Winners of Nortel scholarships, MBA students Montassar Zarrouk, Heather Tay and Ambrish Chitnis PHOTO: OWEN EGAN

Nortel winners

BRONWYN CHESTER | McGill MBA students dominated a recent nation-wide competition for lucrative scholarships/internships, earning three of the six awarded. Ambrish Chitnis, Heather Tay and Montassar Zarrouk took home the honours, offered by Northern Telecom under its globalization challenge program. To qualify, students had to be in their first year of a Canadian MBA program, be Canadian citizens or residents and have done their undergraduate degree in an information technology field, such as computer science or electrical engineering. Winners were chosen according to their academic and work performance, suitability to working overseas and ability to "fit in with Nortel's culture." The scholarship provides approximately $30,000 per student to cover the expenses of studying for one semester and doing a work placement in any of Nortel's 280 locations around the world. After returning to Montreal and completing their MBAs, the students will be offered jobs with the telecommunications giant. Ambrish Chitnis, who holds a bachelor's in electronics engineering from the University of Bombay, will spend one semester at the University of Manchester in the Eurostudy program which includes 12 days in Prague and 12 in Madrid. "I'll be studying how the European Community is affecting the economies of those countries [Czech Republic and Spain] and how it will affect international business," says the trilingual (English, Hindi, Marathi) student. Chitnis's work assignment will be in London, at the marketing division of Nortel's new Nor.web digital power lines, a new technology which will give Internet services over the power lines. Montassar "Monty" Zarrouk, who graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado, will begin his work assignment this summer at the RCP Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, where he will be involved with providing services to local phone companies served by Nortel. Next January, Zarrouk, a native of Tunisia who speaks Arabic, French and English, will study at the Solvay Business School in Brussels. Heather Tay, the only woman among the scholarship winners, will fly next September to Copenhagen to study international business and will work in the United Kingdom next summer. She has an electrical engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. Nearly fluent in French and speaking basic Danish, Tay, who already worked for Nortel near her hometown of Toronto, is interested in joint ventures and strategic alliances in the telecommunications field.