NYU Stern’s One-Year Tech MBA: 55% Women, 100% Employment

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

The program’s 52 credits are delivered in 12 months – May to May. (Stern’s traditional two-year MBA has 60 credits). Without an internship, experiential learning is built into each component of the STEM-designated program.

Students complete a 10- to 12-week business core with foundational classes in leadership, marketing, accounting and strategy; and a tech core with courses such as Technical Product Management, Emerging Technologies, Business Analytics, DevOps and Software Engineering, and others. They can further specialize with Stern’s portfolio of more than 200 electives.

They also complete four industry intensive projects and immersions called Stern Solutions, the program’s suite of experiential courses. These are designed in conjunction with the program’s Tech Advisory Board, comprised of 15 industry leaders from New York and beyond. They include executives from Deloitte, Salesforce, Mckinsey & Company, IBM, and the program’s namesake – Andre J.L. Koo, chairman of the Chailease Group.

The summer New York City Immersion is a tour of NYC’s tech and entrepreneurship ecosystem, Ramos says. Industry leaders visit the classrooms throughout the semester, and the students, in turn, visit a variety of company headquarters. They complete a six-week project in design thinking that seeks to solve an industry problem.

In the first year, for example, the MBAs went to Goldman Sachs to learn about Marcus, the firm’s digital wealth management platform, then still in development. “I remember the students leaving and being like, ‘Wow. I never thought I’d want to work at a bank,’ but hearing more about how technology is revamping the industry, they could really see themselves there,” Ramos says.

In Tech Solutions, students work in small groups over the course of the fall semester to develop and pitch a technology-enabled solution to a real-world business problem. NYU brings in companies of all different sizes from varying industries, all with unique challenges.

Over two weeks in January, students go to Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles for the West Coast Immersion. So, you can imagine the companies they’re visiting: Think Microsoft, Amazon, Hulu, venture capital firms, and a host of startups.

“Coming out of that, I was able to be conversational about how different Amazon and Google approach problem solving. That kind of knowledge is sort of fundamental to how the tech industry works now,” Spielberg says. “Understanding how the behemoths work, understanding how the tiny companies down the street from them are approaching gaining market share. Those visits were really, really important.”

Students also complete a go-to-market strategy for innovation projects, creating and articulating a value proposition, determining revenue and costs forecasts, and building a sustainable strategy.

In the spring, students can enroll in other experiential Stern Solutions courses as electives. These may include Tech and the City, Stern Consulting Corps (SCC), or Consulting Lab: Branding + Innovation. In the popular elective Endless Frontier Labs (EFL) – tied to NYU’s 9-month accelerator program for outside ventures – MBAs work alongside industry mentors to help early-stage startups launch and scale their businesses. Say, for example, a startup has created a cool VR framework with applications that could work for both gaming or in medicine, MBAs may be assigned to research the viability of one or the other. All the while, they are being mentored by leaders in venture capital, angel investing, serial founders, innovators at large firms, and technical experts from around NYU.

About half of the MBAs who take the EFL elective are in the tech MBA program, Eggers says. “For students who want to start their own venture or want to work in venture capital, this course is a phenomenal experience.”

All of the experiential projects are tied closely to core curriculum of the tech MBA. “Traditional education has really separated the theoretical nature of academia and the practical nature of work,” Ramos says. “Our goal with experiential education is to deliver them in one product so we’re delivering the theory but also the skill sets they would have gotten in the world of work.”

A WOMAN IN TECH

One of the 26 women in this year’s class is Mahak Chhajer, 31, of India. She started her career in higher education; in fact, she was part of the founding team for Ashoka University, India’s first liberal arts university and one of its premier institutions today. Before enrolling at Stern, she was the founding associate director of the Asian Century Foundation, working to bring development lessons from East and Southeast Asia to her home country. Before the pandemic, her foundation was working on education-related policy briefs and priorities for the Indian government like using digital technologies in vocational skill training, for example.

“Working with universities, working with the government, literally everything is dependent on your in-person connections to people. When COVID happened, literally overnight, all of my programs shut down,” Chhajer tells P&Q. “It shook me up a little bit; it was a strong reminder of the fact that technology is more important than ever, and it’s not going anywhere.”

While it took a few months to adapt to pandemic shutdowns, Chhajer’s company ended up creating an ed tech platform – AsiaSlate –that enrolled more than 150 learners within three weeks of launch. Chhaljer was leading the team, but she didn’t feel like she was in a position to make some decisions because she didn’t have the background.

“This is something we discuss a lot in the Tech MBA program. I didn’t come in with this idea that I would suddenly start coding. But, I want to be able to talk about technology as an insider. I want to talk to the developers, talk to the coders, talk to the team, and really guide them and understand where the product needs to go.”

This semester, Chhaljer is working with a large company (which she can’t disclose) on an environmental sustainability project as part of the Tech Solutions immersion. Beyond just proposing a solution to the company, if their proposal is good enough, they’ll get the chance to actually see it put into action.

Because it’s just one year, recruitment begins very quickly. Chhaljer has already accepted a new position for after graduation: She will join McKinsey & Company’s Digital Consulting Practice in their San Francisco office.

“The kind of support the program gives was very valuable to me, both in finding the right resources quickly and how willing alumni are to give you time in the middle of their busy days,” she says.

“We don’t have a summer internship, but they help us actually be in a position where we are ready to interview. For me, this whole idea of paying it forward – that you will get help and support from these alumni and then you will help the next generation – is pretty special.”

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