Meet the inaugural class of 2019 Andre Koo Tech MBA!

While you might be able to find the official class profile on the Stern website, or this article about a couple members from the inaugural one-year specialized MBA classes, you are probably still wondering, who are they?

Well, it’s hard to describe ‘us’ in a universal way. We are a pretty global group: out of the 32 of us, we have 8 different nationalities and speak at least 11 different languages (I mean, natural languages like English or Spanish, although I am sure if you count the computer languages we know, it’s going to be at least that many plus 10 more as well). Although most of us had work experience before joining Stern, our professional experience can’t be more diverse: we have consultants, bankers, data scientists, software engineers, accountants, product managers, entrepreneurs, career coaches, game designers, relationship managers, talent agents…. The list goes on and I hope you get the gist 😉

You might have noticed from the list above that some of us come from technical backgrounds and some of us come from business backgrounds. One thing we have in common, though, is that we all have a passion for the tech industry. Worried about your rusty math skills? Stern offers math prep course for this program. Don’t know what “pandas” mean besides the cute animals in China? Dealing with Data, a tech core class built into the summer curriculum, will walk you through that (Stern does assume you have some basic programming knowledge coming to the class and will send many coding prep resources prior to the orientation). Plus there are class projects which promotes even more learning from your classmates with more technical backgrounds.

Don’t think the techies will be able to just fly through this program either (which I think is a good thing, otherwise why pay the tuition to learn something you already know?) The summer is loaded with business core classes such as Leadership, Marketing, Strategy and Economics (click here for a more comprehensive description of the curriculum). For introverts coming from STEM backgrounds like me, walking into the first class was a bit intimidating not knowing what to expect. The minute Professor Pettit, our leadership professor, opened the class with a question, our business-versed classmates started to chime in on the case study. It took me a while to warm up to the atmosphere but eventually I started to feed off from the energy in the classroom: everyone has something to contribute and we are very supportive of each other, even when we disagree. Three weeks into the program, I may still be a bit reluctant to raise my hand when Professor Foudy asks for volunteers in his Economics class, but I am a lot more comfortable to raise my hand if I have some ideas I would like to contribute than I was when the program first started.

Summer has been pretty quiet at Stern while all the 2 year MBAs are interning and we have pretty hefty course load (18 credits!). Nevertheless, you might still catch us hitting the happy hour scene with our Fashion & Luxury MBA friends (we agreed on ‘flux’ for their short name) around campus. We are hard to miss. If you see 40 people with Stern backpacks walking into a bar near Washington square park, all happily chatting with each other, occasionally taking a selfie or group pictures, that’s us! Networking is an important aspect of the MBA experience, right? 😊

Hopefully that gives you a bit of idea about who we are and what we have been up to so far. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our wonderful AdComs or us student bloggers!

Why do an MBA ?

Why do an MBA? That is the question everyone I met in the last year has asked me: I am 32 years old (so older than most of the MBA candidates), I have two Masters Degrees from good French universities, and I had a job that I was passionate about.

My only answer: because I want more! Not more money like most people seem to think, but more experiences, more options, more adventures. Because YES ! Having an MBA open doors, especially in the US market. I started to realize it when I was applying for jobs in the US market and in every single description of the jobs I was interested in, was the mention: “ MBA a plus.”

But I also knew that I did not want to do a regular MBA. I did not want to be away from the professional world for two years. I was at the age and had the professional experience where I could apply for part-time EMBAs, but I wanted the experience of the full-time program. Moreover, I knew that I wanted to work in the Tech industry, and the Tech world is moving so fast that it forces you to be flexible and to adapt. So I started to look online at MBA options, and I found that a one year MBA program was just created by Stern. That was just a perfect fit.

And what is more exciting than being part of the inaugural class of the NYU Tech MBA? Being the first class gives you the opportunity to shape the model for future generations. It is also fascinating to be an agent of change because one-year-MBAs are a new offer created by business schools to answer the demands of companies and students alike.  I can say that I feel as though I am a part of a startup experience and that’ s exciting!

I just fell in love with the NYU Tech MBA program. It gave me the option to get a degree from one of the best business schools worldwide, live in my favorite city in the world and be part of one of the leading innovative programs the MBA world has seen in the last decade.

