Andre Koo Technology and Entrepreneurship MBA

We returned to campus after a two-week break and it’s clear that Stern has a renewed sense of energy. Over the summer, the students on campus were limited to the one-year focused MBAs, which consisted of my Tech MBA colleagues and the Fashion and Luxury MBA cohort. While we spent most days in class or doing homework, we became close with the other focused program students and managed to fit in plenty of socializing between courses. As the fall rolled around, the campus began bustling. However, it’s cooling down outside and commuting in the city is much more enjoyable.

Our first day back on campus was met with an influx of second-year MBA students returning from their internships, first-year  MBA students part of the traditional 2 year program, part-time students from the Langone program, and even some lingering undergraduates who found themselves roaming the halls of the MBA classrooms. While it may be slightly harder to find a quiet study spot in the student lounges, the combined energy of all of the students on campus together truly captures the experience of an MBA. During our first week, club kickoff meetings and social events started immediately, along with corporate recruiting.

Over the summer I applied to be a VP of the Stern Technology Association, a professional club with a focus on technology. The club helps students with or without tech backgrounds learn about the benefits of having an MBA in the tech world and offers several unique immersion treks and recruitment opportunities for all of its members. I was interviewed by the current club leaders and am now the proud Co-VP of Academics and Collaboration along with another student from the Tech MBA program. In addition to the club’s scheduled programming, we are focusing on integrating the Tech MBA students with the rest of the club to share knowledge on interviews, casing, and general preparation for recruiting. The diverse backgrounds of both Tech MBA students combined with the traditional MBA students allow for a unique blend of knowledge that everyone can learn from.

Speaking of recruiting, I’ve been attending my first corporate presentations hosted by the Office of Career Development, or OCD, as you may hear it called around campus. Companies spend about an hour introducing themselves speaking about their culture, working styles, and development opportunities available to MBA students. Following the presentations, the events are typically opened up for casual networking to learn more about specific opportunities or your own compatibility with the firm. If you are interested, be aware that the application deadlines come quickly, and then interview invitations are sent out. Traditional industries such as finance and consulting typically recruit in the fall semester, while tech-oriented jobs wait until spring to come on campus.

While the summer was spent focusing on academics without the distractions of clubs and recruiting, networking with the additional students has been another way to learn about what career paths are available to us. They are also receptive and friendly to the one-year focused MBA students and are happy to see the specialized programs in place. There are new opportunities for the entire academic community to come together and be a part of a more inclusive, diverse network at Stern and even more to do.

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)

Everyone told me that my classmates would be one of the best parts of business school. While I was already very excited to be moving to New York and to make new friends, I have been blown away by everyone’s warmth and friendliness. Since our Tech MBA program in small (only 32 of us this year!) we all seemed to know each other by day 2. Additionally, we’re lucky to be spending the summer at Stern with students in the Fashion & Luxury MBA program, so we are able to meet, work with, and make friends with another group of individuals who have fairly different professional backgrounds from our own.

While our class tends to go to happy hour once or twice a week (the neighborhood around the campus has numerous options) here are few other ways I’ve gotten to meet my classmates outside of Kaufman Management Center:

• Finding new lunch spots: Exploration of the restaurants in the neighborhood is a great way to start appreciating our location and getting to know people. With the growing LunchTech scene (yes, I might coin that term), we seem to find new sign up deals every week from some new app that offers us $3 lunches. We are likely destroying that young startup’s customer acquisition costs, but eating good food along the way!
• Biking, running, and other outdoor pursuits: While it’s 92° outside today in NYC, and I won’t be setting foot outside besides to get to and from the subway, I’ve spent several Saturday mornings on long bike rides with classmates. As someone from New England, I was skeptical of NYC biking and outdoors, but it turns out there are some great ways to quickly bike out of the city onto beautiful back roads, and great running paths along the rivers. These adventures have provided a break from the noise of the city, and continue to be a great way to get to know my classmates – what better way to do it than while you’re all wearing spandex biking gear?

Dumpling tours: Yes, an actual class activity. It turns out that the leader of NYC’s top dumpling tour is a classmate. He’s a highly rated AirBnB experiences guide, and knows all the spots to hit in Chinatown. We’re lucky to have such diversely skilled classmates.

This year is flying by. I’m a solid 3 weeks into the Tech MBA at Stern, and it’s time for finals! It’s crazy to think that I’m already almost done with two of my classes.

