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Networking with Alums & Current Students

Steven is a current Tech MBA student, specializing in Financial Instruments & Markets and Management of Technology & Operations. He comes from a background in tech consulting at Deloitte where he was implementing financial software to complete full cycle digital transformations. He is involved on campus with many clubs including OutClass and Management Consulting Association.

At my last job, my coach told me when we first met, “Networking is part of work,” and this insight has always stuck with me. Networking is so important in all of our interactions because it open doors and leads to so many opportunities. I started my networking with Stern Alumni and current students about a year before I came to NYU. I wanted to get a feel of what the experience was going to be like, both from an education and social perspective, and to see where their MBA took them. These interactions led to so many lasting friendships and great professional relationships. 

At the end of the day, people like to help other people when you reach out. I would say don’t be afraid to ask others for a quick call or coffee chat, because you don’t know where this will lead. In part of my networking, pre-NYU, I learned about so many great opportunities that Stern had to offer such as specialized courses, clubs and recruiting. Now that I am at Stern, I have been able to broaden my network with so many clever aspirational classmates that have come from a wealth of industries. Having these friends with so much experience across different business backgrounds feels like I am being set up for success to easily and effectively execute professional dealings in the future as my career grows.

Through networking with current students and alumni, I realized that so many of us come to NYU without a clear understanding of what we want to do post MBA and how so many of us fluctuate with what will do professionally throughout our time at Stern. I was able to get insights into so many different industries and hear what others did through these connections. When I decided that I wanted to pivot careers from all of these chats, I was able to leverage my relationships with current classmates that came from the industry to help set me up with what I needed to do to be successful in this transition and actually get me ramped up for the career change. I was then able to lean on alumni to help connect me with leaders in the industry that would support me and be willing to take me under their wing. Ultimately, it has led for an easy transition into a new role. 

Overall, networking is important! You never know who can help you or who you can help one day. Be confident in reaching out to others because this will lead to so many lifelong friendships and professional relationships that will always be part of your network.

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Company Visits & Beyond

Christy Kim is a MBA candidate at NYU Stern’s Andre Koo Tech MBA program, specializing in Business Analytics and Product Management. Prior to Stern, she worked at Deloitte Consulting, driving large-scale data and analytics transformations for clients across various industries. She additionally brings a background in product marketing, alliances, and tech sales and graduated from Duke University.

As a prospective candidate, you have two options:

  1. MBA experience with a summer internship (traditional 2-year program)
  2. MBA experience with multiple in-semester projects for top companies (welcome to our world!)

If I were presented today with the same options above, I would still choose option B in a heartbeat. Here are the 5 reasons why I believe our experiential learning curriculum provides above and beyond what can be gained through a summer internship alone:

1. GUARANTEED ‘INTERNSHIPS’ WITH TOP COMPANIES – and no recruiting or interviews required! Our 2-year MBA counterparts spend their first year recruiting for their summer internships; however, we fortunately had the following in-semester project opportunities land in our laps as part of our experiential learning courses:

A Dream Team: Pfizer Group A!
  • ‘Tech Immersion’ (Summer): Pfizer, KPMG
  • ‘Tech Solutions’ (Fall): 13 companies across various industries and of all sizes – including Waze, IKEA, PayPal, and Roku
  • [Optional] ‘Endless Frontier Labs’ (Fall & Spring): In place of ‘Tech Solutions’, you have the opportunity to take this course for hands-on work with Life Sciences, Digital Tech and Deep Tech startups

Through the above, some students have even found full-time employment opportunities with their respective companies!

2. BOOST YOUR LINKEDIN/RESUME. Through our experiential learning projects we act as consultants to the companies listed above. This is outstanding real world work experience which helps build our skills and our resume. We can also share our success during the recruiting process.

3. LEARN, APPLY, MAXIMIZE. The beauty of our experiential learning curriculum is that the course lessons are directly aligned to our project expectations and deliverables. For example, we had the following interactive sessions over the summer to help with our client deliverable preparations: 

In addition, we also had the opportunity to apply our learnings from our core courses (e.g. Entrepreneurship, Strategy) to our projects as well. This chronological, methodological yet practical approach to learning is one that I have yet to experience in my undergraduate years or professional life.

4. FAIL SAFE, LEARN FAST – a key, unique benefit of the experiential learning experience. With formal summer internships, there may be less opportunity for interns to ‘fail safe’ as their individual return offers are on the line. Through the Tech MBA program, our experiential learning curriculum allows us to:

  • Consult for top companies with a focus on innovation, experimentation, and learning (shoutout to our professor, J.P. Eggers, for always ensuring that our client project direction stayed on course for learning maximization!)
  • Receive continuous direction and feedback from our clients and project leadership (e.g. we had review/feedback sessions every 3-4 weeks)
  • Collaborate and lead in a small group setting with our classmates (e.g. my group maintained rotating leaders on a weekly basis)

    On-site visit and guest speaker session at Google!
Myself and Divya Mehta’s mock pitch for Goldman Sachs Accelerate!

5. TIME TO EXPLORE (& CONFIRM). The summer ‘Tech Immersion’ course served to be a great kickoff to the exploration of my post-MBA career path. I had planned to use this time in the MBA to confirm my continued career in tech consulting or explore other paths (specifically product management) that may be a good fit with my long-term career goals. The course not only  helped re-confirm my continued passion for client services (i.e. Pfizer project), but also provided a great introduction/sneak peek into the world of product management. I plan to build on these experiences and continue the exploration through the rest of the program; I am excited to see what the future holds for not only myself, but also for our entire cohort!

 

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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!

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NYU and NYC Opportunities Galore

One of my many reasons to choose the Tech MBA program was the immersive opportunities the program offered. Over the summer, I visited over ten companies ranging from the prominent Union Square Ventures and Deloitte Digital Consulting to the digital arm of the massive JPMorgan Chase and unicorn IPOs such as Uber. I also had the opportunity to chat with the founders of Handy and real estate startup Nestio and visit the NYU accelerators buzzing with innovation.

These immersive experiences have given me a better sense of the opportunities available to me at the intersection of business and technology, provided me with a network of alumni and professionals to seek guidance from and have given me a better understanding of which companies have cultures that aligned with my values.

The VC focused sessions were among my favorites, in particular, the one at the Union Square Ventures, a leading venture capital firm based in New York. We attended a speaker session, led by Albert Wenger, who is a partner at the firm. Dr. Wenger is a serial entrepreneur and was the president of del.icio.us, a USV backed bookmarking service and is also a board member of companies such as Twilio, MongoDB, and Clarifai. It was fascinating to listen to his experiences in the industry and about his thoughts on universal basic income. It was interesting to learn about USV’s thesis-driven investing and how their commitment has changed focus over the years from application layers of the internet and network effect companies to decentralized blockchain-focused technologies and brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being. He explained about the network effects on the B2B side by discussing an interesting company in his portfolio, Sift Science, that uses machine learning to detect and prevent online fraud and abuse. Following that was a stimulating discussion about his book, “The World After Capital,” and how he envisions the potential of blockchain methodology and cryptocurrency to move money creation to the individual level to offer a universal basic income (UBI).

I came into this program not entirely knowing what to expect. I had anticipated that my interests would lie at the intersection of business and technology and was fully expecting my options to be limited to a few career opportunities. Now that I have embarked on this journey and after completing my first four months, I can confidently say that this program has opened my eyes to the multitude of opportunities that NYC and NYU can provide.