Somehow the summer semester is done and I’m ⅓ of the way through the Tech MBA. I’m about to leave NYC to travel for a week or two, and I still can’t believe it! A lot has changed in the past 3 months – I finished 10 classes, many career development and other sessions, and I got married in the middle of it (to a Stern alum, no less)! While it’s a lot to keep track of, I want to use this post to reflect on three things that stood out to me from this summer:
1. The experiential learning was exactly as claimed…an experience.
I feel incredibly grateful that we got to visit a wide variety of companies every Friday – from consulting and established banks to startups and VC funds. While I loved many of the visits, I also saw a few companies for whom I’d never want to work. However, even in the case of the ones I didn’t fall in love with, I really appreciated the opportunity to see their inner workings and start to understand *why* I didn’t want to work there. I can’t say I’ve quite yet honed in on what I want to do after the program, but I feel like I have a much, much better understanding of what to look for. Additionally, each visit provided perspective that made our classes and the business world in general make more sense, which brings me to #2…
2. I feel like I’ve gained significant knowledge and perspective in the last 3 months that helps make the world make sense.
I feel like I have an entirely refreshed perspective on how business works and what drives the economy. In the process of getting through the entire MBA core in 3 months, we compressed econ, finance, strategy, marketing, and many other classes into a small amount of time. This meant that I was forced to synthesize a lot in a short timeframe, but that also forced me to draw connections between the classes, our experiential learning, and what I see and read about in the world around me. All of a sudden, news articles involving financial markets and business strategy make a whole lot more sense.
I knew coming in that finance has long been a specialty at Stern (and I was a little intimidated by that), but I was blown away by the quality of my intro to finance course. All in all, I shouldn’t have worried at all about this summer, but there’s a lot coming this fall.
3. The unknown of this fall is exciting and a little bit scary, but the community we’ve built so is reassuring
The dynamics of school are going to change a lot in two weeks when the fall semester starts. There will be more than 10 times the number of students at Stern, and clubs and recruiting will get into full swing. While I can’t wait to meet more students who will be my classmates for the next two semesters, it’s definitely a change from our small tight-knit groups we’ve had this summer. That said, the community we built in our program shows me that we will continue to support each other, and if the broader Stern community is anything like what we built within the Tech MBA, we have a lot to look forward to.
There’s a lot more to say about the summer, but those are some top-of-mind thoughts. I’m looking forward to a couple weeks off, some travel, and getting into the swing of fall semester!