Meet Emory Goizueta’s MBA Class Of 2023

A Q&A WITH BRIAN MITCHELL

In 2022, Poets&Quants named Emory Goizueta a ‘Business School To Watch’ due to its deep investments in DEI curriculum. In November, the program unveiled a student-run VC fund to support minority entrepreneurs. Before that, the school had launched a DEI concentration. Two years ago, Goizueta made headlines by launching the John Lewis Case Competition dedicated to social justice issues. Those are just a few developments at the school. Last fall, P&Q reached out to Brian Mitchell, associate dean of the full-time MBA program to learn about what first-years and future applicants can expect from the school. In addition, P&Q requested additional information on Goizueta’s legendary experiential learning programming, receiving statements on IMPACT360 and the Leadership Reaction Course from Lynne Segall (associate dean of Goizueta IMPACT) and Ken Keen (senior lecturer in organization & management, associate dean for leadership and retired Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army) respectively. Here are their insights on some of the most critical aspects of the Goizueta experience.

P&Q: What are the two most exciting developments at your program and how will they enrich the MBA experience for current and future MBAs?

Mitchell: “We recently launched two new institutes which represent the future of Goizueta, and are already engaging students at the highest levels. The Roberto C. Goizueta Institute for Business & Society represents an elevated commitment by the Goizueta Business School to explore how businesses can create long-term value, while addressing the most significant social challenges of our time. The Roberto C. Goizueta Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation emphasizes critical inquiry, where ideas are developed to serve fundamental societal needs, executed according to sound business principles, and conceptualized in ways that open possibilities and spark imagination.  Both institutes engage Student Fellows to add experiential elements to the academic foundations.”

P&Q: What are two biggest differentiating features of your MBA program? How do each of these enrich the learning of your MBA students?

Mitchell: “The first major differentiator of the Goizueta student experience is our deliberately small cohort size of approximately 165 students. We are an intimate community with high-touch academic and experiential programming that would be very difficult to achieve in a program of 500, or even 250, students. Our size allows our students to have incredible access to our faculty, and fosters relationships that endure well beyond business school. Another differentiator is the breadth of career opportunities students discover through our Career Management Center (CMC). We are known as a “consulting school”, but our strengths in finance, marketing, technology and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have made Goizueta an attractive recruiting target for firms of all types.”

P&Q: In recent years, there have been several areas that have gained increased prominence in business school programming, including STEM, analytics, artificial intelligence and digital disruption. How does your full-time MBA program integrate these concepts across its curriculum?

Mitchell: “Many of our MBA students select Goizueta’s STEM-certified Business Analysis major, which gives them the opportunity to select elective courses providing “Tools and Methods” and “Applications” to form a well-rounded analytical academic experience. An “Analytics Mindset” is an essential component of Goizueta’s strategy and our MBA program integrates the expertise from faculty members who also teach in our Master’s of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) and our upcoming Master’s of Analytical Finance (MAF) programs. Courses such as “Coding for Business Insight” and “Digital and Social Media Strategy” are among several offerings addressing the realities of the current and future economies.”

P&Q: What have you learned during the pandemic and the shift to hybrid or remote learning and how will they impact the MBA experience going forward?

Mitchell: “Last academic year taught us so much about how adaptable we can be and how resilient our faculty, staff and students are. But it also reinforced the tremendous value of our core competency, which is delivering an exceptional, high-touch, in-person MBA experience. As we have welcomed our students back to campus, we are operating with this in mind, and taking extra care to emphasize the advantage of a tight-knit academic community. We will apply some of the lessons learned from last year about using technology to extend our reach with alumni and other stakeholders around the world (prospective students, guest speakers, etc.). But to be clear, our main lessons learned from remote learning were about how special the Goizueta MBA experience is when we can be together.”

P&Q: What is your most popular course among MBAs? What makes it so unique and so attractive to MBAs?

