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How to Prepare for Business School

As I prepared to start the Tech MBA program at NYU, I felt a wave of emotions: excitement, joy, eagerness, and a little anxiety…I read over the checklists, signed the necessary documents, set up my portals, and tried to prepare myself for a new chapter.

In addition to checking off the boxes on your “to do before business school” list, I recommend taking some time to turn inward to set yourself up for success. Here are a few tips:

Reflect on your why
Earning an MBA is an incredible opportunity to develop skills and build a network to take your career to new heights. However, there are plenty of ways to achieve your career goals. To get the most out of your business school experience, it is important to understand why you decided to apply and ultimately enroll in the program. Are you aiming to gain leadership skills, technical expertise, or to dive deep into a particular domain? Are you most interested in building a professional network? Are you hoping to start your own business and you’re looking for a co-founder and guidance for raising capital? There are many reasons why individuals go to business school and understanding your motivating force before the first day will help you make the most out of the experience.

Prioritize your goals
You might have multiple aspirations for what you want to achieve during your time at Stern. There are many opportunities to get involved with clubs, attend extracurricular activities, TA a class, attend networking and social events, etc. If you want to, you can fill up every hour of the day with something exciting. Business school is a great time to explore new things, but it is also important to prioritize your goals. Reflect on your why and write down what goals are most important to you. For example, your goals might be to hold a leadership position for a club and attend one speaker session per week. Your friend might prioritize working hard in a class so that she can TA the following semester. Someone else might prioritize landing an in-semester internship. Of course it is important to keep an open mind, but writing down your initial goals at the beginning of the year will help you stay on track.

Meet your classmates
If you live in NYC or plan to move here before the first day of orientation, you might want to meet some of your future classmates in person. Check out the Slack group and reach out to a few students. Our cohort met a handful times in the park or for dinner to get to know each other before orientation. While this is not necessary, having a few familiar faces on the first day of orientation won’t hurt!

Relax and savor the moment
You were accepted to a top business school. Business school is an exciting experience, but you worked hard to get to this moment. Take a minute to acknowledge your accomplishments and celebrate.

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Building Community in the Tech MBA Program

A huge part of the Stern experience is getting to know your classmates, Stern alumni, and faculty, and building long-lasting relationships.

I have to admit I was a bit nervous about making strong connections in a one-year program, however I’ve been blown away by the professional and personal relationships I’ve formed during my time at Stern.

The one year Tech MBA program is unique because students take the full business “core” during an intensive summer semester. Tech MBA students dive head first into the curriculum and are in class together five days a week for 12 weeks. This summer semester creates the optimal environment to get to know the cohort very quickly. Not only are you paired with classmates during class projects, but students also get the opportunity to socialize during lunch and after class.

In the fall, Tech MBA students are fully integrated into the Stern community and join clubs and take elective classes with MBA 1s and 2s. I enjoyed participating in Stern Women in Business, Stern Technology Association, and Stern Adventures events to meet Sternies outside of my cohort. Additionally, clubs are a great resource to meet alumni and network with the broader Stern community. Through club engagements I’ve met alumni at top tech firms and formed relationships with them to help me through the recruiting process.

Outside of the classroom and formal Stern sponsored events, there are opportunities for students to gather socially and travel together. Our cohort organized a ski trip to Utah during winter break, which was a great way to bond while participating in a fun activity. My classmates have gone on hiking trips and a group recently traveled to Colombia for spring break. Throughout the semester, our class also holds a weekly happy hour on Wednesdays that anyone can attend. We’ve even taken food tours in various NYC neighborhoods and gone to karaoke! Spending time in and out of the classroom with my cohort has been so much fun.

I’ve made lifelong friends at Stern and am confident that the supportive network I’ve built will help me succeed in my career and beyond.

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Entrepreneurship at Stern

Stern offers a wide range of entrepreneurship opportunities. Whether you are looking to start your own company or join an existing startup as an early employee or cofounder, Stern has resources to help you achieve your goals. This post will explore some of the amazing centers, programs, and classes that Stern entrepreneurs can take advantage of during their time in business school.

