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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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Why is it Important to Understand Innovation?

Joseph Schumpeter, one of the most important economists of last century, related growth with the capacity to innovate. He coined the term “creative destruction” to describe the process of disrupting old habits (products, services, practices, etc.) for new ones. He saw capitalism as the most useful system to incentivize the impactful power of entrepreneurs to create and deliver value for improving quality of life for people.

In the last decades we have witnessed new technologies maturing in parallel, and due to the pandemic, many trends have accelerated. A lot of capital has moved from traditional industries to nontraditional, and new technologies and startups are disrupting old and long-lasting industries. This is supported by based technologies like cloud, IoT, 5G, blockchain, among others, that have been granting more innovation.

So why is it important to understand this? Innovation is uncertain and nobody can predict the future, but it does have patterns. Understanding how disruption has behaved in the past can allow us to understand in what part of its development each technology is located. Sometimes, technologies are received with a lot of echoes by the market, and we may think that they won’t stop until they have been generalized and used in many fields. Many times, this is only hype, fueled by a trend that won’t last. In order to improve, they may need more time, more capital, or perhaps the technology is not disruptive or useful enough.

Innovation normally coexists between three edges: technology, business, and regulation. Therefore, a Tech MBA is incredibly relevant. The program uses technology as a toolkit for facing business challenges in a way that creates and delivers value. There are cases in which is the problem involves more than simple business, like health tech, and understanding these concepts helps us drive impactful change.

We are living in a time in which most industries are trying to transform into tech. This transformation could be in how they reach their clients, in the experience that their customers have, in production, or in how they use data (among MANY others). Stern’s Tech MBA combines resources and knowledge to be able to connect the dots, lead teams, create capabilities to build a stronger vision for facing the future.

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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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Entrepreneurial Opportunities at NYU

This summer, our schedules were packed with classes, meeting new people, industry treks, and evening events like happy hours, panel discussions, and receptions. As a Tech MBA student, a few of my main interests include entrepreneurship, startups, and early stage ventures. At NYU, there’s likely an event on campus that covers any one of these topics every week, but one of my favorites that kicked off summer was called B-School Disrupt.

B-School Disrupt showcases 10 entrepreneurs from NYU, Stanford GSB, and Harvard Business School, and each founder presents 2-3 minute pitches of their startup to the audience, as well as a panel of industry judges who ask questions and provide their perspectives. The event was followed by a networking reception that allowed attendees to connect with the companies.

I attended B-School Disrupt with 14 of my classmates, many of us with entrepreneurial aspirations of our own. In addition to the topics we discuss in the classroom and consulting with companies through Stern Solutions, it’s nice to hear about the businesses that students create and bring to life. A broad range of industries were represented and the startups were as different as they were interesting. People have some crazy ideas! For example, one startup created sustainable cleaning products that come in the form of a dissolvable tablet and reusable spray bottle, while another created a mobile app concierge service that returns your car for you at the airport. There was also a fashion retail brand that sourced its designs from artisans and designers in Africa.

Not only were the startups themselves diverse, but each entrepreneur had a different story. There were students who had just started their business, and others who had been working for years. Others worked full-time on their venture, while some juggled a different, full-time job and pursued their company part-time. I think I had a narrow definition of what it means to be an entrepreneur, but B-School Disrupt, along with the many other startup-related events and activities on campus, has helped expand that definition for me.

These definition-expanding experiences are built into the curriculum: it’s not uncommon for professors to invite founders and industry leaders to class who always share an inside look at their companies and offer students a chance for Q&A. I’ve also found that some of these definition-expanding experiences happen more organically through conversations with classmates who come from many different backgrounds, industries, or geographies. Outside the classroom, there’s a plethora of resources on campus to take advantage of: the $300K Entrepreneurs Challenge, one-on-one coaching at the W. R. Berkley Innovation Labs or the Leslie eLab, and more. NYU has resources for entrepreneurial students and alumni regardless of what stage their company is at. As someone who has benefited from these resources in just a few months, I’d encourage any prospective student who is interested in entrepreneurship to look into these opportunities. I think you’ll be surprised at how much support exists for students and their startup ideas, even if you have no background in entrepreneurship at all. It’s definitely one of my favorite things about NYU and the Tech MBA program, and certainly something I’m planning to continue exploring!
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What a year!

