Meet The McGill Desautels MBA Class Of 2020

BRINGING THE CORE CURRICULUM TOGETHER

Looking back on 2018, the school made several strides. The first involved the renovation of the Don E. Armstrong building, which now houses the MBA and Master’s students. In addition, the MBA program introduced a new integration guide role, which will be held by Corey Phelps, a professor of strategy and associate dean of executive education. According to Alfred Jaeger, academic director of the MBA and professional MBA programs, the guide will help first-years to pull together everything they learned during the core phase of the program.

“Professor Phelps will lead a series of intensive reflection and discussion sessions with students that focus on comparing, contrasting and connecting the different frameworks and tools within and across the core courses,” Jaeger explains. “The purpose of these sessions is to help students actively construct an integrated understanding of the foundational domains of business knowledge. The core phase of the MBA program will also culminate with a case competition. Professor Phelps will prepare student teams for the capstone experience by coaching them on how to integrate what they learned from the core phase using a disciplined process for solving complex business problems and selling the solutions.”

The biggest news, however, comes courtesy of a $25 million dollar gift from philanthropist Aldo Bensadoun. The money was used to spur the growth of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management, which opened in 2018 and is expected to grow to 170 students by 2021 (not to mention nine faculty members and an academic chair). According to Dean Bejeux-Besnainou, the school is designed to capitalize on Desautels’ expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and big data. The goal, she adds, is to turn Bensadoun into the premier program for retail.

A STANDALONE OPERATION TO TRAIN THE NEXT GENERATION OF RETAILERS

“The Bensadoun School will offer innovative academic programs, created in partnership with leading retail players in North America, China, Europe and other parts of Asia,” Bejeux-Besnainou tells P&Q. “A defining feature of the School’s academic programs will be experiential learning opportunities – through co-op placements, worldwide summer internships with partner retailers, a Retail Observatory and most notably, a Retail Innovation Lab.”

The lab is a key element of the program, she adds. It’ll provide a venue for retail partners to conduct “test drives” to gauge consumer behavior as well as evaluate the effectiveness of new processes, products and technologies such as VR and eye-tracking. Retailers themselves can even open pop up stores in the lab to assess new concepts and innovations with support from school faculty, researchers, and students. Located in downtown Montreal, the lab will also deliver data back to the school that can be used in cases and research articles to keep students current on the most cutting edge practices in the field.

In practice, the Retail Innovation Lab will create a virtuous cycle, growing talent in the retail field while attracting the top experts and practitioners in the process. At the same time, it will double as a retail operation that offers both a brick-and-mortar and online retail experience, Bejeux-Besnainou says, to serve downtown consumers and beyond.

“This Lab will provide students an opportunity to learn first-hand about managing all levels of a retail operation using the latest technologies. It will link directly to the study of consumer behavior, experiential marketing, omni channel retailing, pricing analytics, efficacy of different payment systems, global value chain management, all while generating data sets for research, study and courses.”

A MENTORING AND COACHING CULTURE

The Retail Innovation Lab isn’t the only unique wrinkle to the Desautels MBA. Each year, the school hosts the McGill International Portfolio Challenge (MIPC). Boasting $50,000 in cash prizes, the case competition focuses on pensions, portfolio design and institutional asset management. This past year, student teams submitted proposals to fix an underfunded pension plan, which were reviewed by over two dozen executives from leading firms in the field.

Along the same lines, Desautels also offers an investment management program, a specialist stream within its finance concentration. Aside from coursework, the program features the Desautels Capital Management (DCM), a portfolio of three investments with $3.5 million dollars in assets under management. Completely student-run, DCM exposes students to both the technical and practical aspects of investing, ranging from making pitches to evaluating performance, giving students a head start with practical experience in the roles they’ll eventually hold.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to career preparation. Notably, every MBA candidate is paired with an alumni mentor, who can introduce them to their network while providing guidance on career paths and academic concerns. In addition, students receive regular coaching on everything from soft skills to job searches, with the school maintaining a 3:1 student-to-coach ratio in the full-time MBA program. One example is the Desautels Consulting Preparation program. Here, students work with a McKinsey alum on consulting cases and fit interviews, while also visiting firms in eastern Canada to get a feel for their opportunities and culture in the industry.

