What Makes The Georgetown MBA Experience Unique

Byrne: The skills that you’re describing are exactly the skills that a project manager needs to have and, of course, that is a major role for which tech firms hire MBAs.

Malaviya: Absolutely and that is one of the reasons why we are excited about Amazon coming into our backyard.

We already have a strong relationship with Amazon. As I mentioned, the company is one of the five biggest recruiters, and you know we are looking to really strengthen that relationship. We are actively looking to create partnership opportunities, by engaging them in developing our curriculum, but also engaging them to develop experiential opportunities. Maybe they can come in and do a hackathon or a case competition or something. We want to give giving them more opportunity to really get a sense and feel for the talent we have in the program.

Byrne: So that’s going to be a big, big game changer for Georgetown because it’s not only Amazon coming here to employ 25,000 people. In all likelihood, there will be an ecosystem of firms and startups that will crop up around the company’s presence in Northern Virginia.

Malaviya: Absolutely, and six years ago we created a center for entrepreneurship and that has really helped us create this presence in the broader ecosystem of technology, and many of our students are capitalizing on that. That is the type of collaboration we feel happening with the presence of Amazon coming into the marketplace. Amazon will help spur that kind of entrepreneurial activity in the greater D.C. and Northern Virginia area.

Byrne: I also know you’re planning to infuse in your curriculum, both in the core and in the electives, more tech-focused content. Is that initiative a function of technology’s growing importance to the economy today, or is that because Amazon is putting its second headquarters within five miles of your campus?

Malaviya: A little bit of both. I think the real answer is that we know the future of work is changing, so we need to ask as an educational institution, what is the impact of technology on the future of education? How does the future of work change the future of education? We’ve been asking that question throughout the school and looking to create relevant changes within the curriculum. We’ve already started introducing new electives that touch on some of these topics such as courses in blockchain and fintech. We started a new elective on data management and SQL and another one on data analytics and Python and things like that.

There are several electives that are now on the books already. We are now looking to see what should be the infusion of technology in the core curriculum. Is there a standard software platform that all of our core classes should be using, the common platform that every course should use? Similarly, we’re looking at what should be the industry coverage in the courses. Do we still do the old class in consumer goods or should we now start thinking about more digital businesses that are taught in marketing, finance and accounting courses?

So that’s the discussion that is going on right now. In the next year or two, there is going to be a sort of ground-up change in many of the core classes, if not all that will reflect a greater technology focus, obviously because Amazon is going to be here, but also because the future of work is clearly changing and we need to respond to that.

Byrne: You’re also going to have the opportunity to do a lot of action learning projects with Amazon and your students.

Malaviya: That is a very important point because we do believe strongly that experiential learning for the MBAs is extremely crucial and critical. It’s an activity that helps build the right muscles. Currently, we have an experiential learning agreement with the World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC). They provide about a dozen projects every year that our students work on. We are currently with CitiBank and IBM to create additional experiential leaning opportunities with their local offices, so definitely Amazon would be a company we would like to partner with on that front.

Byrne: This is an exciting time for Georgetown and it goes beyond the school’s location, its heritage as a Jesuit institution, the strong job placement rates, the fact that you’re going to infuse even more tech content into both your core and elective offerings and the fact that Amazon is coming to town. You also have the recent finding in the corporate recruiter survey by Bloomberg Businessweek.

Malaviya: According to the recruiters, 3,500 of them, Georgetown MBAs are the best-trained graduates from MBA programs in the world. Hey, we will take that and we will try to explain that to everyone that they should come and look at our talent.

Byrne: Prashant, you can only go up when Amazon comes.

Malaviya: So you would hope.

Byrne: Prashant, thank you so much for joining us.

Malaviya: Thank you, John.

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