Catherine Girardeau:Dr. Jacobina, can you describe a typical day for you and your job?

Dr. Charles Jacobina:  A typical day?A typical day is not typical as probably most EMBA directors would attest to that.  It could mean working with teams of students, faculty, recruiting, going to luncheon where we’re hosting the students.

Dr. Virginia Gerdi:  Classes begin at 2 o’clock on Fridays, so students start arriving around 12:30 or so, and slowly, they start meeting with their teammates.  They have coffee, they have simply before they go into the class.

Male 1:Okay.  Well, on Friday, I go to work like I do every other day, except I leave right after lunch.  It’s only a 10 minute ride, but I try to take about an hour to kind of switch gears so I get here and get ready.We are in class until 9 o’clock on Fridays, 9 o’clock at night.

Catherine Girardeau:I’m Catherine Girardeau for MBA Podcaster.  And this is “A Day in the Life” at the executive MBA program at Virginia Tech.

It’s noon on a Friday, a typical day at Virginia Tech’s EMBA program. Students are starting to trickle into the cafeteria to nosh on enticing catered delicacies, chat with their fellow students, and get caffeinated for their long day of classes.  The steady supply of snacks is just one of the many things staff at Virginia Tech’s EMBA program do to help busy professionals transition from work to another weekend as MBA students.

Let’s meet the program’s executive director, Dr. Charles Jacobina.

Dr. Charles Jacobina:  The structure focuses on every other weekend for 18 months designed for people who are working fulltime.Over the 18 months, they take the standard MBA curriculum, but then we have a heavier focus on leadership in a global economy.

Catherine Girardeau:  Assistant Director, Karime Shamloo.

Karime Shamloo:The cohorts in our executive MBA program at Virginia Tech are very diverse.  We have applicants that come with international backgrounds. We have female students.We have people that represent all sorts of industries.And at the same time, so many different educational backgrounds are represented when they apply to the program.

Dr. Charles Jacobina:  They are the type of students that want to learn something on a Friday and Saturday, and apply it on Monday, so you have to keep the program fresh.  You have to keep it current.  And the students will challenge you to do that.

Catherine Girardeau:  Dr. Sattar Mansi, who teaches corporate finance in the EMBA program, can attest to that.

Dr. Sattar Mansi:The students bring in a whole host of knowledge from because they work in variety of industries.And we have in this area the defense industry.We have the telecommunication industry.We have a high-tech industry.We have an aeronautic industry. So you have really a whole host of firms that come in. These students bring in a lot of expertise.And, you know, I benefit from those expertise because I gain knowledge about the industries where they actually work and they operate.

Catherine Girardeau:  One example of how Virginia Tech’s professors bring the real world into the classroom is Dr. Virginia Gerdi’s class—ethical leadership in a global context.  She’s teaching the Great Falls Cohort this evening.These students are in the first week of their 18-month program.Let’s listen in.

Dr. Virginia Gerdi:  The picture is now moving more towards management of risk in a variety of areas, but also in terms of corporation.  Some of them wants to see the immediate return.You know, if I invest in marine technology, I want to see the return in a year or two or three.

Some people might be, “Okay, I’ll invest in education because it helps the community, it makes my employees feel better.”  Or they may give money in a crisis such as Haiti.  Well, how much value can you tie to the money they gave toHaiti?  Pretty hard.  It’s pretty much an indirect advantage you get from refutation, from the will of your employees, a variety of things.

Now, why companies match contributions from employees?  If you’re lucky enough to work in a company that matches your contributions to your – in a graduate institution, than your graduate institution, why do they match it?
Male 2:They get their name out there.
Dr. Virginia Gerdi:They get any amount there, it’s a tax break.It also makes you feel good as an employee, right, like they actually care about you?

Female 1: Yeah.

Dr. Virginia Gerdi:Yeah.  It also helps when it comes time to be an employer of choice at the university. It doesn’t hurt the fact that they give X amount in matching donations to the university. So, I’m not trying to sound cynical, you know, like (Jason Ramona).

Female 2:I’ve only been here before you missed…

Catherine Girardeau:  Dr. Barbara Hoopes’ module five class—Managing the Global Supply Chain is for the Blue Ridge Cohort.They’re in the homestretch of the program with just four months to go.  But this is the first class of the module for them.

Dr. Barbara Hoopes:  So you’ve got the text?It’s just, you know, not much but it’s all something that would walk us through.  Mostly I’m going to rely on articles, and then there will be a couple of cases that we’ll use.  So there are four articles that were posted for today’s class.  So let’s look at the syllabus real quick just so we can be on the same page.