We made it (barring us passing all of our finals per Dean Raghu at the graduation ceremony 😊)!

It is still a little bit hard for me to wrap my hear around the fact that just a little over a year ago, I was still working full time and living in a different state, barely knowing any of the 30 people whom I would call family now. At a recent conversation with the next class of Tech MBAs (yes they have already started their amazing 1-year journey), I got asked a question: do you think this has been a life-transforming year?

The answer is absolutely yes.

Over the year, I kept getting asked why I wanted to do an MBA after a PhD. I have said the answer enough times that I distilled it to this: because I not only want to know how to solve a problem, but also what problems to solve. With this degree, I definitely feel more comfortable defining and justifying problems worth solving. My way of thinking about a problem or situation has been slowly transformed over the year: from delving straight into numbers looking for one ‘true’ answer, to factoring in interests of and impacts on all stakeholders finding the best solution from all possible ones.

Before our orientation, one of the action items was to write a vision statement for May 2019, imagining what we would consider as success at the end of this year. I imagined along three dimensions – academically, professionally and personally. Today, I can proudly say I achieved most of what I set out to accomplish. One thing I am most proud of is the personal growth I had by constantly challenging myself. As an introvert, I didn’t like speaking in class or talking to strangers but at the end of the year I am contributing frequently in class and comfortable starting a conversation in networking sessions. As a number cruncher and non-native English speaker, I didn’t read a lot in English and my writing wasn’t as polished. During this year, I probably read more cases, articles and textbooks, and wrote more papers for classes than I did for my entire physics education. As a type A personality, I wanted to spend as much time as possible to perfect each task but with so many activities pulling me in all directions this year I learned the skill of time management and got comfortable with ‘good enough’ and setting my boundaries.

As I get ready to start my job at IBM post-graduation, what I will miss the most is the Stern community: all the professors – who all are so eager to help and invite us to stay in touch for the rest of our career, all the staff members from OCD, OSE and Admission – who always support us and cheer for us along our journey, all the administrators – whose doors are always open whenever we have any feedback to share, and mostly all my fellow tech MBAs, focused MBAs and Sternies – who made this year so much more special and memorable. What bonded us so strongly will stay with us for life: those late night and weekend meetings for a class project or case competition; those happy hours after a company visit, an exam or just a class; those trips we took together, near or far; those impromptu conversations just to cheer each other up while we were overwhelmed with recruiting and school; that night of Karaoke in San Francisco at the end of the Tech MBA west coast immersion trip; all the tears we shed and laughter we had. The MBA was a journey but also just the beginning, the beginning to many many life-long friendships.

Now, as a proud member of the over half million NYU alumni and over 100,000 Stern alumni, I can’t wait to see everyone at our reunion – be it one-month reunion or 20-year reunion – and hear all the wonderful stories we get to write in the next chapter of our lives.

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Final Notes: A Year in Review

I moved to New York just over a year ago to join the inaugural Andre Koo Tech MBA class of 2019. Now, with graduation just three short weeks away, I’d like to write some final thoughts about the first year of this innovative program. If you’ll be joining the next class, have only started your application, or are just exploring your MBA options, I hope these notes are helpful:

Plan Your Specializations

Stern offers over two dozen specializations and the Tech MBA degree naturally lines up with two: Product Management and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. While these specializations satisfy most students that attend Stern’s Tech MBA program, you may want to take advantage of the school’s world-renowned finance faculty and tack on a Finance or FinTech specialization to your degree instead. If so, remember that you’ll likely need to take an extra class or two by taking advantage of the free credit overload policy, and you will also need to plan your fall and spring semester schedules more carefully. While the degree is already “specialized” in tech as a whole, these additional specializations add signaling power to your resume that demonstrate your knowledge in specific disciplines.

Understand the Tech Recruiting Cycle

During the first (summer) semester, there aren’t very many students on campus. Undergraduates are on their summer vacations, incoming MBA2s are working hard at their internships, and MBA1s are still packing their bags to move to New York. It’s a quiet time for job hunting and recruiting. However, when the fall semester begins, everything changes. Part of that change involves the exhilarating, but competitive, recruiting cycle. MBA2s are recruiting for full-time positions, MBA1s are recruiting for internships, and some Tech MBAs students are still figuring out what they want to do. Believe it or not, just three months in, it’s time to recruit for a full-time job.

