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West Coast Immersion

This past year has flown by, and it’s hard to believe we’re already almost halfway through our final semester at Stern, and graduation is only a few short months away. The January West Coast Tech Immersion was a great way to kick it off too.

Over winter break, we spent two weeks in Seattle and San Francisco exploring the tech space there, visiting all kinds of companies. It was a wonderful opportunity to get a better understanding of each company’s role in the tech ecosystem, and how they were leveraging it to drive innovation within their organization. It was also great to connect with Stern alumni at each of these companies and learning about their experiences in their roles and living in each of these cities.

We kicked the trip off in Seattle with a visit to Amazon, where we toured their campus and learned about their most innovative projects. It was interesting to learn about these initiatives, and to connect with Stern alums currently working there, and hear about the different projects they were working on, and how much they enjoyed living in Seattle.

Another highlight of the Seattle portion of the trip was visiting Microsoft’s campus in Redmond. Like Amazon, we spent the day touring the campus and later talking to Microsoft senior management about their latest projects. We also had the opportunity to meet Jeff Teper in person, Corporate VP at Microsoft, NYU Stern alum, and member of the Tech MBA Advisory Board.

The rest of the week was definitely packed with more visits and meetings with Boeing’s Horizon X division, the Create 33 entrepreneurship center, networking event with Stern alums, and catching up and reconnecting with classmates about their winter breaks and all the places they traveled before arriving in Seattle.

After an action-packed week in Seattle, we all flew to San Francisco, where another busy week awaited us. We started off with a corporate visit to Salesforce downtown and met with representatives who shared what services the company provided, and success stories of some of their clients. The next day, we visited Oracle and PayPal, explored their offices, and learned about how they help their clients, and what new projects they’ve been working on. Given my specific interest in fintech, I was particularly excited about visiting PayPal and learned so much about the company during the visit.

Our last day in San Francisco couldn’t have been better. We first met with David Ko, President and COO of Rally Health and also a member of the Tech MBA Advisory Board, and learned about his experience as a startup founder and his career trajectory. His story was truly inspiring and we all thoroughly enjoyed having the opportunity to meet him and connect with him. We then visited Google’s offices, another company visit many of us were very much looking forward to. There, we met with Google employees from many different divisions, from AdWords to Waymo, and learned firsthand about their different projects and how they fit within the larger organization.

Overall, the Tech Immersion Trek was a great trip and provided an incredible opportunity to explore these cities, learn more about the different companies we visited, and reconnect with fellow classmates. It is definitely one of the highlights of the program for me so far, and I loved every minute of it!

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And So It Begins

I can’t believe the summer semester has already ended and we’ve begun fall classes! These past few months have definitely been a blur and so much has been going on. While we’ve had many challenging classes, we have also had so many opportunities to explore New York, get to know our classmates better (and create lifelong friendships), and explore the tech space throughout the summer.

One of my favorite parts about our summer classes was the tech immersion. This class was more practical than our other classes and included company visits, workshops and presentations from industry experts, and our immersion project (which this year was in partnership with Verizon). In the tech immersion, we had the opportunity to visit and network with companies such as Union Square Ventures, Deloitte Digital, Uber, JPMorgan, and Nestio, and to learn from and connect with experts on topics such as cyber security, data visualization, UX/UI and many more. I am so thankful to have had these incredible opportunities to learn and connect with experts and professionals in these spaces and learn from each of them.

I learned more about topics I hadn’t had much exposure to before Stern, and that helped me discover different companies and potential opportunities that I perhaps wouldn’t have considered before. These company visits and workshops with experts were invaluable resources to better understand the industry, an incredible opportunity to connect with industry leaders and to connect what we learn in the classroom to the real world and to see what the broader NYC tech sector was like, and each company’s role or position within it.

It was amazing to have the opportunity to explore how these companies are leading innovation and creating value, and understand how companies such as Deloitte, Uber, and Verizon are leveraging AI, 5G, machine learning, big data and more to create business value, provide better products and services, automate processes, and generate valuable insights to generate efficiencies, increase productivity, and contribute to an organization and the tech ecosystem in general.

The workshops and presentations by experts were also tremendously valuable, because even if you weren’t particularly interested in the topic beforehand, the sessions were so compelling and insightful that everyone certainly got a lot of use from each of them. Furthermore, they were on varied topics from UX/UI and data visualization, to cybersecurity and ethics in tech. While you may not specifically work in any of these areas upon graduating, they are all extremely relevant and important areas in tech that will undoubtedly affect each one of us personally and professionally, no matter what industry or role you end up in.

This is just a glimpse of what the summer was like for Tech MBAs, there’s so much more to it! I learned more than I ever thought I even could during the summer, and am excited to see what the fall semester will bring!