This is a work in progress.  I changed up the articles at the last minute when I was pulling together this weekend’s stuff, so that may happen for weekend two.  But I’ll get them posted as soon as I can.So, by the end of this weekend, I hope that we can choose stuff up.And we may or may not have exactly the same titles as around here.  But I’ll let you know, and then, the two cases that will be sort of the core of the weekend two stuff.

Catherine Girardeau:  You probably get by now that these students have a heavy workload.  Completing an MBA is difficult enough if you’re a fulltime student.What’s it like for these mid-career professionals who go to school on the weekends?

Melanie Yeager is a senior level instructional designer and manager at Task Incorporated, a government consulting company in the D.C. area. She’s also a triathlete.  And an athletic multitasking comes in handy to an EMBA student at Virginia Tech.

Melanie Yeager:  During the week with working roughly 10-hour days, it makes it very difficult for me at least to do a lot of the heavy research and writing assignments.  I do a lot more of the reading prep works in the week nights.So that doesn’t leave much for a social life on weekends right now.

Catherine Girardeau:  Richard Teel is a web application developer with Booz Allen.  Despite the fact that his company supports his study as one of the corporate partners of the Virginia Tech program, he’s still…

Richard Teel:Just trying to balance the workload and then a family, too.  I’ve got two kids, young kids that are demanding as well.

Catherine Girardeau:  Brian Boyle is a director with FedEx Corporation where he’s worked for 14 years.

Brian Boyle:From a professional standpoint, I have obviously the support of my company for the flexibility to be able to be out of work but also manage different programs and projects, as well as my travel schedule to accommodate if I need to fly back for class and what-not.

One of the things that I like to tell everybody is that with a family, if you do have a family or, you know, even a significant other, the one part of the EMBA program is that they are getting the degree and the certification as well as you.Going into it, the family needs to understand that it is a time requirement.  There are late nights.  There’s times away meeting with your group that you may be working with.

I missed at times things that kill me to miss, a father-daughter dance.It could be my son’s Tee ball game, a swim meets.But the beauty, like I said again, is they understand that.  They know that.  But they also know that the following weekend, I’m going to be there. And so, those weekends are really reserved for them.  And I do a lot of my work at night after my regular job.  But during the weekends, I really, when I’m not in class, try to reserve that time especially Sundays for just my family.

Catherine Girardeau:  More than one student I talked with said the intensity of the EMBA program creates bonds within their teams that sometimes feel like family.Brian Boyle.

Brian Boyle:The Blue Ridge Cohort, I would consider them an extension of my family.  You look to them for help.  They’re also within the cohort.  You’re assigned to specific teams, and those teams are the teams that make or break you.

Catherine Girardeau:  Assistant Director, Karime Shamloo, explains how the staff creates the teams.

Dr. Karime Shamloo:  We make sure that we don’t put two CPAs in the same team or two engineers on the same team.We try to balance the teams out so that everyone has the same opportunity of expressing how he or she works in certain environments.

When we’re putting teams, we also considered the results provided by the Keirsey Sorter or the Myers-Briggs.  So we make sure that we don’t have three introverts or four introverts in the same team.

Catherine Girardeau:  Nick Scalise compares his team experience at school with his finance position with GE Capital.

Nick Scalise:As far as challenges, it’s not only just different industries that our team are a part of, but it’s also what you experience internally with your own organizations.  You have cultural differences, you have personality differences, you have workload and timing, and then you got life things.  I mean, you’ve got weddings, you’ve got children.You just got, you know, life that changes on a daily basis.

So you incorporate all of those things and that’s very real to what you experience in the real world and your career.  So there’s a very close tie with what you’ll experience here with what you can absolutely apply into your career.

Catherine Girardeau:  Robert Doolittle, a professional communicator for a Fortune 500 company, said working within his team exercises all his considerable communication skills.

Robert Doolittle:Our team, we have a regular schedule, Tuesday night video chat where we – we’re all on EyeChat.We’re together 8 o’clock Tuesday night.That’s where we get back together.We look at what homework we have to do.We look at what team assignments we have.We divide up responsibilities and get to work, because it’s a real quick two weeks before you’re back in class again.
Catherine Girardeau:Doolittle explained that at the beginning of the program, all the team members have to sign a contract governing their behavior as individuals within their team.

Robert Doolittle:Now we all have a contract.One of the first things you have to do is negotiate this contract in terms of “Okay, I’m not going to be available to meet on, you know, on this day, any earlier than this hour.”Or, “We’re going to meet every week,” or you know, you sort of work out the terms of what you think is going to be the way you want to work together.