Many large tech firms, like Amazon and Microsoft, recruit in the fall. Larger companies have defined MBA recruiting cycles and will be on campus early. However, these tech firms are in the minority. Most tech recruiting takes place in the spring, so don’t fret if you don’t land a full-time job in the fall – there just aren’t that many.

Prep for Interviews with Classmates

After you go through a few rounds of interviews, you’ll realize that the people who conduct first-round interviews are no different than you or I. That being the case, your fellow students provide great interview practice. Before, during, and even after recruiting is complete, you should be working with your classmates to nail down solid answers to common questions, practicing product management cases, and soliciting resume and cover letter feedback. If you’re wondering why you would still want to be doing this after you’ve finished recruiting, it’s to help your other classmates who may still be hunting.

Negotiate Your Start Date

Once you do receive a full-time job offer, don’t be afraid to ask for a later (or earlier) start date. It may be very beneficial to take some time to recharge between school and work. This will allow you to walk in on your first day ready to tackle the new challenges that await you. New employers would prefer that you bring your best self to work, not your burnt-out self. Completing an MBA in 12 months is no small task and giving yourself time to reflect between the degree and your new career will be essential for long-term success.

Time Flies

I know it’s cliché, but the year really does go by in a blink of an eye. Make sure you take full advantage of being a student again. There are discounted student tickets flying around, events in the city that would conflict with a traditional 9 to 5 job, and an energy at NYU that embraces learning, failure, and everything in between.

If you’ve made the plunge and are attending Stern or any other MBA program, remember how privileged you are to be in an environment that fosters learning and is focused on helping you grow. Then, make the most of it!

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So many events!

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 26th 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!

 

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But wait, there’s more! Other NYU Grad Schools

On March 28, NYU hosted their fourth annual “One Day” fundraising campaign. The University collectively raised over 4,000 matched gifts and the MBA class of 2019 made dozens of contributions to their annual class gift. As a student that has benefited remarkably from NYU’s Tech MBA program with a shiny new job offer, I felt compelled to give back. While I was determining how my gift would be spent, I was reminded of the sheer size of NYU and the academic resources available outside of Stern. Between recruiting, club events, and classes, it’s easy to simply stay inside of the business school and maintain a packed schedule. However, NYU is much more than just Stern, and I want to highlight some classes and opportunities available outside of the business school in this blog post.

There are a couple of core technology classes that are required as part of the Tech MBA program: Foundations of Networks and DevOps & Agile Methodologies. These two classes are graduate level computer science courses taught at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. If you’re not already familiar with Courant, I highly recommend making a quick Google search to learn about the high-caliber faculty that make it such a competitive graduate school for applied math, computer science, and information systems. If you’re joining the Tech MBA program with a lighter technical background, these classes will be challenging. Nevertheless, the full-time and adjunct faculty at Courant understand they are teaching a variety of skill sets among business students and your more technical classmates will be invaluable throughout the year.

Stern also offers a credit overload program. The credit overload policy at Stern allows full-time MBA students to take up to 3 additional credits. This can be completed as one 3-credit class in one semester or split over the fall and spring semester with two 1.5-credit classes. If you take full advantage of the credit overload system, you will graduate with a total of 54 credits, just 6 credits shy of a two-year MBA from Stern. This is an incredible value considering the Tech MBA takes only 12 months to complete.

These additional credits allow you to take various elective classes, and some are offered outside of Stern. I have taken advantage of this and will be venturing down to the NYU School of Law during my final semester. The class is called, “Negotiating Complex Transactions with Lawyers and Business Professionals” and is comprised of both law and business students. Combining the two sets of students from the different graduate schools offers new learning opportunities, debates, and conversations to take place, in addition to new networking opportunities.

In addition to classes outside of Stern, there is a university-wide event calendar that posts concerts, lectures, exhibits, games, and more happening on or around campus. I hope that if you attend NYU, you make the most out of your time by exploring everything that the greater university has to offer.

