I have been fairly quiet about my MBA course because I wasn’t sure who would be interested in reading about school, but I just finished the academic portion of the course and wanted to talk about the last month because it was really interesting!

April is dedicated to our specialisation tracks and basically, everyone can choose one track from the following:

• Entrepreneurship
• Leadership
• Digital Innovation
• International Finance

As you probably already guessed from the title, I chose the entrepreneurship track. It was a difficult choice because everything sounded really interesting, but I liked the personalisation in the entrepreneurship track and since I had a project I wanted to work on, it felt like a good fit.

The track was broken into two sections – three weeks of classes and a one-week learning expedition. The classes are designed to take you through the steps of turning an idea into a business/startup and you’re expected to work on the same idea every class. Of course, your idea may evolve as the classes go through, and that happened for a few of my friends. So the classes we had were:

• Innovating New Products and Services: This was the first course and it was an intense introduction – we were told to find potential customers and talk to them to understand pain points. This was probably when I realised that they were serious about making sure that the business idea was viable and not just a theoretical thing
• Building a Scalable Business Model: The second course builds on the first and introduces various business models so we can pick one. We also had to design (and ideally conduct) an experiment to test some of the assumptions our business model relies on. This actually gave me the push I needed to talk about my new project with Hanfugirl! I’ve been able to look into some really interesting women and I just keep getting more excited about the book!
• Marketing New Ventures: New businesses survive by being distinctive and this short marketing course focused on that. It felt somewhat similar to our marketing class, just that it was tailored to making us work on our idea.
• Financing New Ventures: This class looked at the type of financial projections/ratios you need and what you would need to provide to business angels/venture capital firms.

At the end of the classes, we had to pitch our ideas to a panel of judges which was intimidating but a really good way to distill everything we had been working on into 7 minutes.

Honestly, I really enjoyed the track. Not everything was new because I have been taking business classes since September, but being able to apply them to a real project made all the difference. I also really liked there was time allocated to our individual projects in all the classes – being able to pick the professor’s brain if I needed meant that even if the theory was something that I already knew, I still took something away from that class.

So that’s the academic portion of the track – coming soon, my experience with the learning expedition!