The Curtain Is About To Rise On NYU Stern’s Big Mideast Venture: An Accelerated MBA In Abu Dhabi

POETS&QUANTS’ Q&A WITH ROBERT SALOMON, DEAN OF NYU ABU DHABI

P&Q: Where are things at right now in preparing for the first year of the NYU Abu Dhabi one-year MBA program, and what has the last year been like for you?

Robert Salomon: The last year has been an absolute whirlwind — in a good way. I’ve never had this kind of experience in my career before of trying to put together an entirely new program, and in some sense a new business school. So we’ve spent the last year hiring staff, administrators. We’ve spent the last year hiring faculty. We’re already up to 14 faculty members in C2 (Campus Center), in Abu Dhabi.

And we’re in the throes of the admissions process. So we went from when we announced it was, I think there were two people that were attached to the program at the time from a faculty and staff standpoint. Now we’re up to 32. And we have plans to grow that from there.

The first classes begin in January. Did you receive the volume of applications you’d hoped for?

The volume’s been excellent. We don’t release numbers until after the class is admitted, but the class is shaping up really, really, really strong. Once the class arrives in January, we’ll release all those data and class statistics.

But just to provide some specificity, for this first class we said that we were looking to have a class of around 50 students in this first cohort. And like I said, the class is shaping up nicely.

This program is unique in several ways, but I’d like to hear you talk about them. It’s fair to say that there’s nobody doing quite what you’re planning to be doing.

That’s fair. I can talk about it on several dimensions. We can talk about it in terms of location, program structure, the composition of the class. I’ll talk about all those things.

The way in which this program is slightly different than most full-time MBA programs is that this is a one-year, intensive full-time MBA program that goes straight through. It’s 12 months long, there’s no break. It starts in January and it ends in December. So structurally, it’s a little bit different than many other programs that are out there. I mean, there are a few other programs that are one year in length, at some schools, at some of our competitor schools, in fact. But that’s one thing that makes this unique.

Another thing that makes this unique is that it’s off-cycle in some sense. Typically, we’re accustomed to programs that start in September and end in May. That’s sort of the classic school-year cycle.

We are starting in January and ending in December, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because in the U.S. there is very much a hiring cycle. The hiring cycle starts in September. It usually starts with the financial institutions. Then in November, the consulting companies come by. Then in January you get the tech companies to come and interview. In other markets in Europe, in the Middle East, the hiring calendar isn’t as structured as it is in the United States. So we thought to ourselves, “Look, there’s nothing that says that the program has to be September to May. We can have a program that starts in January and ends in December, and that might speak to a whole set of students for whom that calendaring works better than what a standard academic calendar might look like.” So that’s another unique aspect of it.

And then there is the summer in New York.

There you go. The summer in New York, that I think is one of the things that we have at NYU, which is a true advantage as a university: We have what’s called the Global Network University with campuses in Shanghai, in Abu Dhabi, with study-away sites, with sites in London and Madrid and Accra, Ghana, and Buenos Aires, and Australia. So the nice thing is, we have the opportunity to bring the benefit of having that Network University to our students and allowing them to study in different places.

So for this program, we’re doing Abu Dhabi for nine months and New York for three months — eight and a half and three and a half, let’s call it.

So everybody in the program will come to New York. Where are you going to put them?

They’re going to all stay at my place. (laughs) One of the cool things about NYU too is that we have a fairly regular cycle. The students are here from September to May. So in the summer months when they leave the dorms, those dorm rooms are available and we will have capacity. So we will offer our students dorms, and there are even apartment-style dorms for graduate students that will be on offer for them as well, which is nice — especially for older students, graduate students in an MBA program.

We talked about target size for the cohort, but what about target student for the cohort? What are you looking for? Who are you looking for?

So that’s another thing that I was going to discuss as a difference maybe from this program versus, say, the New York program. One of the similarities between this program and the New York program is we’re looking for the best and the brightest from anywhere in the world. Just like the New York program, we’re looking for people who are intelligent, have the IQ factor and also the EQ factor. That for us is very important. We’re looking for folks, just like New York, who have 2 to let’s say 10-plus years’ worth of experience commensurate with a full-time MBA program.

But there is one difference. And the one difference is that we really are looking to identify people who are interested in building and developing their careers in the region, in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, in the broader Middle East. And there’s a couple of things that make that attractive. The first one is, if you look at the UAE and the Middle East as a region more broadly, it’s one of the fastest-growing regions in the world. One of the consistently growing regions in the world. There are people coming to the UAE from all over the world.

And there is a real desire in the UAE to attract talent — and not only attract talent, but keep talent there. And so we’re looking for folks who are smart, yes, have emotional intelligence, yes, but also who have a desire to contribute to the region in whatever way, shape, or form. So we’re not looking for local students to go to a local institution. This is going to be a global institution that’s looking to attract students from all over the world — but what they share in common is a desire to develop their careers in the region.