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Spring Break!

Work hard. Play hard. I think this is a motto that most MBA students can identify with. While of course there is plenty of work and studying to accomplish in order to earn the degree, an MBA is likely the last time in your life you won’t have a morning commute and boss to report to – and you should take advantage! There are plenty of opportunities to unwind and have some fun throughout the MBA program at Stern, from the weekly Thursday night “Beer Blast”, to the Welcome Back Boat Cruise around Manhattan. But perhaps nothing can match the spring break treks led by some of the amazing affinity clubs at Stern. This year, we had options of heading to one of the following school-sponsored trip locations: Israel, Vietnam, Tanzania, New Zealand, Japan, Himalayas, and Patagonia. After working hard through the first half of the spring semester, the break finally arrived, and I and many of my classmates left New York City and jetted off to different corners of the world.

I attended the trek to Israel, and it exceeded even my lofty expectations. First off, it’s a great opportunity to meet other two-year MBA students. It can be easy to stay confined to your fellow Tech MBA students during your year at Stern, but between classes and events like these treks, there are ample opportunities to grow your network outside of 1-year classmates. After a long flight, we wasted no time in exploring and learning about the country. Throughout the trek, we were joined by a professional Israeli tour guide, who shared his knowledge about the thousands of years of history in the country. Some of the historical stops in the trip included: The Old City of Jerusalem, the Yad Va’Shem Holocaust Museum, a sunrise hike and tour of Masada (seen in the photo above), excursions through Caper Naum and Nazareth, and finally a tour through the old town of Jaffa. But it wasn’t all history – through visits to an Israeli Air Force base, and lectures from a former military Colonel as well as a business CEO, we were able to learn about all the forces shaping Israel and the Middle East today, and how we might want to keep them in mind as future global business leaders. And finally, what would be a successful spring break trip without some fun: from beach parties on the shores of the Dead Sea, to ATV rides through northern Israel, to nights out in world-famous Tel Aviv clubs, this trek offered something for everyone.

For now, it’s back to school and homework, but these last few months of the final semester will undoubtedly offer lots more opportunities for fun and chances to make even more lasting connections with classmates who will be part of your network for life.

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Starting the third and last semester

On February 4th of 2019, we all got back to Stern with a strange feeling, this was to be our last semester and we wanted to make the most of it.

We came back even more united than before thanks to the two weeks of the West Coast immersion trip that we took in January. During this immersion, all the students of the NYU Tech MBA went to Seattle and San Francisco to meet with companies and leaders in the tech industry for three main reasons :

  1. Understand the tech ecosystem of the west coast
  2. Speak about business and tech challenges of today
  3. Discuss the future of tech.

The diversity in company visits was amazing. To give you a sample we had the opportunity to visit the Boeing factory, the Tableau office, and we met with leading VCs of the valley who talked about their portfolio. And that is just a small sample of the meetings we had that week.
We all felt impressed by the time every person spent with us – everyone seemed genuinely ready and pleased to share their journey, their challenges, and even asked our opinion on their business or tech questions.

During the trip we didn’t only learn about tech and business, we also learned about each other – the 31 students of the inaugural Tech MBA class. Because when you spend two weeks, 24/7 with people, you learn more than just what’s at the surface. We got to understand the challenges, fears, life goals and values of our classmates, and we all, as a team, worked on trying to make this trip the best for each other. We made introductions to people we knew and made sure everyone had the chance to speak during networking time and corporate presentations. With empathy and compassion, we made the best out of the trip. We all felt that these two weeks were very special, and it was very hard to say goodbye.

So, here I am in my last semester. This is my third Masters degree, so clearly I have said that sentence a lot, but it never felt stronger than on that day facing Stern. For me, this semester is about getting to know as many classmates as I can. I gave myself the challenge to create a strong network with the MBA1s and MBA2s and try to learn as much as I can. So I picked classes that were not tech focused, and I have to say that I love it. I have a class in brand strategy where we have been working with cosmetic and kitchen tools brands, and it is super fun for me to get out from the tech-focused program and expand my horizons in what takes to create a business.

This semester will pass at light speed, but I know that we will make sure to enjoy the time together as a team, as a class and to get the best out of it.