I deeply believe in the give-back culture and coaching, hence whenever I can contribute to support others I’m happy to share my experience. I’ve been accepted for the Executive Master in Business Administration at the Quantic School of Business and Technology and decided to share periodically on my Linkedin profile each milestone of this journey. I often receive several requests for advice, insights, and feedback about the program, how I’ve approached it, and why I’ve chosen it: I’ve decided to put all the information in this article (which I’m going to update every time I’ll receive new questions not yet covered here so that everybody could benefit from it. Quantic already describes publically how it works as well as many articles out there already produced, hence I’ll really focus on the experience I lived. Feel free to leave requests and observations in the comments, and I’ll enrich the article accordingly.
EMBA
I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Control Engineering, and a Master of Science in Computer Science Engineering pursued between Italy and USA. I’ve participated in many Hackathons both at local and international level (Tech/Business Competitions that last few days, working also during the night!) and I’ve got some proposals of pursuing a Ph.D. (Sapienza CSE Dept, MIT Media Lab, HKBU) but I decided to enter the Enterprise Business world right after my Engineering Studies (I’ll deepen further this choice in a separate blog if it’s of interest). I’ve always wanted to increase my Business Acumen by pursuing a Master in Business Administration but I’ve also been told that I would have taken the most out of it by applying for it after some years of actual work in an Enterprise environment, and so I did.
I’ve gone through a Business Intelligence, Bigdata, Cloud, and Artificial Intelligence related career journey which perfectly matched my Tech Background with my interest in the business impact that computer science has in other people’s everyday life.
Quantic
I think that the Quantic School of Business and Technology is a really great format for those who work and don’t want to take a sabbatical period as it empowers students to pursue the program in parallel to their ongoing job-related duties. It doesn’t mean it is a relaxing year, you are still working and studying in parallel, but the method, the approach, and the way the material is organized, definitely help in managing the student’s year plan. The year plan! Yes, it is important to draw a precise personal year strategy. The program will help by providing a precise calendar with all deadlines at the beginning of the course, but It’s really worth looking at the entire year to forecast which periods are going to be tougher, which ones are going to be a bit less overloaded. It’s surely a personal time investment, so you would like to use it wisely.
There are 9 Concentrations (9 mandatory exams) and 3 Specializations (3 exams that the student can choose from a list of options). The Specialization could be taken in whatever part of the year. On average you should plan to have one exam per month. The concentrations can be done only after a precise given date. It’s mandatory to complete all lectures to “unlock” every single exam.
In my strategy I noticed that the program would have had Summer in the middle, I knew that in October/November I would have had a tougher period, hence I’ve targeted to prepare for 2 exams during summer. I’ve not been able to do both exams during summer (failure admission here!) but I’ve been able to do 1 of the 2 and prepare 90% of the second one. This still helped me a lot to reduce the EMBA workload later.
Back to Quantic, the core aspect that many asked me about is the Brand: Quantic is officially recognized as per Official Documentation
[...] licensed by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) in Washington, DC and accredited by the Distance Education Accreditation Commission (DEAC). The DEAC is listed by the United States Department of Education as a recognized accrediting agency and is also recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) [...]
Network and Knowledge are the 2 core aspects to get from an EMBA. Surely the Brand it’s relevant on a Resume but, during an interview, what you know is what counts the most. Quantic is so innovative that Rankings currently (Early 2022) don’t even cover the metrics in which Quantic is really competitive with respect to “traditional” MBA programs. But I’m confident the Brand recognition will increase more and more in the future. Think of brands like Toyota for the Hybrid world or Tesla for electric cars …
Exams
The way exams are set up allows the student to organize her/his time according to her/his needs. Once the exam (Concentration) is unlocked you have up to 48 hours to complete it. Once you answer a question of the exam, “that question is gone“: you will know right away whether you were right or wrong and you can never go back, this will lead you to extreme attention to every question. Let’s say one question is a multiple-choice question with only one single answer which is correct, you won’t get to the next question until you’ve not answered right the current one meaning that if choices are 4, you’ll select the wrong option 3 times and the right answer after 4 attempts, it will count as 3 mistakes.