A FAMILY MEMBER, NOT A CUSTOMER

Indeed, Desautels is a high-touch MBA program. Anastasia Budaeva calls it a student-centric approach – one where “professors and advisors know every student’s background, career goals and aspirations, so they can provide personalized attention and advice as necessary.” Ly Thi Tuan Dinh frames it another way.

“At Desautels, I am treated not as a customer, but as a family member.”

That ethos extends to the students themselves, where the small class size and kindred spirits enable cohorts to jell sooner into a tight-knit community. “McGill has a solid network of alumni and students that are collaborative and supportive of each other,” says Ysa Cao, a Frenchwoman who scaled Mount Kilimanjaro despite a fear of heights. “For me, it’s important to be in an environment and a community where this is the case and where we share common values. It is in these types of environments where we can truly feel ourselves, and thus strive authentically toward our aspirations.”

THE PERFECT MIX TO START A BUSINESS

While Montreal has long grabbed attention with its cultural chic, the region also maintains a tradition of being a startup hub, with the region pivoting increasingly to the life sciences and AI. For the past 30 years, McGill has helped drive startup activity through the McGill Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurship, which ranks among the world’s best university-run incubators. The Centre also hosts the McGill Dobson Cup each April, which awards over $100,000 in seed funding. Over the past decade, cup alumni have created over 1,200 jobs and raised over $110 million dollars.

This support for entrepreneurial ventures appealed to Salvador Sanchez Jimenez, who plans to use what he learns to create an international brand.

“Most MBAs focus on building a curriculum and really stress “hireability”, he notes. “As an entrepreneur, however, I had to make sure that my MBA program offered the best chance to succeed at planning, launching and growing a business. McGill offers the perfect mix of tools to achieve my goal. Montreal is a cosmopolitan and multilingual city which provides countless markets and niches to cater. McGill offers numerous networking opportunities, both in and outside of the program. After 197 years, McGill University has consolidated its position as one of the most renowned schools in the world, and this prestige and reputation translates into credibility for its graduates and their projects…I wanted to choose the place that would provide me with the best chance of starting a successful business. I think I found that place in McGill.”

While Sanchez Jimenez is going all in with entrepreneurship, he still sees a larger picture of where he hopes his Desautels MBA will take him. “It really doesn’t matter if I end up working in a different industry or even if I work for somebody else; as long as I believe in the cause, I will happily wake up every day to go to work.”

What led these professionals to enter business schools? Which programs did they also consider? What strategies did they use to choose their MBA program? What was the major event that defined them? Find the answers to these questions and many more in the in-depth profiles of these incoming MBA candidates. 

 

Student	Hometown	Alma Mater	Employer
Laura Botelho de Carvalho	Belo Horizonte, Brazil	Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais	P3N Projetos Ambientais
Anastasia Budaeva	Ulan-Ude, Russia	Moscow State University	University of Manchester
Ysa Cao	Senlis, France	Concordia University	RBC Royal Bank
Sean Coleman	Montreal, Canada	McGill University	Bell Media
Jiefu Liu	Leshan, China	Sichuan Normal University	Alibaba Group
Mohit Mehta	New Delhi, India	Delhi University	Ernst & Young LLP
Olivia Roy	Pembroke, Canada	Queen’s University	PIA Automation
Salvador Sanchez Jimenez	Guadalajara, Mexico	ITESM	Tanttemenne
Ly Thi Tuan Dinh	Hue, Vietnam	College of Medicine and Pharmacy	Eli Lilly & Company
Mandy (Meng Meng) Wang	Montreal, Canada	McGill University	TD Asset Management
Kevin Wijaya	Jakarta, Indonesia	Cologne Business School	Shopee International
Hanqing Zhao	Beijing, China	Glion Institute of Higher Education	Ogilvy & Mather Marketing Communications Consulting

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