And stay after they graduate, right?

Yeah, it would be great if they stayed after they graduated. I mean, you can’t force anybody to stay anywhere. But yeah, it would be nice for us as an anchor institution in Abu Dhabi, to see our students graduate, stay, and flourish in the region.

For you to become a sort of feeder institution to the local industries, if that’s the way it works out.

And there are many! There are a lot of industries there.

When people think about that region, they probably think oil and gas first. But you also are going to have a focus on sustainability, right?

Consistent with our tradition in New York and how we grew up as a school, obviously finance will be a big component of what we do. And Abu Dhabi is a financial hub. It’s home to some of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. I think several of the top-10 largest sovereign wealth funds in the world are located in the UAE. Sophisticated financial institutions are located in the UAE, in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. So that’s one. Another is consulting. There’s a huge amount of consulting. All the large consulting firms, the BCGs, the Bains, the McKinseys, the KPMGs, the Kearneys, the PwCs, they all have hubs in the UAE and they all have large offices in the UAE.

You mentioned sustainability, and you mentioned oil and gas, and that has been a traditional industry there. But when I think about the UAE, they’re also one of the fastest-growing alternative energy markets in the world. For example, they have the largest solar farm in the world. So alternative energy is an industry that’s growing and growing very quickly there. Their sustainability at large is growing very quickly there. Tech of all sorts. FinTech, EdTech — they’re pioneers in both of those spaces.

Biotech is another area. I would say that biotech is probably more aspirational. They’re making investments in those areas. It’s not like a Boston or a New York or a San Francisco when it comes to biotech. It would be foolish of me to make that kind of comparison. But they do have aspirations there. And it’s a burgeoning group of pharma-biotech companies that are starting to locate there.

So there are lots of areas where we’re seeing interest among the students. And not only that, the employers in the region are very receptive to having a top U.S. business school in the market.

What would you say for someone who may not necessarily be on a track but who is interested in entrepreneurship and doing their own thing after this program? What might interest them about coming to Abu Dhabi?

That’s something that is another area that they’re very keen on in the UAE: entrepreneurship. And one of the things that NYU Abu Dhabi is extremely proud of is that on campus it has an accelerator called startAD.

Students will be able to connect with this accelerator, and there will be collaborations between Stern and Abu Dhabi — Stern and NYU Abu Dhabi and startAD and NYU Abu Dhabi — to promote the entrepreneurial education of our students. We have an entrepreneurship track. Students can study entrepreneurship and in addition to studying it, they can also engage with startAD to work with ventures that are already in their accelerator to get help on with ventures that they themselves are thinking about forming. So it’s nice to have that there.

There’s one other thing that I forgot to mention that maybe is slightly unique about the program. It’s not a unique concept — this concept has been around for a long time. But one of the things that we were very mindful of is that in having a one-year full-time MBA program that runs straight through with no break, there isn’t a natural internship. There’s no, ‘OK, you’re going to go off and do an internship for a little while and then come back to school.’ So what we’ve done is, we’ve built it into the full-time MBA: Students will be doing what we refer to as the signature internship projects where they will be paired with local organizations that need help on specific issues, real-world issues that they’re facing at the moment. We already have 19 projects, which is more than enough that we need for the 50 or so students that we’ll have, because we’ll be working in groups on these projects. And the students will work on real problems with organizations from the get-go.

So then the New York phase of the program will actually be a bit of a break.

Right. There are two projects that they’ll do during their time in the program. Signature Internship Project one, which is January to May, then a break in New York, and then they do another project: Signature Internship Project two, which runs from the end of August to the end of December. For an example of the kind of projects, one of the projects is that some student groups will be paired with startups: Those students who are interested in entrepreneurship can get paired with a startup for their project so that they help the startup.

If you think about a two-year program and you take out all the breaks — take out the summer, take out the six-week winter New Year break, take out the one week or two weeks that they get for spring break here and the days they get there, it actually turns into a 12, 13-month program. That’s exactly what an MBA is. So we’re just taking out all those breaks and helping people get it done.

One thing I would say is that this also helps people stay out of the workforce for a shorter period of time. So they’re not out of the workforce for two years. They’re only out of the workforce for one. So they get their MBA which is equivalent to an MBA that they might get at any other top institution, and they get it in a shorter period of time. And so they minimize the amount of time that they’re out of the office so they can get back to work and start building their careers again.

Faster is what people want.

I think that’s the way the market’s going. If you ask me, I think 10, 15, 20 years from now, I’d say half the programs will be one-year programs and half the programs will be two-year programs.

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