Everybody signs on a dotted line before you get started.So you’ve got an agreement that you can say, “Okay, you aren’t pulling your load.  Here’s what you said you were going to do,” if it gets to that.And we haven’t had that issue.

Catherine Girardeau:  Sounds pretty real world.

Robert Doolittle:It’s very real world.I do a lot of team-based projects at work.And there are people who contribute above and beyond, and there are those who you’re always kind of dragging along. My teammates are great but, you know, we have different strengths.  And so, each of us contributes in our way, but there are time where you wish you could pull a little more out of somebody to kind of move the ball forward.So it’s just like the real world, because you have to get it done.

It doesn’t matter.  When all four names are on the top of the paper it doesn’t matter who did what. Everybody gets judged on the end product, soyou have to make the decision about, do I put in any extra effort to make this as good as I know it can be even if somebody else isn’t working quite so hard, because in the end we’re all getting judged on the productnot on the process.And that’s very real world.
You know, ultimately, if a project fails or it worked, everybody who’s on the team gets blamed, you know, so the same thing here.

Catherine Girardeau:  During the dinner break, I sat down with one of the teams from the Great Falls Cohort to try to get a sense of how a team from very diverse backgrounds comes together to solve cases and get all that course work done.

Male 3:I think we might still be working on it.With each group project, we’ve tried different means to complete it, whether it be, you know, each person take one slice of it then we’ll put it all together.  Or somebody is the project manager or we’ll break it up and two people will serve as a sub-team whilst two others serve as another sub-team.And it really changes from project to project.It has changed project to project. We’re trying out all the different options.

Female 3:I think it was interesting in the beginning.I mean, you really don’t know each other very well and then you’re new to school and then you’re new to the subject matter, and then just trying to like figure it out and how to like best utilize everybody.  And that was the challenge I think in the first two weeks more than anything, and then they got a little bit easier as you went along.

Male 4:We do rely on technology a lot as part of this team exercises.  We used EyeChat a lot of times.  We talk over video chats, and we also shared documents on the internet, and we have shared folders that are set up for the team.So we use that as a repository for all our homeworks and assignments.So we do rely on a lot of technologies, because we all live in different areas even though we are all from this part of Virginia.  So, that’s helping too.

Catherine Girardeau:  In fact, the Virginia Tech EMBA program’s unique partnership with Apple Computer is one of the things that sets the program apart, says Director, Charles Jacobina.

Dr. Charles Jacobina:  We embrace technology.We are Virginia Tech, and Virginia Tech traditionally has been known for their technology innovation.So, six years ago when I came here I expressed interest in forming a partnership with Apple in which we did. And since that time the partnership has grown.We give each student a Mac Book Pro and also a touch-screen iPod.
Why do we do this?One, the computers are now cross-platform.They also provide built-in video chat.And that’s very helpful to our students who are working fulltime that perhaps would rather meet with their team virtually to discuss cases and projects.  They can share documents live.  They can also tape the sessions on their iPods.They can download articles from The Economist, from Wall Street Journal, and they can listen to those in their car while they’re commuting.

Catherine Girardeau:  Melanie Yeager.

Melanie Yeager:For my group, the Apple technology is very helpful, because I have a couple of team members who are located on opposite sides of the Northern Virginia, Washington D.C. area, so we don’t always get to interact with each other in person very easily.So, we use the Apple EyeChat capability which is a video conferencing technology that we’re – software – that we’re allowed to log four people in at a time, which is what we have in our group is four people. One person will be the facilitator, and then call up the other people.  And that allows us to have team meetings virtually.

Catherine Girardeau:  I understand they gave you iPods.  How would you use an iPod besides to unwind or use during your workout?

Melanie Yeager:Sure.  We’ve used the iPods for podcastings.  Some other professors have chosen to introduce themselves and the courses prior to the beginning of the courses using podcast so we can, you know, get a little bit of insight that way.  We’ve also been asked by some professors to download various podcast and other resources that will facilitate with our team discussions or group discussions in class time.

Catherine Girardeau:  You can tell by now that these students are practically superhuman – balancing fulltime jobs, their personal lives, and this very demanding 18-month program.Why did they do it?

Brian Doolittle:It’s one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do.  And I think I got to the point in my career, you know, I’ve progressed fairly quickly.  But this is something that I knew whether I stay with my current company or look at options outside of the company.  I want it to have as a resource.

Melanie Yeager:Working with other professionals, I felt that it would help me to be better prepared to lead organizations.That’s ultimately what I’m looking to do is to become a leader within my company, to offer ways to better run an organization, and help an organization succeed.