Leslie E Lab
The Leslie Entrepreneurs Lab is a physical building in the heart of the Washington Square campus where aspiring NYU entrepreneurs from across all of NYU’s schools and colleges can meet to connect, collaborate, and tap into a vast array of resources to help develop their ideas and inventions into startup companies. Anyone currently at NYU can take advantage of the resources offered by the Leslie eLab, so it serves as a great place to meet current NYU students, faculty, researchers, and staff. In response to COVID-19, the eLab held virtual programming, workshops, and social events to help the NYU entrepreneurship community thrive during challenging times.

Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship
The Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship is a venture design studio within NYU Stern School of Business. The Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship exists to help foster entrepreneurship at Stern and provide support as entrepreneurs navigate the many challenges their new ventures encounter. The Center provides startup accelerator programs, mentoring, workshops and technical assistance, all designed to provide NYU students, alumni, faculty and staff with the skills and resources needed to discover and execute bold new ideas. The team members at the Berkley Center provide general advising services in addition to helping founders connect with subject matter experts in various functional areas such as branding, customer strategy, legal, prototyping, etc. The Berkley Center also hosts the Entrepreneurship Challenge and Stern Venture Fellows program.

Entrepreneurship and Startup Association (ESA)
ESA is a student-run organization with the mission to empower its members through unparalleled access to NYC’s vibrant entrepreneurial community. ESA provides education and information on the entrepreneurial resources available to Stern MBAs. By empowering and educating its members, ESA aims to position Stern as the broader NYU community’s hub for entrepreneurial activity.

Classes
Foundations of Entrepreneurship: This class is designed to increase the chances of entrepreneurial success by helping aspiring founders or startup employees identify and thus avoid a range of dilemmas all startups face. To do so, this class provides a broad introduction and overview of entrepreneurship based on a range of teaching methods including: academic research, cases, empirical data, videos, and guest speakers.

Managing the Growing Company: This course exposes students to the unique challenges of managing the growth of small businesses. It concentrates on building the company issues rather than start-up issues, although some cases and lectures explore start-ups as well. Included are studies of family businesses that have acute growth issues because of succession and family dynamics. It is designed for students interested in understanding the opportunities and problems involved in the management or operation of their own business, and it is also aimed at students considering employment in a small or midsized firm.

Endless Frontier Labs: Students will learn about the process of successfully taking new ventures to markets, including aspects related to development, management, and financing of ventures. The course will be centered on student observations of the interactions of startup founders & their potential investors. After familiarizing themselves with the startups’ ideas, students will apply basic analytical tools, drawn from management, econ, and finance to evaluate the size of markets, attractiveness of industries, financing options of early-stage ventures, sustainable competitive advantage of proposed strategies, and the risks and potential of ideas. Along with the experiential component, the course will introduce students to a framework for developing an entrepreneurial strategy.

If you are interested in a dynamic startup ecosystem with the resources, faculty, and alumni to help guide your experience, NYU Stern is a great place to begin or continue your entrepreneurship journey.

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My Favorite Class This Semester

One of the best parts about Stern is getting to learn from incredible professors who are experts in their fields. While many of my classes are engaging, there is one class that stands out above the rest: “Strategic Foresight and Predicting the Future of Technology” with professor Amy Webb. The objective of the class is to introduce students to the methods, concepts, frameworks, tools and techniques of strategic foresight, a multidisciplinary approach to deriving new insights about the future. To deliver on this promise, the class is organized into three sections each week 1. Introduction to methodology and a foresight tool 2. A deep dive into an emerging area of technology and 3. Practicing what we learned and applying concepts and tools to our final group project. Not only is the topic of strategic foresight extremely interesting, but the structure of the class also ensures that discussions are relevant and concepts can be applied to any business sector. We learn to identify signals in the world and make connections to form potential trends. We are challenged to imagine what the future of meat consumption will look like in 10 years, what the future of work will be in 15 years, and what the future of media will look like in 20 years. We learn to address assumptions and state uncertainties and back up our scenarios with quantitative and qualitative evidence. To give you a sense of the breadth of what I’ve learned so far, here are some of my favorite things we’ve discussed in class…

