Alumni Panel: MBA Programs

I found that intuition and fearlessness and relentlessness is spectacular but it doesn't help you with a conversation with your CFO to actually have something that is tangible to be able to read a balance sheet to be able to understand what you intuitively know or feel about marketing or promotion or about people is hugely valuable I can have those conversations in a much more confident way and no matter where I travel around the world to talk to our customers I understand why they'd make the choices that they make I'm not going to be an expert in finance and I'm not going to be an expert in IT and I don't know how to pilot a vessel but I can ask the right questions and land on a solution much more quickly because of the foundations I learned at at the Biddy MBA my experience was going to be heavily influenced by the caliber people I was involved with and I knew he really understood the value with cohort and the value of getting in the room with like-minded people beginning of our second year we had an amazing seminar negotiations put on by Dave Hanna two-day seminar and at the beginning of the second day after we read all this these these great books and had this great coaching and kind of the first day we were asked to bring in a problem to prep as a group with a cohort and the problem that I brought in was that I'd recently broke got a whole bunch of more responsibilities at work but hadn't seen the title change that I was looking for right and we've all been in that position I'm sure I prepped that conversation of three other cohort members I walked into my VP's office the next week and two weeks later I was promoted to director off one conversation and that was kind of the culmination of gaining the knowledge having the laboratory to test it out with with the cohort and then moving it into action and that's an example of a very tangible result impact for me was huge a lot of it was really about how I felt in the way that I was able to share a lot of the things that I was learning on site I would go to class in the evening and then the next day I was able to apply that exact same concept at the office right away and pretty much within my first semester people could really tell that I was definitely in the in the MBA program I was able to also build up other people around me and understanding that were really only as great as the people that we work with or that work for us and really understanding how to do that thanks to all of the courses and the instructors but also the peers that I was working with within that program and the cross section was incredible what I found I gained the most from networking is just learning a lot more about myself because it really kind of put me out of my comfort zone and got me just having candid conversations with people and learning so much more about these companies and industries that I would have never have known you don't have to go to these networking events to find these answers our cohort was so diverse such a great range of people with different experiences and everyone has so much information to offer and so much support because of all these conversations I had with people I ended up going into an industry that I never really saw myself in one of my classmates called me one day first thing in the morning and said like Rena there's a position on with Aquilino right now you need to apply and because of that tip I applied and I got the job so that's how your network can really end up helping you in the long run I just wanted to make sure that the dis and I was having the situations we were learning about we're more suited to my reality I saw a couple masters programs that related to governance and I saw a couple programs that related to other areas that didn't quite fit so finally this this specific program it was just well-timed I found everybody absolutely great in terms of making sure that what we're learning is applicable to our situations for our finance class so I pulled in the financials for the first nation that I'm a part of did some work and released it back to our community in terms of our general manager being able to kind of look and just see here's some insight that we were able to uncover based on the course that I'm currently taking many of the instructors that we had were from industry so whatever they were teaching they were bringing the fact that they had actually done it in the market with them and had endless amounts of experience and stories that they could share so that we could then relate to that and then also be able to apply that there's theory to give you a foundation but a lot of it is actual practice and a huge component of almost all of the courses in the MBA programs are case studies and it's really about what's happened and what can we learn from it and how do you take that forward and improve on that so it is absolutely practical knowledge [Music]

Channel: SFU Beedie School of Business

Views: 1,601

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Id: YEibJQw5k4s

Length: 5min 48sec (348 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2018