So I decided to do it! But what I did not realize was how hard it would be to get in. I was used to being an excellent student in France. I was the class president every year with great grades … but facing the GMAT and this entirely new way to think (especially the multiple choice questions) was more than challenging! But I did it, and I won’t share with you how many times I took the GMAT but let’s just say that at the end the employee center knew my name.

So when I received the acceptation Letter from NYU, I was ecstatic!

Little to say that it was just the beginning of an intense journey: getting my student visa, moving across the country (I lived in San Francisco), and leaving my job were challenging tasks, but the help I received from the NYU Offices made it almost effortless.

And so on May 10th, 2018, the day before the International Student Orientation day, I was excited to begin my MBA journey and to meet my classmates. At the same time, I was nervous about getting back to school, meeting my classmates and this whole new world in front of me.  However, after 5 minutes in the classroom, I already made five jokes with the others students in my class, we all laughed, and I felt at home.

 

Citi Ventures Project Kickoff

The moment we’ve all been waiting for is finally here… we kicked off our NYC Immersion summer project with Citi Ventures. Over the next few weeks, our cohort will be split out into small groups to brainstorm solutions to some of the city’s biggest problems. While we won’t be able to implement our solutions as part of our coursework in the next few weeks, the goal is to use design thinking methods to identify relevant problems and start quantifying them. Once we have identified a problem we would like to pursue, we will explore tackling it from a holistic, tech perspective and distill the business risks and opportunities into a presentation.

We met with thought leaders in the “smart city” space to help us identify unforeseen challenges in our ideas and to talk through current efforts underway that may help or hinder our work. New York, like any major metropolitan area, is full of opportunities for improvement. Cities are controlled by local governments and are often slower to implement major technology improvements primarily due to their heavy focus on tight budgets. My group was directed to focus on the government as our primary “customer.” That being the case, we’re exploring the ways in which we can create sustainable solutions that last for many years and are easy to sell to stakeholders with clear, quantifiable results.

The idea of a “smart city” sounds new and trendy, especially with projects in the works like Google’s Sidewalk Labs, however, cities have been undergoing massive technological improvements for generations. Nevertheless, this is the first time in modern history we’ve been able to combine the efforts of urban innovation with the internet. We are at a turning point in time when we can collect vast amounts of data, even if we don’t know what we’re going to do with it quite yet. This data includes metrics on the basics such as temperature, humidity, and air pollution, but also expands to micro levels including street-level noise and light pollution, traffic flows, and consumer behavior. Collecting this type of data today will allow data scientists in the short-term future to analyze this data to predict future trends, along with what kind of impact we can have on it. Successfully predicting the human impact on city-wide efforts allows us to focus our efforts on the most pressing tasks at hand.

As part of our NYC Immersion summer project, we are exploring some of the ways in which major cities are starting this process and how it will shape the future of business. While the primary consumers and collectors of this data are inherently municipal and public governments, the private sector is beginning to fund projects in the effort to solve societal problems with innovative, tech solutions while building positive brand associations. We are trusting companies to use this data to help solve everyday problems that ultimately benefit society and it will be fascinating to see how this plays out as new solutions are built.

My group is excited to kick off this phase of the summer project and we will be finalizing a version-controlled project charter this week. We have approximately 5 weeks left in the summer semester to complete this project and are looking forward to presenting our proposal to professors, business leaders, and team members at Citi Ventures.

What is Ethnographic Research?

Back in early June when Professor Anne-Laure Fayard introduced the concept of ethnographic research in her design thinking workshop for our NYC immersion class, was the first time I had even ever heard of the word. With English not being my first language, I had to look up what that word meant. I wasn’t the only one in my class new to the term either. So we had a great conversation with Professor Fayard on what it means, how it is typically done, and most importantly, why we should do it. First of all, here is my interpretation of ethnographic research:

“Popularized by anthropologists, ethnographic research is a qualitative method to study people’s behavior in their own real-life environment.”

