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There’s a very good reason the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Management consistently produces MBA grads who excel at the top of their fields. The school might be more dedicated to giving its grads real-world experience throughout their degree than any comparable business school.
Nowhere is that philosophy more apparent than with the school’s wildly successful experiential student consultancy course.
Raymond Fitzpatrick has taught the course at UNB for several years.
Fitzpatrick spent nearly a decade in the venture capital world and is the CEO and co-founder of a successful startup. He says he designed the course to feel as much like real life as possible. That means he focuses less on formal lectures, quizzes, and case studies and more on doing actual work, with actual consequences, for actual companies.
For the course, UNB partners with the startup accelerator Creative Destruction Lab. Through that partnership, students work as consultants directly for early-stage companies attached to CDL.
Fitzpatrick explains that the companies students work with are at crucial stages and genuinely need help. That means students must show up with concrete, actionable plans that will work in the real world. He’s always there to step in if things get dicey, but he gives his students a real opportunity to flex their talents.
“They can’t bullshit; this is real life,” he says.
“Students in the consultancy get to work with a real startup that has a real problem that needs real help in a messy world,” he says. “It’s not in a case study where all the information is presented to you and pre-written by professors. It is real life, real messiness, real problems, and we get to work with these startups to try to help them solve that.”
Angad Loomba is one of those students. He took the course in his last semester and says it was incredibly rewarding to put everything he learned throughout his MBA to the test.
“You learn all these concepts throughout your MBA program and then you get to apply those to a real-life company,” he explains.
Loomba says he knew early on in his MBA that he wanted to go into consulting and was excited to see UNB offer a course that would prepare him so well for the field.
“Helping businesses with their problems, helping them grow, and working on different kinds of projects is thrilling for me. That’s what makes me excited… trying to solve a particular need that a company has,” he says.
During the course, Loomba consulted for a company in a field he knew almost nothing about. He says the experience forced him to dive into a whole new side of the marketing industry and learn a ton of new things.
He says the real-life nature of his work was both challenging and fulfilling, “because understanding concepts is one thing but applying those concepts is totally different.”
Fitzpatrick says it’s often surprising, even to students nearing the end of their degree, to be thrown so far into the deep end.
“The shock when I put everyone into a group without asking their opinion is always fun,” he says with a chuckle. “You don’t get to decide who you’re with… that’s what happens in real life.”
Fitzpatrick says the consultancy course challenges students but that almost everyone who takes the course realizes at the end how valuable the experience was.
“I find when students are challenged with real work, with real startups, they rise to the challenge. They’re excited not to just be working on another case study or doing another presentation on a fictitious company. It’s real life and it comes with the challenges of being messy.”
“But at the end of the day, after four years of doing this, I found they’ve always stepped up. They realize this most accurately resembles what they’ll probably deal with after graduation. It was a stressful environment, but still a safe environment.”
This story is sponsored by the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Management.
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