Since classes are on my mind, I’ll use this first post to talk a bit about my initial impressions of the academic experience at Stern in the Tech MBA. Though I was thrilled to be coming back to school, I spent the months leading up to May dreading the idea of sitting in a lecture hall. At work I was that annoying coworker who would get up and start pacing around conference rooms 10 minutes into a meeting. How on earth would I sit still for hours of classes? Luckily, it turns out my fears were unfounded. Here are a few aspects of the program that have helped:

The classes are highly interactive – but not in a scary way. It was easy to let my mind wander during undergrad differential equations class. I can’t do that at Stern. The professors expect active participation, but not the type where you’re just regurgitating numbers or facts – they want us to share our experiences and opinions. Given the diversity of our class, this allows us to all draw from our range of backgrounds, experiences, and failures. This leads to reason #1 why I’ve been able to sit still in Stern classes: They are engaging and participatory in a way that makes you want to jump into the conversation.

Second, I quickly learned that our course content is highly relevant and thoughtful. In an era when issues such as workplace gender discrimination and corporate ethics are far from solved, I am glad to see us facing some of these issues head on. When I saw a class called “Leadership” on my schedule, I figured I was in for a lot of fluff. The first time Professor Nate Pettit opened his mouth however, I instantly knew my assumption was wrong. We don’t talk about how to give the punchiest PowerPoint presentation – instead, we focus on issues like barriers to communication, cultivating positive culture, leading effective change, and how to have difficult conversations (yes, he makes you practice!).

So that leads to reason #2 why I can sit through classes: the professors are astoundingly thoughtful about why material is important to creating strong leaders, and focus on content that resonates with our past experiences and future aspirations.

Lastly, Stern is an oasis away from a deluge of work emails. I am taking notes on paper for the first time in probably 10 years. I still can’t read my own handwriting, but putting away the laptop, putting my iPhone on do not disturb, and focusing on all the things that will further me professionally brings me to reason #3 I can sit through classes: I’m never going to get this opportunity again, and so far the program is filling the exact gaps I came here to address.

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!

Why do an MBA? That is the question everyone I met in the last year has asked me: I am 32 years old (so older than most of the MBA candidates), I have two Masters Degrees from good French universities, and I had a job that I was passionate about.

My only answer: because I want more! Not more money like most people seem to think, but more experiences, more options, more adventures. Because YES ! Having an MBA open doors, especially in the US market. I started to realize it when I was applying for jobs in the US market and in every single description of the jobs I was interested in, was the mention: “ MBA a plus.”

But I also knew that I did not want to do a regular MBA. I did not want to be away from the professional world for two years. I was at the age and had the professional experience where I could apply for part-time EMBAs, but I wanted the experience of the full-time program. Moreover, I knew that I wanted to work in the Tech industry, and the Tech world is moving so fast that it forces you to be flexible and to adapt. So I started to look online at MBA options, and I found that a one year MBA program was just created by Stern. That was just a perfect fit.

And what is more exciting than being part of the inaugural class of the NYU Tech MBA? Being the first class gives you the opportunity to shape the model for future generations. It is also fascinating to be an agent of change because one-year-MBAs are a new offer created by business schools to answer the demands of companies and students alike.  I can say that I feel as though I am a part of a startup experience and that’ s exciting!

I just fell in love with the NYU Tech MBA program. It gave me the option to get a degree from one of the best business schools worldwide, live in my favorite city in the world and be part of one of the leading innovative programs the MBA world has seen in the last decade.

So I decided to do it! But what I did not realize was how hard it would be to get in. I was used to being an excellent student in France. I was the class president every year with great grades … but facing the GMAT and this entirely new way to think (especially the multiple choice questions) was more than challenging! But I did it, and I won’t share with you how many times I took the GMAT but let’s just say that at the end the employee center knew my name.

So when I received the acceptation Letter from NYU, I was ecstatic!

Little to say that it was just the beginning of an intense journey: getting my student visa, moving across the country (I lived in San Francisco), and leaving my job were challenging tasks, but the help I received from the NYU Offices made it almost effortless.

And so on May 10th, 2018, the day before the International Student Orientation day, I was excited to begin my MBA journey and to meet my classmates. At the same time, I was nervous about getting back to school, meeting my classmates and this whole new world in front of me.  However, after 5 minutes in the classroom, I already made five jokes with the others students in my class, we all laughed, and I felt at home.

 

The moment we’ve all been waiting for is finally here… we kicked off our NYC Immersion summer project with Citi Ventures. Over the next few weeks, our cohort will be split out into small groups to brainstorm solutions to some of the city’s biggest problems. While we won’t be able to implement our solutions as part of our coursework in the next few weeks, the goal is to use design thinking methods to identify relevant problems and start quantifying them. Once we have identified a problem we would like to pursue, we will explore tackling it from a holistic, tech perspective and distill the business risks and opportunities into a presentation.

We met with thought leaders in the “smart city” space to help us identify unforeseen challenges in our ideas and to talk through current efforts underway that may help or hinder our work. New York, like any major metropolitan area, is full of opportunities for improvement. Cities are controlled by local governments and are often slower to implement major technology improvements primarily due to their heavy focus on tight budgets. My group was directed to focus on the government as our primary “customer.” That being the case, we’re exploring the ways in which we can create sustainable solutions that last for many years and are easy to sell to stakeholders with clear, quantifiable results.

