Reveling in the Sense of Community at Columbia Business School

Since starting his full-time MBA at Columbia Business School in January, Jacques Mouracadeh has been bowled over by the lengths the school goes to in order to initiate new students into a welcoming and collaborative environment.  

“They really encourage a sense of community here. As soon as you get here for orientation they pile it on in terms of the icebreakers, the sense that this is a life-long commitment, the sense that for the next year and a half these are going to be the people who are going to make your life better,” says Jacques.

He adds that, although you often hear schools talk about their spirit of togetherness, he’s been so impressed by sense of community instilled at Columbia that he says it has to be experienced to be truly appreciated.

“It’s really made a huge difference and, I’m sure for other international students as well as me, it’s helped a lot to make us feel welcome and feel that you’ve got a place away from home at Columbia – and that stretches from the peers you started with, to the second years, to the alumni and even the administration,” Jacques observes.

Crucially, he says the sense of community encourages you to be as involved as you can with the group. For instance, he’s already signed up to be a career representative for his class. In this, he’s been inspired by Columbia Business School’s team of peer advisors. They’ve been on hand to introduce new students to the school and organize events - helping people feel at ease with their new surroundings as well as fostering a growing sense of community. Jacques has nothing but praise for the way the peer advisors took the new intake under their wings during orientation with a healthy display of their nurturing sides.  “It got pretty emotional at the end of the orientation,” he says, and offers an analogy by way of explanation. “This is the bit where your parents are saying, ‘alright, kids here you go, now it’s time for you guys to start on your own.”

The path to seeking an MBA experience

Jacques has a background in finance, having spent a number of years with Morgan Stanley before moving on to smaller financial firms to try his hand at different roles and to learn more about himself and where he wanted his career to go.

“But that wasn’t enough,” Jacques affirms. “After a while you can’t just keep on learning on the job. You really need to take that next step and have a new experience and be taught something new, while ‘bridging the gap between theory and practice’,” he says, tapping into Columbia’s program ethos to meld the latest academic research with techniques applicable in real world.

Indeed, it was this line of thinking that brought him round to the idea of the MBA. Columbia Business School, where he already knew students and alumni, seemed a strong option from the outset.

“Columbia’s a great school and a great name. New York is a great city. Location and life experience was a massive priority of mine when it came to this MBA experience,” Jacques explains.

With his professional past and networks strongly tied to Europe, the opportunity to shift his outlook to a different continent was also a huge draw. “The new country and, not only that, the new continent was a big factor for me in deciding where I wanted to go for my MBA experience. I’m not here for an easy route to specifically find my next job, I’m here to be able to expand my network and my way of thinking, thereby ensuring a long and successful career in my next role,” he says.

A ‘relatively straightforward’ MBA application procedure

Jacques doesn’t quite make the experience of his MBA application sound like the daunting gauntlet of despair that others can sometimes express. In fact, he makes it sound, well, fairly simple – provided you put the right amount of work in. 

“I had really strong reasons about why I wanted to come do the MBA, so I found it was relatively easy to get the essays down on paper. The GMAT I found relatively straightforward because I wasn’t in a rush to get it done. I used an online tutorial to help me study for it and I only did the GMAT once,” says Jacques recalling the specifics of his MBA application.

Jacques took his GMAT before he had definitively decided on completing the Columbia Business School application procedure, but, “knew that it might come somewhere down the way.” He also knew any score he accrued would be valid for five years and, even though he was working full-time while preparing, he had more time than work had allowed him in the past. He therefore advises anyone with an inkling of wanting to pursue an MBA in the next few years to study for, and take, the GMAT whenever they sense they have the time, even if they don’t intend to complete an MBA application in the immediate future.

Finance courses and the ‘real fun of the academics’

Owing to his background, Jacques looks set to be drawn towards some of Columbia Business School’s specialist finance courses once the core part of the program has concluded.

Something he’s particularly looking forward to getting his teeth stuck into acts a gateway to a number of finance courses. “Columbia has a world-renowned value investing program and that opens you up to a variety of courses which you’re automatically involved in,” Jacques says.

He’s can't wait to take on some of the more advanced learning that these finance courses, as well as non-finance electives, can offer. “The [core] course has been great in terms of getting an insight into the different areas but the real fun of the academics doesn’t necessarily get going until further down the line with its great choice of electives,” he says.

Here, Jacques says he may be swayed by the chance to learn from a particular faculty member when selecting a course. “There are certain standard one-off electives where you know you have great professors,” he enthuses.

For example, while he touches on his interest in electives ranging from advanced corporate finance to organizational change and real estate, his keenness to branch out from pure finance courses has also seen him sign up to explore electives in media and entertainment consulting as well as digital marketing.

In terms of the structure at Columbia Business School, Jacques can already see the benefits of an interactive atmosphere between students and professors alike. “It really helps you express yourself during the course and it allows other people to express themselves, allowing you to learn from them at the same time which I think is a great benefit, especially when you’re in a business school surrounded by people with great ideas,” he points out.

Career goals

When talking about his career goals and what he hopes to take away from his MBA experience at Columbia, Jacques emphasizes his desire to control where his future lies.

 “I’ve come to business school to be able to take that leap and say this is the type of role I should be doing. This is where my career and my next 10 years plus is going to be,” he affirms.

Jacques is also of the belief that one can’t be too rigid in your career goals, especially when the MBA experience is just getting going. “Having an idea of what you want to do is important, but I also try to and keep as much of an open mind as I can while I’m here because being in this kind of environment is unique,” he says.

However, he’s very clear on his overriding career goals and one senses that this flexibility in exploring any new opportunities arising from the program will still require that they fall within that overall vision. Indeed, it’s this drive to purse his career goals that has led him to opt for the January intake, where six months are shaved off the program’s total duration by forgoing summer internships for a concentration on the academics.

But, this makes him even more set on getting the most out of his time in New York and at Columbia. “This is the last time I’ll be in this kind of environment, potentially for the rest of my life, where I have the opportunity of a blank canvas and so many different colors with which to paint the picture of my future,” he notes.