade are being drafted. A placement here puts a business student in the room while those decisions get made — not on a graduate scheme, but next to a chief of staff, a country lead or a founder whose calendar sets the week.
We place fellows across the working span of the field: strategy and corporate development, operations and supply chain, management consulting, and business development. Every seat is sourced privately, after a conversation about what a fellow can already carry and what they want to learn next.
The companies we work with are sized so an intern is visible. Fellows draft board memos, sit in on pricing reviews, walk a factory floor in Shenzhen or sit across from a partner in Singapore — and leave with a deck that went to a real decision-maker.
What a fellow does not do is shadow a manager for ten weeks. The placement is built around a question that needs answering — a market entry, an operations problem, a competitive read — scoped to be delivered and defended inside a single summer.
A business degree is welcome but not required. We have placed economists, historians, engineers and students of philosophy — anyone whose thinking holds up under pressure on the page.
What the office looks for is judgement and the willingness to defend a position. The fifteen-minute call is where we find that — not a transcript.
Five archetypes we source against. Every actual seat is hand-matched to a fellow after the introductory call — these describe the shape of the work, not a fixed opening.
Work alongside the chief of staff or a strategy lead on the questions that go to the CEO — market sizing, M&A reads, the case for a new product line.
Inside the working machinery of a company — pricing, logistics, supplier negotiations and the bottleneck nobody has had time to look at properly.
Project-based work for a regional consultancy or in-house team — diagnose a problem, run the interviews, write the memo, present the answer.
Source the deal, draft the term sheet, sit in on the call. Outward-facing work for fellows who can hold their own with a counterparty twice their age.
A seat alongside the principal of a family-owned group — succession, portfolio review, the unwritten reasoning behind a long-running business.
Something else in mind?
Tell the office on the call. Commercial placements are scoped to the fellow, not the other way round.
The same field reads differently in each city. Where a fellow is placed depends on the work they want and the team that fits them.
The deal-making capital of the region. Strong for fellows drawn to the corporate machinery of finance, real estate and trading houses — where a single transaction can run for months and the memo culture is unforgiving.
China's commercial cockpit. Country-manager seats inside multinationals and the in-house strategy teams of consumer brands — a crash course in how a billion-customer market actually behaves.
Regional headquarters for most of Asia. The strategy and corporate-development teams that decide what a multinational does from Mumbai to Manila, and the most fluent landing for a fellow new to the region.
A market run by family conglomerates and a thickening layer of professional managers. Best for a fellow who wants to see how decisions get made behind the corporate face, in conversations that happen at lunch.
I came in expecting to take notes. By week three I was presenting the market-entry case to the country head — and the recommendation we wrote became the company's plan for Vietnam. No classroom does that.