The idea of a “smart city” sounds new and trendy, especially with projects in the works like Google’s Sidewalk Labs, however, cities have been undergoing massive technological improvements for generations. Nevertheless, this is the first time in modern history we’ve been able to combine the efforts of urban innovation with the internet. We are at a turning point in time when we can collect vast amounts of data, even if we don’t know what we’re going to do with it quite yet. This data includes metrics on the basics such as temperature, humidity, and air pollution, but also expands to micro levels including street-level noise and light pollution, traffic flows, and consumer behavior. Collecting this type of data today will allow data scientists in the short-term future to analyze this data to predict future trends, along with what kind of impact we can have on it. Successfully predicting the human impact on city-wide efforts allows us to focus our efforts on the most pressing tasks at hand.

As part of our NYC Immersion summer project, we are exploring some of the ways in which major cities are starting this process and how it will shape the future of business. While the primary consumers and collectors of this data are inherently municipal and public governments, the private sector is beginning to fund projects in the effort to solve societal problems with innovative, tech solutions while building positive brand associations. We are trusting companies to use this data to help solve everyday problems that ultimately benefit society and it will be fascinating to see how this plays out as new solutions are built.

My group is excited to kick off this phase of the summer project and we will be finalizing a version-controlled project charter this week. We have approximately 5 weeks left in the summer semester to complete this project and are looking forward to presenting our proposal to professors, business leaders, and team members at Citi Ventures.

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!

It’s been a remarkably busy summer and it’s continuing to fly by. Summer in New York is certainly toasty, but we were lucky enough to get a 4-day weekend to cool off. A colleague in the Tech MBA program recently posted the following update on LinkedIn that really put things in perspective:

As of today, we have completed 6 weeks of Stern’s 1-year Tech MBA. During this time, we completed 5 courses, 30 assignments, 5 group projects, 5 immersions, 5 presentations and countless readings.

The volume of work that we’re completing over the summer semester is not trivial. We’re cruising through 18 credits and learning about several subjects including finance, leadership, strategy, big data, and economics. While we’re only scratching the surface of some of these subjects, the fall and spring semesters offer the opportunity to dive deeper into disciplines and specializations that we’re passionate about. I’m really enjoying this high-speed approach to learning. The classes are long, and the homework stream is constant, but it’s amazing what Stern professors can compress into six or twelve 3-hour classes when they are asked to.

We’ll be switching to a more “normal” grad school schedule once the fall semester begins. This means that classes will be taught through the entire semester and the pace of each class will be less accelerated. That being the case, other on- and off-campus activities will start gaining steam. The 2-year students will be back on campus from their internships (or just starting school at Stern) so the social outings are set to increase tenfold. Clubs will be packed with new members and the student government will be back together coordinating events. In addition to this, recruiting for specific industries begins in the fall and I’ll be seeing more of my classmates in their best interview attire between classes.

A large part of business school at Stern is spent meeting and networking with the NYU community including other students, alumni, and professors. While I was searching for the perfect MBA program, a constant theme was the quality of the network that I would have access to. I knew Stern had a large network, but I didn’t understand just how welcoming it would be. Connecting with the NYU community is encouraged regardless of who you’re reaching out to. From the first day of orientation it’s embedded into the culture that we are a strong community that supports each other during our time at Stern and long after we graduate. Apart from forming friendly connections within our cohort, we’re encouraged to reach out to Sternies who may be able to help us learn more about where we want to be or what we want to do, whether they are students in the other programs or recent alumni at our target companies.

Before I started at Stern, I was reluctant to actively network. I did what was required to thrive in my career, but rarely stepped out of my comfort zone. I felt somewhat awkward reaching out to people in a strictly professional manner, sometimes secretly hoping they could help me further my career. I assumed that if done incorrectly that it would come off as desperate, inauthentic, or self-promoting. My assumptions were quickly challenged – everyone I’ve reached out to has been thrilled to help me navigate the next year and upcoming recruiting season.

What I have learned is that networking is ultimately a two-way street. When I put myself in the shoes of a prospective mentor or if I were called upon to help a student, I would happily do so. Many working professionals enjoy sharing their experiences and relish helping students avoid making mistakes that they may have made. Often times, the advice they have to offer can only be given by someone who has lived through a specific unique experience. They will likely also be curious about what we are learning at Stern and how the landscape of MBAs is changing in real time.

Networking is a major piece of the business school experience and a large network offers opportunity. However, filtering through a large list of contacts to find the right mentors is up to you. Once you have identified who you would like to meet, whether it be through a school’s database or LinkedIn, reaching out to them in a clear and professional manner to ensure that you can create a mutually beneficial relationship is the next step. I’ve already made several connections through NYU and plan to continue to do so until graduation and beyond.