Essential MBA Courses: Unveiling My Year One Game-Changers

Unlocking Success: A Brief Guide to Pivotal MBA Courses for Enterprising Technologists, Along with Key Takeaways

I have finally finished the first year of my MBA program at the Baruch College Zicklin School of Business. I decided to take things easy in my first semester with just two courses. After getting through that, I wanted to stay in student mode over the summer and took just one course. In the fall, I wrapped up the year with four full-credit courses just to challenge myself and see what’s possible.

With a whopping seven courses for my first year of business, there were many takeaways and insights. My natural inclination is to compare and rank, so here are my takeaways from the top 3 courses from my first year in the MBA program.

Managing People and Organizations

The. first course I took at Baruch was. Managing People and Organizations. It was a required course in the curriculum so I wasn’t very excited about it. Upon hearing the professor’s first lecture, I was completely enthralled.

The professor, Roger Mckechnie, was an eccentric but well-learned organizational psychologist with years of experience. Not only did he keep the class engaged with the application of theory to our individual real-world experience, but he underscored everything he taught with evidence-based research.

In my current role at Bloomberg, I’ve made no bones about it… I’m interested in managing and leading a team to deliver big and impactful solutions. In addition to my interest in transitioning to a leadership role at Bloomberg, I also used the tools to excel at managing folks in my startup called Pod Rank. Both of these desires have served as the driving purpose for the “Why” behind learning management theory basics.

Given those goals, there are two concepts from the course that are most transferable. The first is the expectancy theory of what motivates employees. This concept was founded by Victor Vroom and suggests that there are three main sources from which an employee’s motivation comes. If you are interested in learning about those evidence-based sources, you can read more about that theory here.

The second concept that stood out to me was related to the way companies leverage competition in the workplace. There are many opinions on the merit of competition, but evidence-based research suggests that competition can benefit an organization if the implementation takes heed of several guidelines. You can read more about those guidelines here to learn more.

Corporate Finance

The team I joined last year at Bloomberg is called Bond Data Platform. It is a pivotal part of the Bloomberg Indices organization that is responsible for the bond data that contributes to the Fixed Income Indices that Bloomberg offers.

As a part of my role, I found myself dealing with a plethora of financial concepts to build software that satisfies the needs of my clients. Understanding why assets have value and how to evaluate them have become increasingly important to me. The Corporate Finance course at Baruch helped me with this and so much more.

Right off the gate, the professor spent the first class emphasizing the monetary value of time. I think most people intuitively understand that a dollar today is usually preferable to a dollar tomorrow. This course contextualized exactly why this is the case and provided a methodology to put a number on that time. If I offer you a million dollars today versus two million dollars a year from now, which would you take? Corporations deal with problems like this all the time in the form of annuities, bonds, stocks, etc.

After the midterm where I had to solve a bunch of problems related to the present value and future value of cashflows, something sparked in my mind: Why doesn’t the everyday person know about concepts like this? Formulas like Present Value (PV) and Number of Periods (NPER) could be useful to help people with various financial goals like saving money. With my technology-geared mind, I decided to do a mini hackathon and build an app that could help people save money like corporations do without having to learn the low-level formulas related to present value.

The app is called Time is Money and you can access it now on any web browser. Check it out and let me know if you would like to be an open-source contributor to it!

Strategy and Competitive Advantage

I always had the desire to run my own business. This was sparked by seeing my dad sell cars and perfumes in Nigeria when I would visit during the holidays. I had a miniature version of this selling chocolates in high school and sneakers when I was in college.

That being said, I always had trouble determining what the “correct” business move was. Should I buy cheaper sneakers in bulk and have less margin? Should I buy premium sneakers with more margin that are expensive to acquire? Should I diversify with Supreme apparel? All of these were questions related to business strategy. and that’s where the course “Strategy and Competitive Advantage” provided the supplemental theory to real business practices.

Throughout the course, we spent time covering the theoretical aspects of why a business might succeed over another. What I appreciated most about the course is that it didn’t just stop at theory. We spent time analyzing real businesses with the theories we learned like Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean or Cost Leadership vs Differentiation strategy.

One of the ways we tied the theory we learned in lectures to real businesses was via the analysis of a real business we chose at the beginning of the semester. My group chose the tech company Spotify. Together we wrote a series of reports on the external business climate, corporate structure, threats to their business model, and much more about the strategy and competitive advantage of Spotify.

Another way we applied theory to real-life businesses was through. the analysis of case studies written about some of the biggest corporations. Because of my affinity towards Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch, I chose to write my first analysis on how Nintendo disrupted the video game industry. This piece discusses how Nintendo, the underdog, was able to compete and ultimately beat Microsoft and Sony with their Nintendo Wii at the time.

I wrote my second case analysis. on the concept of arbitrage, something I was researching at the time. In the international business context, it refers to a business buying assets or services in one area to sell in another to take advantage of cost differences. When I learned that this was an established strategy for international business, I had to write about the case study that covers how existing companies strategize abroad. The second analysis was about how G.E. was able to successfully compete in the Indian healthcare market. I delved into the triple-A strategy and which one G.E. Healthcare utilized in India.

In the tech industry, there is a ton of scuttlebutt about how worthless MBAs are. For those whose main goal is to just write code, I understand the rationale. But if you’re someone like me who wants to do so much more than that, from building solutions in the finance industry to leading organizations toward a common purpose, there is substantial value that you can take from many courses in an MBA program