In the business setting, ethnographic research is typically used to study customer needs and customer behavior. Over the last two and half months, we have heard so many times the importance of product-market fit. Whether in marketing class, strategy class, in speaking with entrepreneurs we met during our visits to various start-up incubators, or during the kick-off of our summer stern solution project, time and time again, we heard the number one reason a start-up or new product fails is that no customer wants to buy it. We have heard stories of hugely successful products coming from customer research, far from what the business originally intended, such as Swiffer sweeper (can you imagine the original product in-mind was a new floor cleaning detergent?). We have also heard stories of failed products due to the disconnect between customer needs and product such as PlayPump (a pump to be deployed in Africa that harnesses the energy of children playing on a carousel and uses it to pump water out of the ground).

How do we conduct ethnographic research then? There are two typical ways: ethnographic observation and ethnographic interviews. For the observation, one would go in the ‘field’ or an organization and watch people’s natural behavior in the environment. During our design thinking workshop, our group decided to address the walk-ability aspect of mobility in NYC as a smart city. The observation entailed us going to Astor place near Stern, watching how pedestrians navigated the subway exits, sidewalks or intersections, and summarizing common pattern of people’s behavior in their ‘natural’ state. We generated two insights from the observation. First, when people are lost at the subway station exit, they just follow the crowd without checking signs or maps for the proper route. Second, when pedestrians run into unexpected constructions they tend to cross the street in the middle of a block to avoid the construction. As it turned out in our ethnographic research, the top pain point for pedestrians in NYC is not uneven pavement, not accessibility for strollers or wheelchairs at the intersection, but construction ! None of our team members anticipated that in our brainstorming session!

The other type of ethnographic research is through interviews. This is definitely more challenging from our experience as we needed to find random users who are willing to talk to us. For our entrepreneurship class assignment, we had to interview twitter users, persuade them to download the twitter app if they didn’t have it installed on their phone already, and ask for permission to take a video of the phone or computer screen as they interacted with the app or the website. Since classmates are not allowed to be a study subject (that would be too easy!), my teammate Jim and I took a field trip to the World Trade Center and tried to find random strangers to participate in our interview. About 50% of the people said straight out loud they don’t want to talk to us. I was surprised this wasn’t higher, but I guess the student card helped (more on that later). About 30% of the people were willing to talk to us about their social media usage but not willing to download the app or let us video them using it, and the rest, about 20% became our amazing interviewees for the class project. Through listening to their description of how they use twitter and observing their body languages, we were able to see some patterns of how twitter is or is not meeting the needs of users. Stay tuned for our finished class presentation on this topic!

Networking at Stern

It’s been a remarkably busy summer and it’s continuing to fly by. Summer in New York is certainly toasty, but we were lucky enough to get a 4-day weekend to cool off. A colleague in the Tech MBA program recently posted the following update on LinkedIn that really put things in perspective:

As of today, we have completed 6 weeks of Stern’s 1-year Tech MBA. During this time, we completed 5 courses, 30 assignments, 5 group projects, 5 immersions, 5 presentations and countless readings.

The volume of work that we’re completing over the summer semester is not trivial. We’re cruising through 18 credits and learning about several subjects including finance, leadership, strategy, big data, and economics. While we’re only scratching the surface of some of these subjects, the fall and spring semesters offer the opportunity to dive deeper into disciplines and specializations that we’re passionate about. I’m really enjoying this high-speed approach to learning. The classes are long, and the homework stream is constant, but it’s amazing what Stern professors can compress into six or twelve 3-hour classes when they are asked to.

We’ll be switching to a more “normal” grad school schedule once the fall semester begins. This means that classes will be taught through the entire semester and the pace of each class will be less accelerated. That being the case, other on- and off-campus activities will start gaining steam. The 2-year students will be back on campus from their internships (or just starting school at Stern) so the social outings are set to increase tenfold. Clubs will be packed with new members and the student government will be back together coordinating events. In addition to this, recruiting for specific industries begins in the fall and I’ll be seeing more of my classmates in their best interview attire between classes.

A large part of business school at Stern is spent meeting and networking with the NYU community including other students, alumni, and professors. While I was searching for the perfect MBA program, a constant theme was the quality of the network that I would have access to. I knew Stern had a large network, but I didn’t understand just how welcoming it would be. Connecting with the NYU community is encouraged regardless of who you’re reaching out to. From the first day of orientation it’s embedded into the culture that we are a strong community that supports each other during our time at Stern and long after we graduate. Apart from forming friendly connections within our cohort, we’re encouraged to reach out to Sternies who may be able to help us learn more about where we want to be or what we want to do, whether they are students in the other programs or recent alumni at our target companies.

