A glimpse into the life of a Johnson Cornell Tech MBA
From gorges Ithaca to the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, Cornell Tech MBAs experience the best of both worlds.
Summer in Ithaca
The program begins at Cornell’s main campus in ‘gorges’ Ithaca, NY. Having went to Cornell for undergrad, I can attest to the fact that summer is truly the best (and one could argue, only) time of year to spend in Ithaca. It was a jam-packed summer between enjoying all that Ithaca has to offer — hiking, wineries, beautiful gorges — and completing the majority of our core business classes: Finance, Financial Accounting, Marketing, Strategy, Microeconomics (just to name a few!).
While I debated sharing a few economic theories we learned, I think I’m going to stick to a topic that is challenging, but critical for any person to master: leadership.
In our Leading Teams course, we read a bunch of cases and articles, and learned a lot of frameworks for leadership, but the one thing I will always keep with me is: always believe that the people you lead or work with have unlimited potential.
Why? Because of expectancy effects. There are hundreds of studies that show that your beliefs about your subordinate’s potential will come true in their performance. More concretely, if you believe they have high potential, you will drive their performance up. On the contrary, if you believe they have low potential, you will drive their performance down.
We got to put this learning and many other frameworks into practice through our summer Core Teams, where we all took turns leading one group assignment during the summer.
Transition to Roosevelt Island
In August, after a great summer in Ithaca, my MBA classmates and I packed our bags and headed to New York City — to embark on the next portion of the program on Cornell’s new Tech campus on Roosevelt Island (off the east side of Manhattan).
We went from 65 Cornell Tech MBAs to over 300 Cornell Tech students across the 7 masters programs: MBA, Computer Science, Health Tech, Operations Research and Information Engineering, Connective Media, Master of Law, Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The benefit of this is getting the opportunity to work in inter-disciplinary teams (which mimics the real world) on interesting challenges posed by real companies as part of the Product Studio curriculum.
My challenge was submitted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest US philanthropy focused solely on health, and it is: “How might we use technology to re-engineer everyday life to be healthier?” This challenge resonated with me because I value living a healthy lifestyle and often think about the implications of technology. I see technology as both a blessing and a curse, but know it’s here to stay, so I’m interested in developing solutions that help maximize its benefits.
Read more about our first few weeks of Product Studio here.
What’s next?
While we are still working hard on our Product Studio challenges, we’re already looking ahead and forming teams for next semester. This spring, we have a choice between Startup Studio (developing our own startups) and BigCo Studio (learning how to navigate and innovate within big companies).
As MBA students, we also have the opportunity to participate in a Digital Marketing or FinTech Intensive (which is the one I’ll be participating in). I’m looking forward to learning more about Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies, as well as completing a field project that will allow us to apply our coursework and get hands-on experience in the FinTech industry.
It’s hard to believe we’re already halfway through this 1-year program, but you know what they say: time flies when you’re working hard (and having fun too!).