1. Why is Nintendo the most innovative company? When we think about Nintendo, we might think about Mario Party or Pokemon, but Nintendo was founded in the 1880s. Nintendo originally sold hand-painted playing cards. As the world evolved and technologies developed, Nintendo paid attention to the signals on the “fringe” and made bets to ensure they could stay in business. Nintendo transitioned from selling playing cards to developing games for malls, handheld gameboys, commercially available video game consoles, the motion sensor Wii, and many more innovations. This example clearly highlighted how companies can use strategic foresight to prepare for the future and remain ahead of their competition.

2. How will a refrigerator be used in 2031? At the start of class we are asked to do a re-perception exercise in which we imagine how everyday objects might be used in the future. Recently we discussed how refrigerators might be used to grow our own food at home, store essential pharmaceuticals, or in new areas of the supply chain as the world becomes warmer. This led to a discussion about when an object is still considered the original object…

3. What are the implications of synthetic influencers? We’ve learned about synthetic influencers like Lil Miquela and K-pop group “Eternity” in class. Prior to this class, I was not familiar with synthetic influencers and their potential impact on not only the entertainment and media industries, but also on society at large.

Throughout the semester, we work on a final group project. This is a great opportunity to apply the theoretical concepts and frameworks we learned step by step.

If you are interested in technology, want to challenge yourself to think differently about companies, societies, and governments, like to imagine what our futures look like, or just love learning new things, then this class is for you. Every week I look forward to rich discussions that develop because this class is a safe space for learning and taking risks. Each week the class time flies by as I absorb information from the professor and her guests lecturers/ class coaches. If you have the chance, definitely take this class!

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Why I Chose the Andre Koo Tech MBA at NYU Stern

As a Graduate Ambassador at Stern, I speak to a ton of prospective students. Multiple times per week, I’m asked about my experience and why I chose to pursue NYU Stern’s Andre Koo Tech MBA program. Although there are many reasons someone might pursue an MBA at Stern, here is why I chose the Andre Koo Tech MBA program:

One year program: The Andre Koo Tech MBA program at Stern is a one year accelerated MBA program. Students begin their MBA journey in May, take classes for one full year and graduate the following May. While students do not participate in a summer internship like a traditional two-year MBA student, the Tech MBA curriculum is designed to give students ample experiential learning opportunities to apply the skills they learn in the classroom in a business setting.

The one year program attracts students who are focused on learning the material so that they can directly apply learnings to their work. I wanted to pursue an MBA degree, but was worried about being out of the workforce for two years because in the tech industry everything is constantly evolving. The Tech MBA program provided a path to earning an MBA degree in a timeframe that met my needs.

Opportunity to learn technical skills: Prior to Stern I worked as a product manager at New York Road Runners. While I had experience working with technical teams and engineers, I did not have a background in computer science or engineering. Technology is changing the way business gets done and having a basic understanding of technological concepts and tools will be key in any business role in the future. I was eager to come to Stern to learn technical skills so that I can work more effectively as a product manager. The Tech MBA curriculum does not require prior coding knowledge, rather it is designed for students who are open to learning technical skills in a meaningful way. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my Python and data science classes. While I do not intend to pivot into software engineering, I feel confident in my ability to understand technical complexities and communicate effectively with technical teammates.

Access to the Stern network and community: When evaluating business schools, I was looking for a strong network. I was drawn to the Tech MBA program at Stern because of the resources, alumni, and community that the school offers. As a focused MBA student, I have access to the same career center coaching, club resources, and alumni network as the two-year students. Part of business school is investing in relationships, and I felt confident that at Stern I would be able to thrive and meet intelligent, hard-working, passionate students and alumni.

Live in the greatest city in the world: I’ve lived in New York City for over five years and I’m still excited by the hustle and bustle and all New York has to offer. Each neighborhood is unique and there is always something new to explore. New York is a business powerhouse and as a student at NYU Stern you have so many opportunities to explore everything from the startup scene to the financial services industry.