New “One-Year MBA” Program Approved

This past week, the Stevens School of Business received approval from the Graduate Curriculum Committee of the Stevens Faculty Senate for a new MBA program called the “One-Year MBA.” The One-Year MBA program will begin in the Fall semester of 2018, and there will be approximately 25 students in the program.

This One-Year MBA will be the third MBA program offered at Stevens – the other two being the Stevens MBA and the Executive MBA. “There are a couple of distinct points about this program,” said Brian Rothschild, Director of Graduate Management Programs, about the One-Year MBA. Rothschild explained, “Number one, it’s an analytics program. In business now, the new trend is to make more analytical decisions — to use analytic technology and quantitative-based reasoning to back up decisions that are made — so this program brings in four classes that are specifically tailored toward analytics.”

Students in this new One-Year MBA program will use a “mini-mester” course structure rather than a semester-based course structure. “[The mini-mesters] will be three courses every seven weeks,” said Rothschild, “so within the traditional semester, [students in the MBA program] will have two mini-mesters.”

The School of Business segmented the 13-course program into “three threads,” which include the “Language of Business” thread with courses like “Traditional Marketing” and “Finance,” the “Leadership and Innovation” thread with courses like “Leader Development” and “Creative Collaboration,” and the “Analytical Thinking” thread.

The One-Year MBA program teaches students beyond those enrolled in the School of Business how to apply analytical skills to their business careers. “Everybody can get something out of [the One-Year MBA],” such as engineers, mathematicians, or social scientists, “that they didn’t get during their undergraduate experience,” said Rothschild.

According to Rothschild, “Chances are whether you’re business or engineering, you’re going to go out into the corporate world.” Students in an undergraduate computer science program, for example, “may know all the analytical techniques, [but] may not know how to use them in a way that resonates with a business manager.”

This new MBA program also offers “a few extras” to distinguish it from other MBA programs, making it more of a learning lab than a coursework-based degree program. The extras include things like a leadership retreat weekend that takes place at West Point, a “business emergence experience,” opportunities to take on entrepreneurial projects and field consulting projects, and a mentorship experience, where “each student in the [MBA] program will be working in the courses and outside of the courses with faculty, alumni, and corporate mentors” to build leadership and business skills.

The One-Year MBA program “owes a lot to Stevens students,” according to Rothschild, because this program emerged as a solution to some Stevens alumni’s early career frustrations. Stevens graduates would often leave with impressive science or engineering skills yet struggle with convincing managers of their business strategies. “Being in that business world is a wake-up call for a lot of them. [Stevens alumni] have said, ‘I know that technical stuff, but trying to explain it to my boss … has become a point of real frustration,’” Rothschild said.

The School of Business will offer information sessions and webinars throughout the course of the current semester so that any interested Stevens students can learn more about the program.