I’ve personally never really looked for the maximum score possible during my engineering studies, but given the shape of Quantic, I’ve tried to really achieve the maximum achievable because this meant really understanding both the material during courses and really going in-depth during the exam. Having a 100% passing score or 92%, shouldn’t really psychologically impact your brain, but setting up a high bar helped me in deepening the content.
Capstone and Projects
Having several projects along the program here are a few thoughts about a potential approach to have:
- Individual Projects:
You can definitely organize your time as you prefer, but always try to give yourself a timeline with deadlines to respect. The probability of having delays and overloading yourself due to overlap of exam preparation, project preparation, personal life, and professional life, is high. Better to stick to a plan even when working individually - Team Projects:
The timeline is more important (even if it’s going to be a short timeframe). Try to connect to build the team as soon as possible. Do the team-building (like just pinging the teammates, having an introductory call, deciding how to approach the project) so that when the real work will start, you’ll start right away - Capstone Project:
Have I already mentioned Timeline??? Here is really really important, because it will last months, and without a strategy, the risk is to get close to the final deadline full of things to adapt. Put a recurring meeting with the team to touch base on the progress, then you can work offline asynchronously, and then you catch up to decide what to do next and perform brainstorming where needed. Agree with the team on internal deadlines and you will be all good to go. You could assign ownership of chapters to cover based on interest. This will help the team to start having something on the document to look at. Then every member can look at the portion written by others and share feedback. Go through the doc to adapt chapters to connect them i.e. chapter B can have sentences that are referring to chapter A so that the final document will be coherent. If your team is formed by 3/4 people, there might be 3 or 4 different styles, so generating a well-coherent document is surely a nice challenge.
I’m not a SocialMedia addict, I prefer human interaction in real life, but I think that using Social as a means to share deeper messages, contribute to a “Virtuous Circle”, promote a can-do attitude and a give-back culture it’s a nice opportunity to help others. Besides, with a public commitment, I felt to have a higher engagement during my studies, because when you commit to others and write something, it’s “more official”. That’s absolutely not needed at all! But in my personal case, it gave me some “extra power” during tougher periods. I’ve decided to keep track of all my steps in a dynamic always growing EMBA Wall made of all the bricks (exams). Here is a Post Example
The Approach
No right single answer here is valid for everybody.
I’m not able to say whether I’m a morning person or an owl (It depends a bit on the period of the year) but surely it’s worth considering that after an entire day of work your mind is not fresh as at the beginning of the day. And if the EMBA is a personal time investment I’d want to give it the best quality achievable.
Given the extreme flexibility of the program and the easy-to-consume material, there might be the temptation to proceed fast on some lectures (given how simple it is to go through them), above all, if you are studying while you are tired! Consequence? You’ve done your duty (you’ve completed your course) for the program in the short term, but not the duty for yourself in the long term! (digested the content)
You’ve done your duty for the program in the short term, but not the duty for yourself in the long term
Here is why I targeted to book 1 hour in the early morning during the week every day to go through the material. Have I been able to always do that? Absolutely not. (Second failure admission!) Did I have weekends where I had to go through the entire content of the planned studies of the week? Absolutely yes.
But having a precise strategy helped to have a plan in mind to try to follow! Sometimes you’ll succeed, sometimes you’ll fail … and that’s absolutely fine!
Based on everybody’s background some exams are going to be easier to prepare for whilst other ones will be tougher, just accept it because everything will even out at the end of the journey 😉. For Accounting and Finance (my weak points) I used to produce more notes on paper, writing concepts, and numbers, to force myself to not simply read the content, but really digest it. Even if I’m that kind of person that writes on a keyboard without looking at it and I type faster than how I write with a pen … but the goal is exactly to slow down!
but the goal is exactly to slow down!
As anticipated at the beginning of the article, that’s an “open article” as the other ones I wrote, because I think that based on the feedback I collect on comments, via private messages, Mails, and LinkedIn, it’s worth keeping them updated to share with everybody potentially useful material. Always #open2feedback