Appearing on a recent “Dawgs on Top” podcast to discuss their consulting work with South African companies, Georgia MBA students Travis Hawkins, Kobby Amoah and Alex Meier each had a distinct story to tell.
Hawkins served as a logistics manager and company commander in the U.S. Army, Amoah is a Ghanaian native seeking a Doctor of Pharmacy degree at UGA, and Meier worked in information technology after earning a Terry marketing degree in 2015. The three traveled to Cape Town before the COVID-19 pandemic to work with three separate companies, addressing problems involving energy, radio technology and health insurance.
“We worked on projects that were real-world applications, and these companies took our recommendations and used them to make their companies better,” Meier says.
“It was a cool experience to learn and bounce ideas off someone who has been in their industry for a while,” Hawkins says.
“It added value,” Amoah says. “I was able to know how companies approach key decision-makers and how they are trying to get customers to get on their platform.”
Three students of various backgrounds brought together under one program to help improve businesses worldwide. It is everything Santanu Chatterjee wanted to achieve when he was named director of the Full-Time MBA Program in 2014.
“Over the last five years there are several things that I think moved us significantly in a positive direction,” says Chatterjee, who also serves as director of the Master of Science in Business Analytics program and is a Josiah Meigs Professor of Economics. “These include changes in the curriculum — we introduced new concentrations, areas of focus, and became a more market-driven program. At the same time, we focused on recruiting students through on-campus partnerships. We now have dual degrees with engineering, with the College of Pharmacy, public health, law, medicine, and a one-year MBA for students in 45 STEM majors on campus. This has allowed us to grow enrollment over time, while adding many bright students to the program. We also branched out and invested in a relationship with the U.S. military, became a Yellow Ribbon Program and devoted more strategic scholarships for U.S. veterans. Our veterans’ enrollment has gone up significantly in the last few years.”
It adds up to climbing rankings. The Full-Time MBA Program moved from No. 55 to 33 (13th among public business schools) in U.S. News & World Report, and from 74 to now 33 (9th among public business schools) in The Economist’s global MBA rankings. Those higher rankings attract a sharp group of students, but it only lasts if the program continues to adjust and adapt.
It has.
The Full-Time MBA recently added three areas of focus — Strategy, FinTech, and Social Innovation — to complement the program’s nine concentrations. Strategy and FinTech are market-driven areas preparing students for fast-growing, billion-dollar business sectors, while social innovation emerged at a time of dynamic shifts in business practices. Addressing the ways companies innovate to serve the social good has never been more important.
“The ground has shifted significantly under our feet over that last four or five years as more and more companies are cognizant of their footprint on society,” says Chatterjee. “Look at financial services, operations, manufacturing, IT — there is much more awareness today that companies have to look beyond their shareholders and profit maximization into stakeholders — their communities, employees and the environment. This new generation of students being more conscious about the footprint business leaders leave is what motivated us to start the area of focus in social innovation.”
MBA students combine their social innovation coursework with an applied learning experience. Whether working on Lean Six Sigma or consulting projects, helping companies to earn a B Corp certification (which requires companies to meet environmental sustainability and accountability standards,) or joining the board of a local nonprofit organization, students are thrust into a real-world environment to apply what they learned in class.
This practice of getting students into the field, as well as classrooms, is a staple of Terry’s Full-Time MBA. In the last five years, the program participated in more than 70 client projects with at least two dozen companies.
“Every student has to complete two corporate projects before they graduate — this is a new requirement — and they typically do a one semester-long corporate project in the first year and one in the second year,” Chatterjee says. “That hands-on experience working with companies creates a pipeline for employment and essentially gives them a compelling story to tell a prospective employer.”
All of these upgrades — in rankings, curriculum and specialized courses — have produced impressive growth and demand for the program. The entering cohort in fall 2020 is the largest in the program’s recent history, and perhaps the most diverse. Women represent more than a third of this class, along with 21 percent under-represented minorities. Pair that with STEM majors adding a fifth year and those who are serving or recently separated from the military, and you have a class of globally engaged students.
Alumni are doing their part too, with MBA advisory councils set up in Atlanta and Silicon Valley to give present and future graduates access to mentors and contacts for job opportunities. Some of the students’ corporate projects involve companies where alums are in leadership roles, serving a mutual benefit for all.
“A lot of times we’re working with people in the business who are alums and have some sort of connection to our program,” says Emily Nicholos, Full-Time MBA’s associate director of corporate relations. “We want to help those alumni get recognized, while also helping our students and promoting partnerships.”
In 2019, 95 percent of MBA graduates landed full-time jobs within three months of graduation, averaging a starting salary of $101,223 at top companies around the country. The numbers are proof the full-time program’s formula is graduating students who are ready to have an immediate influence in the businesses they represent.
“When you talk about bolstering the business you’re working in, you’re looking at all the different ways in which the business or project you’ll be leading affects people around you — your clients, your workers, your customers, your community,” Chatterjee says. “The knowledge our students get about how to run a business, what challenges they face, and how business interacts with public policy and society makes them more productive team players wherever they work.”