After graduating last June, Olesy Alekseev became a guinea pig, and she couldn’t be happier about the way the experiment turned out. She is now a customer service manager with Scotiabank in the financial district-the youngest such manager in the GTA.
“I never would have dreamed that I loved finance!” Alekseev laughed. “From my work experience I knew I wanted to get into business, but I was missing these essential business skills.”
Alekseev was one of 57 participants in the Bridge to Business program, a month-long course designed by U of T’s Rotman School of Management that sees top Rotman professors teach business skills to high-achieving arts and science undergraduates.
Along with business training, B2B, as the program is known, aims to set participants up with “platform jobs that will provide students with multi-directional career opportunities,” said Joelle Allen, a marketing and communications officer at Rotman.
After a solid first session for B2B, enrolment this June is set to increase to about 120, said program director Katie Burrows. So far, the new group boasts undergrad representation from schools across Canada, and has drawn interest from American schools such as Harvard.
One-third of the inaugural graduating class found full-time work directly through in-course job interviews, while others returned to existing jobs, started their own entrepreneurial ventures, or were hired later through contacts they had developed at B2B.
While the cost per student rings in at just under $5,000 for tuition, materials, and apartment-style residence at Woodsworth, a quarter of last year’s participants benefited from substantial need-based scholarships.
The true payoff comes in the direction B2B provides for students seeking to develop their business potential, explained Burrows, adding that the participants’ calibre is also a top selling point.
“I was in awe of the people that came to the program [last year],” she said. “We know that we’re attracting people who don’t just have high grades, but who have strong ambition and goals, and really want to make a difference in the world.”
B2B grads Tonika Morgan, a project manager at the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre, and Charlotte Sobolewski, a U of T alumnus now with famed NGO Free the Children, have applied their new found business skills to the non-profit world. Morgan is experiencing first-hand the benefits of linking business skills with charitable aims.
“The non-profit sector is changing so much. It’s becoming an industry that employs a lot of people,” she said. “It’s not about broke social workers anymore.”
More and more, non-profit leaders need business sense and good management skills to make sure their “shareholders,” the aid recipients who depend on NGOs, are being served as well as possible, Morgan believes. Following that trend, Rotman administrators are finding more NGO jobs for the upcoming session.
Much of B2B’s curriculum is delivered as hands-on business projects. In one such task-which wouldn’t be out of place on The Apprentice-groups of students were hired by Sony Music to develop marketing strategies for several acts, including Los Lonely Boys. Students had to research the target market for each group and plan events like CD release parties. Sony implemented the brightest ideas at actual events.
“Through projects like these, we really learned how to work with people and to develop each other’s talents,” Alekseev said. Students with arts and science backgrounds thought of marketing strategies that wouldn’t have occurred to the average business student, she said, proving that the two academic backgrounds can be fused in the working world.
Ashutosh Jha, a U of T computer science grad currently working as a systems analyst at Mayon Technologies, loved learning the ins and outs of the business world through these group projects.
“We realized that things like marketing aren’t just done by intuition, but that there is logic behind it,” Jha said. “These are things that as a non-business student you don’t know.”
Students’ enthusiasm for the MBA staples surprised Rotman staff. “The program was very heavy on the ‘hard skills,'” said Burrows, and professors worried that students lacking a commerce background would be overwhelmed or put off by the substantial finance and accounting content.
“There’s also a little bit of fear with art students that they can’t learn business, but they find that they can,” Burrows said. Coupled with their people skills and liberal arts backgrounds, they become “very attractive to employers.”
Judging from the initial class’ success, B2B has found a winning formula by combining arts and science skills with business know-how.
“Business does touch everything,” said Burrows, evidenced by the fact that students went on to find jobs in a wide variety of fields.
Including, for one Scotiabank employee, a world she thought she’d never return to.
“I was actually scared about doing B2B because I hadn’t done math since high school,” Alekseev recalls. “But the program is nothing like undergrad. I think I learned more in that month than I did in my four years!”
Applications to Rotman’s Bridge to Business course are currently being accepted for the June 2007 session. Decisions are made within five business days of receipt of the full application. See www.rotmanb2b.com for more information.
