Author: Chaoyun Bao

At the end of March when I looked at my calendar for April, I said to myself: “Whoa, April is going to fly by so quickly with all these events!” And just like that, here I am sitting at the end of this month realizing the semester is only couple weeks away from ending. I guess having a jam-packed schedule was the manifestation of realizing that I don’t have much time left and wanting to take advantage of being at this wonderful community as much as I still can.

After all the events in April (which I will tell you more about), I really wished I could have two years at Stern so I can do them all again. So if you are a one-year student at Stern like me, please make sure you take the opportunity to participate in the ONLY chance you have! And for the lucky two-year Sternies, you gotta start early so you can have twice the fun 😊

So here are a few of the events happening at Stern in the spring:

Stern Speaks

Well, this is actually a year-long event – every week or two, on Thursday afternoon right before the beer-blast (another year-long event, but I won’t talk too much about it here, you will have to do more research yourself 😉), we have this closed-door event featuring two MBA students telling stories about who they are not what they do. After going to many of them, I finally mustered the courage to be a speaker and share my own story at the beginning of April. It was kinda scary going into it – public speaking in front of a big crowd, sharing a personal story I barely told anyone at Stern and being vulnerable in front of an audience – and the weeks of formulating and practicing the story can be an emotional toll. But after the Speaks I am very glad I did it: I was able to build a deeper much relationship with many of my fellow Sternies. Did I mention I did this together with another amazing person from the Tech MBA program? Eliza-Eve and I were able to support each other through the preparation process. Right before my turn, she squeezed my hand firmly and with just that, I knew I was ready. So make sure you mark this on your calendar, support your fellow Sternies, and be a speaker if you are brave.

SWIB conference

The Stern Speaks I presented in was actually part of the Women’s Week at Stern. Stern Women in Business (SWIB) put many events during this week, from self-care workshops to work out sessions, from ally lunch to salary negotiation workshop, from female founders panel to community volunteer trek. At the end of this week celebrating women at Stern, was the annual SWIB conference. This year the theme of the conference was “through her eyes: navigating the jungle gym”. We had many passionate and brilliant women leaders talking to us about how they managed their career and made a positive impact, including Trish Donnelley from Urban Outfitters Group, Colleen Taylor from Mastercard, and Annie Edwards from Daily Mail General Trust. The event ended with a network cocktail party with all attendees – prospective students, current students and alumni – and we had a blast!

Preview weekend

This was an event different from all of the rest that I am mentioning here – as the name suggests, it was a weekend for admitted students to preview what Stern life is like. As a chair of the torch committee, I was able to participate all of the events and meet many of the future Sternies including 30 focused MBAs! One consistent theme I heard from all the graduating MBAs speaking or volunteering at the weekend was: “we are really jealous of you”. I guess this speaks volume about how much we enjoyed our time at Stern being part of the community. As our time at Stern draws close to finish, we know how great of a time lies ahead of the incoming class of MBAs and we really wish we got to relive it again. I sure hope we showed all the prospective students what it feels like to be a Sternie and got them excited about being part of the family!

Passport day

This is a multi-cultural event that I have been looking forward to since I submitted my Stern application. As an enthusiast for ethnic dances and a foodie, nothing excites me more than a spring event where more than 35 countries showcase their food and/or traditional performing arts. Under the big tent in Gould plaza right in front of Stern, you get to sample bite sized servings for two hours (don’t let that ‘bite size’ thing trick you, after 30 of them you will feel so full you could roll on the ground) while also cheering for fellow Sternies doing some acts you don’t usually get to see. This is probably one of the best attended events at Stern and definitely one of my favorites!

Follies

If you think the amount of Stern talent outside of B-school is amazing with Passport day, wait till you see Follies. Follies is Stern’s annual theatrical production mixing digital shorts and musical theater. The entire show is produced by the members of the Stern Follies club – from scripting the play to coming up with the jokes, from choreographing the dances to filming the shorts, including all cast and crews. This year the show, titled Beauty and the B-school, ran in the Skirball theater on April 26^th in front of 600 people. I made my contribution by being part of the stage crews. It was such a humbling experience to see all the passion and effort from all the cast members. They are all MBA students with a ton of other things going on in their life, but they stayed many late nights to rehearse so that they can put the best show forward for our friends and families. Now looking back, I wish I had realized how much fun it is to work on this production and join the 8-month journey way earlier starting last fall. Focused MBAs only get one chance to experience everything and I am super thankful I get to take part in this in some way!

 

When in business school, people often think of network as the group of people you are connected with socially and professionally. And one might naturally think of interpersonal communication skills as the foundations of network. The Foundations of Network I am about to write about today, however, is something completely different.

This is actually one of our tech core class, taught by Professor Lakshmi Subramanian from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The network in discussion in this class is the network of computers – PCs, mobile phones, routers, servers, cloud and many other devices connected through the internet. The participants of this class include us (the Tech MBAs) and the students from the Courant Computing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MS-CEI) program, whom we already know very well through some of the business core classes we took together in the summer.

