For the past two years, mid-career MBA students in
Wright State University's Raj Soin College of Business have gotten to
know each other well. Really well.
The 23 students spent every other weekend together
as they pursued their next educational and professional achievements
through Wright State's MBA cohort in Mason.
"I always knew I wanted to do this," says Roxana
Turner, 48, owner of an analytics startup. "It was a personal, more than
a professional, goal to try to reach the highest level of personal and
professional excellence."
Turner, formerly a senior business analyst with Avon
Products for 13 years, came to Cincinnati in 1998 from Lima, Peru. She
says her decision to pursue an MBA took years, but then she finally
decided it was time. She chose Wright State because of its "great depth
in research, great seriousness of purpose and a very modern curricula
that shapes you as a decision maker, a lifelong learner."
Learning as a Team
With a cohort program, students "” with few
exceptions "” start the program together and finish together. They share
late Friday evenings and early Saturday mornings. It promotes a common
purpose and camaraderie, they say.
Professor Bud Baker, chairman of the management
department at Wright State, who taught the group in their final five
classes, says he enjoys teaching the cohorts.
"We rarely see that level of cooperation and
teamwork" in the regular MBA program on the main campus, he says.
"People just don't know each other well enough in the normal program.
You're always starting a new team every quarter with a new set of
characters." With the cohort, "you have much more strength in the group.
They draw on each other. It really works out."
How it Applies
Michael Fiszlewicz, 35, Monroe, a senior
infrastructure engineer at Sinclair Community College, says the program
allowed the group to "get to know what the other people do and the
companies they work for and how the different material that we're
learning applies to them.
"There isn't that awkwardness when you first form a
group every single class. "¦ You can talk to them more casually, and you
feel more comfortable being more frank with them. There are friendships,
too."
Andy Dunn, 30, a software engineer at Ecova who
lives in Loveland, says "the program fit my lifestyle well. Having every
other weekend off, you can manage your schoolwork, and the degree was
very, very affordable."
Dunn says getting to know everybody "was one of the
major benefits that I didn't anticipate. It's a great networking
opportunity."
Tuition Ranges
Monica Snow, the university's director of marketing,
business and international relations, says Mason has hosted four
cohorts with 92 students so far. She says it's one of the most
affordable MBA programs in the region, with tuition ranging from $18,612
to $44,687, depending on whether students are in-state or out-of-state
and whether they need lower-level business courses to take part in the
cohort.
For Darnell Brown, 41, also a senior infrastructure
engineer at Sinclair, the drive every other weekend from his home in
Dayton was well worth it. He thinks the MBA will help him secure a
management position in the future, plus he has an interest in public
service.
"I certainly would like to take the frameworks I've been exposed to in leadership, and lead groups into change," he says.
As part of the MBA program, all of the students
worked with regional businesses to solve issues "” including a
waste-management company facing new competition, a pediatrician who
wanted to start his own practice and a marketing-company owner who
wanted to develop a structure and set long-term goals.
Sri Pasupuleti, 35, of Miamisburg, an e-commerce
manager at Hubert Co., says the MBA will be her second master's degree,
after one she obtained in her home country of India. She says the
program "helped us gain perspectives from all different angles, which is
what a real business would need.
"And when we, as leaders, take positions, we'll be
able to consider the finance perspective, the accounting perspective,
the marketing perspective, information systems, supply chain, and most
importantly, ethics. It has been an amazing journey."