Mitchell: “Several of our required core courses are extremely popular, including “Goizueta IMPACT”, which matches each first-year student with a real-life client project to work on complex, strategic challenges. Among our elective courses, Professor Renee Dye recently introduced a course titled “Innovation Strategy”, which has become one of our most popular MBA electives.  Our students are excited about the Innovation Strategy course because it gives them state-of-the-art, highly practical training in how to manage innovation inside large, incumbent businesses.  Professor Dye was the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at a publicly traded company before she joined our faculty, and she has extensive hands-on experience in building successful innovation programs from the ground up.”

P&Q: Your IMPACT360 projects and Leadership Reaction course at Fort Benning are considered hallmarks of the Goizueta MBA by alumni. What makes this initiative so special? What have students told you are the big takeaways from them?

Segall: “IMPACT360 is a two-semester, core experience which is required for graduation. This is unique – only 6 schools require project-based learning for graduation. The first semester focuses on preparing the students for projects and ultimately their careers by teaching them a structured approach to problem solving, how to communicate with influence, and how to organize and navigate the work of a problem-solving team. The projects are semester-long in the spring.

We ensure success by 1) securing solid projects, 2) assembling strong, diverse teams, and 3) providing a strong ‘ecosystem’ of support

1) Securing Solid Projects: We ensure our students are set up as advisors. We focus on ensuring the project has a strategic focus where the organization is seeking recommendations on a course of action. Our goal is to offer our students a portfolio of options across a range of business disciplines and industries. We work with organizations of most shapes / sizes – from medium/large nonprofits to start-ups (post revenue), mid-sized private and Fortune 100-500 corporations.

2) Assembling Strong, Diverse Teams: Students express their interest in projects after attending Project Reveal, an event where all of the project sponsors “pitch” their projects. We create diverse teams using a proprietary algorithm that is designed to match student interest with projects to ensure every student is working on a project of ‘high interest.’ They find out their project and meet their team at a fun event called “Team Reveal” a few weeks later.

3) Providing A Strong ‘Ecosystem’ Of Support:

* We source projects across a variety of business disciplines and industries and organize them into electives so the faculty advisor is a subject matter expert.

* Every project has a Goizueta Business School librarian assigned to it to ensure thorough and quality research is completed as an input into final recommendations.

* Every project has a 2nd year “IMPACT Coaching Fellow” coach who attends team and client meetings and coaches the team on both content and team dynamics. This is a great leadership development experience for 2nd year MBAs.

* We hold several consultations throughout the semester with external advisors who coach the teams on content and communication.

* All programmatic aspects of IMPACT360 are led by a student team of 2^nd year MBAs.

The spring semester culminates in Goizueta IMPACT Showcase – a competition of the top ~15-20 teams. We have 250-300 business leaders, faculty and staff judge the teams over a full-day event.

Keen: “The Leadership Reaction Course is a unique experiential team and leadership learning opportunity that was adopted over 60 years ago by the U.S. Army. It is still used today across the Army to train our Nation’s military leaders. Due to our close proximity and special relationship we have forged with Fort Benning, one of the Army’s primer educational and training bases, Goizueta Business School is able to offer all our MBA students, as part of our Leadership program, the opportunity to conduct the Leadership Reaction Course

The top 3 take-ways I consistently hear from our students is the following:

1) Importance Of Effectively Communicating: Their ability to communicate with each other is critical to success. How well the team creates a climate that encourages open dialogue, feedback, and ensures everyone is listened to can mean success or failure. It is especially important due to the diversity of cultures, languages, and experiences among our students and teams.

2) Learning To Fail Without Being A Failure: Teams are given a mission with 25 minutes to solve a difficulty problem. Developing a plan, recognizing when the plan is not working, and quickly adapting to overcome potential failure is key to being successful. Even with that teams will face failure and they have the opportunity to learn how to overcome that failure on the next challenge and build resilience; and finally

3) Learning The Strengths Of Your Teammates And How To Best Leverage Those Strengths In Accomplishing Your Team’s Mission: Over the course of the day at the LRC, each team has the opportunity to tackle at least 6 events. During that time they are able to get to know each other much better, their strengths, and where each member wants to improve their skills. This helps build greater trust within the team, and better understand how to come together as a team to be stronger together.”