Taking such a class within the computer science school might seem too technical and irrelevant for MBA students – after all, we are unlikely to be creating the network architecture or writing lines of software codes for the companies we will be working for in the future. But having a high-level understanding of various pieces of the very network that is so essential to our productivity nowadays can be hugely beneficial to understanding the risk and opportunities behind a product or business. On a practical level, some high-tech companies are known for asking MBA candidates questions like ‘what happens behind the scene when you type the address of the website in your web-browser?’.

Professor Subramanian has done a great job this semester at explaining many engineering concepts to non-technical audiences and covering a wide range of topics that are highly relevant to current landscape in the tech industry. We started with the foundation of the internet – communication protocols between devices of different complexity, location or form, to how data packets are routed through the internet, to how a web page is downloaded through the http protocol onto our browsers, to how signals are sent over the wireless and cellular network, to cloud computing services, to more advanced topics like 5G network and data center architecture.

As the capstone of this class, we are supposed to submit a project at the end of the semester – either build (code) a functioning product or write an in-depth case study about something related to the content covered in class. Our class is roughly split half and half between ‘build’ and ‘case study’ projects. It is very exciting to see what my classmates have come up with for their projects: interactive ads for mobile games, google phi case study, finger print authenticated QR code for login, Amazon data center in Chile case study, multi-user web-based games, case studies on mesh network and many, many more. Don’t be surprised if you see some of our apps pushed to app stores or case studies published in the near future!

This class seemed a bit odd at the beginning but it has quickly become one of my favorite classes. Tech core classes like this class provide us with a unique opportunity to get exposure to the intersection of tech and business from the perspective of the tech side. Last, I want to give a shout-out to our Teaching Assistant Talal Ahmad, who is a PhD student in Professor Subramanian’s lab researching on mobile networking and mobile systems. Besides the fact that he is passionate and empathetic toward his students, he has also done amazing things with his research like deploying software-defined network base stations in Ghana. Talal is graduating soon – can’t wait to hear his new adventures!

By this time of the semester, we all tend to feel like we are drowning in meetings and deliverables. Yes, you heard me right, drowning. Every class we take has a group project component which is a significant portion of the grades, plus assignments, plus potential midterm / final. And that’s only for the academic side. There are also student club activities ranging from networking to skill-based workshops to case competitions to company treks or information sessions. Then on top of that, don’t forget about one of the biggest missions in business school – finding a job. For each company participating in on-campus recruiting, you start with a corporate presentation, followed by a coffee chat and round 1 on-campus interview, then potentially round 2 or many further rounds of virtual or onsite interviews. Each of these steps takes a few hours. And multiply this process by 10 to 20 employers depending on the industry you are recruiting for. Now we can start thinking about job applications to employers not conducting on-campus interview . . .

Naturally, things start to fall behind schedule. Then one day we wake up to 5 deadlines coming up and piles of to-do items on our list. One of the skills you will definitely come out of business school with is time management and prioritization. You are pulled in so many directions that either you have to let go of something or you risk burning yourself out. At the beginning of the summer when we just started the program, Tiffany from the Office of Student Engagement made it an assignment for us to create a vision statement for this upcoming year. We were supposed to write down what a successful year at Stern meant when we graduate in May 2019, with as much detail as possible – not just academically, but also professionally and personally. The statement was for sure hard and time consuming to create at the time. I am sure not all what I wrote will be achieved by the time I graduate. But I am very thankful that I created this document: though the details might be unrealistic at times, it definitely outlined what I wanted to prioritize this year of my life at Stern. At moments when I felt overwhelmed with action items, I always referred back to this statement for how I would spend my time and energy in different aspects of life. (For more on how to strategize what to spend energy and time on in life, I strongly recommend this episode of the Stern Chat podcast with Professor Sonia Marciano, our strategy professor who made a great metaphor with a ‘sock puppet’.)

Apparently, I am not alone in feeling the lack of infinite time to accomplish all things. When I look around at school, it is easy to think I am the only one falling behind on deliverables – I mean, look at my classmates, everyone is doing 10 million things outside classes, from running student clubs to connecting with the next class of Sternies, from participating in innovation challenges to developing their own businesses, from writing and publishing books to helping early stage ventures as Insite fellows. But here is what makes Stern a great community – we are all in this together, we feel safe to share our struggles with each other, and we are supportive of each other’s endeavors. The support from fellow classmates can come in many different forms: group dinner delivered to whichever random classroom we find available so we can catch up and bond; cheering each other during difficult times; teammates carrying the workload in the week when another teammate had an interview; setting up cloud based Jupyter server such that classmates can accomplish assignments more easily; or doing mock interview and providing resume suggestions for each other. On top of all that, faculties, career coaches as OCD (Office of Career Development) and staff members at OSE (Office of Student Engagement) are all eager to jump in and help, usually just an email away.

At this time, we might all be treading hard to stay afloat, but I cannot ask for a better group to be in this together. I can’t wait to see what we all will achieve in just one short year when we cross the finish line together in May.