Before I started at Stern, I was reluctant to actively network. I did what was required to thrive in my career, but rarely stepped out of my comfort zone. I felt somewhat awkward reaching out to people in a strictly professional manner, sometimes secretly hoping they could help me further my career. I assumed that if done incorrectly that it would come off as desperate, inauthentic, or self-promoting. My assumptions were quickly challenged – everyone I’ve reached out to has been thrilled to help me navigate the next year and upcoming recruiting season.

What I have learned is that networking is ultimately a two-way street. When I put myself in the shoes of a prospective mentor or if I were called upon to help a student, I would happily do so. Many working professionals enjoy sharing their experiences and relish helping students avoid making mistakes that they may have made. Often times, the advice they have to offer can only be given by someone who has lived through a specific unique experience. They will likely also be curious about what we are learning at Stern and how the landscape of MBAs is changing in real time.

Networking is a major piece of the business school experience and a large network offers opportunity. However, filtering through a large list of contacts to find the right mentors is up to you. Once you have identified who you would like to meet, whether it be through a school’s database or LinkedIn, reaching out to them in a clear and professional manner to ensure that you can create a mutually beneficial relationship is the next step. I’ve already made several connections through NYU and plan to continue to do so until graduation and beyond.

Entrepreneurship at NYU

NYU Stern might not strike you as a business school with a strong component in Entrepreneurship. A month into our Tech MBA program, we were astonished by the amount of resources available on campus for entrepreneurship – it felt a bit overwhelming at some time, in a good way though. Last month we visited the Digital Future Lab in Brooklyn and the Leslie E-lab right next door to Stern. The creativity, collaboration and synergy flowing at these places are amazing.

First, let me tell you a little bit more about these two labs. Digital Future Lab is one of the four future labs started by NYU Tandon school of engineering, the City of New York, NYSERDA, and the New York Economic Development Corporation. With the funding from the city and state government, digital future lab is external facing – helping companies in the NY community by leveraging the resources at NYU. This incubator has various programs that help start-up companies to secure funding and grow to about the size of 50 employees. On the other hand, Leslie E-lab is the internal facing NYU entrepreneur hub – helping current NYU students and faculties across all NYU schools to bring their ideas to real life. The E-lab offers a wide variety of opportunities to foster entrepreneurship and cross-disciplinary collaboration, including startup schools, NYU entrepreneur festival, Healthcare Makerthon, 1-on-1 coaching and mentoring, Startup Sprints and Summer Launchpad, just to name a few.

During our visits to the two labs we met with Craig Wilson, the General Manager of the Digital Future Lab, and Frank Rimalovski, the Executive Director of the Leslie E-lab, together with several founders at these two labs. Through our discussion with these panelists, one important lesson for every start-up or even product development in an established company is the importance of initial customer research. Apparently 75% of the venture capital backed start-up companies ended up failing, mostly because they built something which customers can not benefit from. This tied closely to the design thinking workshop we did with Professor Anne-Laure Fayard a week ago. We got to do some exercise with customer research ourselves during the workshop. There were many assumptions we made during our brain storming session that turned out to be wrong after interviewing potential customers. Extensive customer research at the beginning of a project is something I will definitely apply to our summer project and my future career!

Another thing mentioned repeatedly during the visits was how difficult it is for start-ups to hire the right employee. It is very time consuming and costly to find the right talent. On the flip side, to be able to work at a start-up, you must be very passionate about the mission of the company and be clear about what you can offer the founder: building the product, bringing in funding, or saving time for the founder. If founding a company is not the kind of entrepreneurship experience you desired, maybe joining a start-up as an early member is another way to explore the start-up scene. To foster this match making between early companies and passionate entrepreneurs, there is a bulletin board at Leslie E-lab with postings from companies needing talent or individuals looking to join a start-up. Make sure you check it out next time you pass through the E-lab, just like some of my Tech MBA classmates did!

On top of these two labs we visited, there are many other entrepreneurship resources at NYU to check out: the newly founded Creative Destruction Lab, Berkeley Innovation Lab, and Fubon Center for Technology, Business and Innovation.