Richard Teel: I’ve been working for about 25 years, but I think I have probably another 20 years to go.And so, I’m kind of looking at this as sort of a mid-career update.I mean, we’re all hope we’ll retire before we reach, you know, our mid-60s. But the reality is probably not.  And so, I kind of feel like I needed some new tools in my tool bag to continue to progress in my career and to find a new ways to create value for myself or for my company.

Catherine Girardeau:  Executive Director, Charles Jacobina, explains what he sees as the value of an MBA to mid-career professionals.

Dr. Charles Jacobina:  I look at a person’s career as you would at a product life cycle.  And when you get into your late 30s, if you haven’t made a decision to go back and get an MBA, you better do so quickly.  Many of our students come in with advanced degrees, some with Masters, some with PhDs.  Those have been in technical fields, computer science or engineering.

The product life cycle for that technical degree has run its course, and they see themselves getting passed over for general management positions.And I ask students, do you want to go from managing things and process to managing people?  Yes.  And that’s why you need a general management degree, which is the degree of choice is still the MBA.

If you’ve been working 12 to 15 years, you have a certain comfort zone.You know the terminology, you know the culture, you just know that type of organization.  But there’s something (eating) at you when you get to being your late 30s, early 40s if you haven’t reached the next level.And you might reflect and say, “What do I need to do to get to that next level?”
EMBA programs focus on experiences in the classroom and out of the classroom, not just the MBA degree.And that’s the biggest difference between just getting a degree and having an experience.  And that experience will stay with you, your entire career after you leave here.

Catherine Girardeau:  One of the peak experiences for many Virginia Tech EMBA students is the international residency they take after completing all their course work.  Because of the program’s focus on leadership in the global economy, this overseas trip really brings the entire program together for its soon-to-be graduates.

Dr. Charles Jacobina:  It’s a two-credit course.They have to complete a blog, which on our website you’ll find a number of examples of those blogs to countries in Asia, in Europe, and in South America where we’ve gone.They also have to write an executive memo back to their company outlining some aspect of the trip which their company might benefit from, because we do go to countries that are emerging markets and there might be an opportunity there to develop a new product or a new service—for example, we just returned from Vietnam and Hong Kong.

Catherine Girardeau:  Richard Teel, who has just finished the program shares his impressions.

Richard Teel:Hong Kong was, of course, more like New York City.  The business environment, the laws and such are very similar to what we’re used to. Now, in Vietnam it was a lot different because it is a communist country and there’s still a lot of corruption there and stuff. So, it’s a little bit more of a challenging environment but there are companies there, such as, we went to IDG Ventures.They help entrepreneurs get started in Vietnam businesses.Like I said, I really was surprised with the IT businesses and climate there.  And also, just some of the challenges that we talked about in the class, we’re able to get more in-depth answers to while we were there.

Catherine Girardeau:  Teel had earned his capstone experience, but everyone else I talked to was still in the trenches. Before they all went home to study, sleep, and get ready for their full day of Saturday classes, I asked them to share a piece of advice for prospective students.

Melanie Yeager:I would say, go for it.Just 19 months of your life it goes very fast.It’s a very difficult period of time, but it is 100% worth it in the end.  I have already – myself been awarded with a promotion as a result of the program. It set me just ahead of some of my other colleagues that I was in competition for for the position.

Brian Boyle:For any of those people out there that say, you know, may not be the right time, I would tell you that it’s never the right time.  So engage in it if you’re serious about getting involved.

Katie Gladhill:It’s been a great networking opportunity, really, to get to know other professionals.  One of my classmates is my industry, he’s not in my team, and we’ve decided we’re going to set a business meeting and begin working together during our program to talk about how we can collaborate and do some business together.

Nick Scalise:Do it now or you’re not going to do it.It is a lot of work.You can do it.  If they accept you into the program, you know, they got a good screening program here.  If they screen you and say you’re going to be able to do it, you’re going to be able to do it.So, you know, put that behind you and just get it done would be the biggest thing.

Robert Doolittle:  Advice?I would say, don’t wait.There’s probably never a great time to, you know.There’s always a reason why how I have to wait, and I have young children in my case, or I’m going to change companies, or I’m transitioning in my career.  I don’t think there’s ever a perfect time to enter into a program.Now is the right time to do it, because there is no better time than the present.

Catherine Girardeau:  Just another day in the life at Virginia Tech’s Executive MBA program.For MBA Podcaster in Falls Church, Virginia, I’m Catherine Girardeau.

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• 
  Virginia Tech EMBA
• Great Falls Cohort
• Overview: International Residency
• Richard Teel’s blog post on International Residency
• Meet the Students, Blue Ridge Cohort