Fall is the official kickoff of the recruiting season for MBA2s and us focused MBAs in the TechMBA program. You will constantly bump into fellow Sternies in the Kauffman center who are dressed up in formal attire attending various events put up by the Office of Career Development (OCD): corporate presentations, career fair, coffee chats, workshops and campus interviews. At this point in the fall semester, we have been focusing on events that help us get to know the potential employers and build a good relationship with them. These are great opportunities to talk to as many companies as possible and learn what they actually do which might be very different from what you thought they do. Through these events, I confirmed my interest in some companies, crossed some companies off of my target list, and added many companies that I never knew I would be excited about.

As I am getting started with job applications and interviews now, I am greatly thankful for all the preparation work we did over the summer, mainly through OCD’s IGNITE program. IGNITE is a series of workshops and online modules designed to build job searching skills such as resume writing, networking, developing pitches, building a LinkedIn profile and interviewing. As one of my classmates put it: “I always dreaded attending the IGNITE workshops but I walked away from each one learning so much!” These workshops usually start with a short presentation going over the background and techniques in the relevant topic followed by an interactive practice session. The round-table practices provide an intimate and safe environment for us to practice our communication skills and provide real-time constructive feedback from classmates and career coaches. Through hearing our classmate’s responses and stories it not only helps us in building a strong bond but also provides additional thoughts for us to consider on our own career development.

Another important component of the recruiting preparation is the individual coaching sessions with an OCD career coach. These are 30-minutes sessions dedicated to a specific topic we want to talk about related to the recruiting process, including resume feedback, cover letter feedback, pitch refinement, career goals and personal strength review, job search strategy etc. All the career coaches at OCD are knowledgeable, passionate and personable. If you are more comfortable in a one-on-one setting and want to seek more personalized feedback, definitely take advantage of these coaching appointments!

Lastly, every alumni and career coach I have talked to emphasized the importance of networking in the process of job searching or career development in general. I have heard repeatedly ‘use your student card and ask for coffee chats. You will be surprised how many people will respond to your request. It might seem a bit intimidating at the beginning, but sometimes you just have to try it and the response I’ve got so far is overwhelmingly positive. To search for potential networking candidates, I have asked for help from OCD career coaches, utilized LinkedIn alumni functionality, and cold-contacted people I have met through industry events I attended. You will be surprised how willing people are to help and to share their stories!

As part of our summer curriculum, we have the NYC Tech Immersion class, which is a blend of guest lectures, company visits and Stern solution group project. “What does this have to do with the title of this blog?”, you might have asked. Well, Marcus and the trading game were my favorite sessions during our visit to Goldman Sachs in Jersey City on Friday August 3^rd as part of our class.

Before the visit I didn’t quite know what to expect besides the fact that GS is in the finance industry and that this was going to be one of the longer company visits (4 hours). Our afternoon started with a welcome note from Andrew Trout, the managing director of Human Capital Management, giving an overview of engineering at GS: 25% of the total global workforce and the mantra “challenge the status quo”. Then Sinead Strain from the FICC technology team talked to us about Marquee – the digital storefront for Goldman’s security division, and all the valuable lessons learned through the process of building Marquee, such as figuring out the proper business model, understanding the user persona and focusing on KPIs while creating the product.

Next we had Regina Lerit from the digital finance technology team talking to us about Marcus – their consumer banking product launched just a few years ago. Regina shared the growth story of Marcus with us, from the initial customer research, to the ideation and development of its MVP – personal loan platform, to its growth strategy. She even quizzed us about the name ‘Marcus’ and explained why this name was chosen. My favorite part of Regina’s presentation though, was how she explained the traditional waterfall vs. the agile framework of project development. She used our classmates sitting at a table as an example of multiple participants on the team and described the workflow of how they would improve the design of a water bottle had they been using waterfall vs agile methodology. The explanation was very clear and easily relatable. I think I am going to use the same way to explain the two frameworks in the future.

By this time, our class started to be a bit tired from all the presentations on a Friday afternoon: just in time for some highly interactive and fun activity – the trading game. Facilitated by two young and brilliant traders at GS, each group sitting at the table got to collectively decide the asset allocation among 4 stocks, the position we want to take (long vs short) and the opportunity to re-balance the allocation each quarter based on the macro-economic news and firm-specific news given in the simulated game. This got us all ignited and we even got to name our own team. From Fine-Ants, to Goldman Stacks, we got very creative. We had to discuss, calculate and decide how much we wanted to invest in each stock. We love to talk and our recent accounting and finance classes prepped us well. We had a lot of heated discussion on what the economic news meant, whether we should go long or short a company and how much to invest in each company. In the end every team was able to beat the average market return and the Goldman Stacks team made a whopping 60+% return over the course of 4 quarters (they had a CFA on their team so the other teams were playing with a competitive disadvantage)! This was before we learned the portfolio theory and importance of diversification in our finance class. I imagine our investment decisions will be different now.

The visit concluded with a Q&A panel with a few Stern Alumni on their experience at GS and a networking session with the panel. Everyone had a great time and we of course didn’t waste the amazing skyline view of Manhattan from Jersey City! (Photo credit: Isabel Izquierdo)

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!

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!

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.