At the Rotman School of Management, opening minds is a “soft skill.” Just imagine what a hard skill would be. “The MBA is a multi-purpose degree, it’s like a Swiss Army knife,” says Alex Kenjeev, an MBA candidate graduating in 2009. I shudder.
If Kenjeev is right, this is one expensive Swiss Army knife. According to the Rotman website, Kenjeev’s program, a joint law and MBA program, costs $111,780 over four years.
I ask for a less imaginative description and he comes up with another military metaphor: “Boot camp. You don’t sleep very much, you just work all the time. There is no such thing as a weekend, forget it. It does change our personalities a bit. It makes us more effi cient and result-oriented.” Somehow, Kenjeev says this lovingly. Clearly, we don’t think alike.
• ROTMAN IS IMMODEST
What could possibly make a person trade the wonderful world of academia for a gruelling lifestyle of number-crunching, while paying a king’s ransom for it all?
MBA students say that a business degree is an excellent monetary investment, and the numbers back them up: the average Rotman MBA increases salaries by 125 per cent.
“Rotman helped me fi nd the job that I’m in, and I really love my job,” says Helen Vavougios, who did the Bridging to Business program after a degree in behavioural biology at U of T. She is currently a supervisor at a dairy manufacturing company. “I love it. I’ve been with them for eight months now.”
But thinking quantitatively for the case of a Varsity associate news editor, adding that 125 per cent means that if I join the two-year MBA, based on my current wage, I can expect to pay off the Rotman tuition in 141 years.
If Arts and Science is for boys, an MBA is for men. “You’re at the stage of life where you have to think about how you’re going to live your life, as opposed to, you know…like ‘mm yeah I’m still fi guring things out,’” says Kenjeev. “You’ve learned who you are, and now you want to improve yourself in a way so that you can get value out of it. Or create value for others.”
“Value creation,” he tells me, is MBA jargon. “A good corporation creates value for shareholders, customers, and employees.”
Kenjeev says that his program has taught him how to making decisions by quantifying. “Like, I could open up a spreadsheet, and work through all the tangible and intangible aspects of it, and fi gure out to the dollar is this worthy or not, and actually make the decision rationally.”
Apparently, employers also love Rotman students. An MBA helps quantify an employee’s value to a company.
No, says Kenjeev. “We recognize that our neighbours and colleagues in the other departments are doing something different, but there isn’t any ‘looking down.’” Kenjeev makes the distinction between the “practical” and the “academic” aspects of what goes on at university. Pharmacy, engineering and medicine would count as practical. If you’re in philosophy you may hot have hope, but you’re not inferior.
• ROTMAN IS DIVERSE
The program is poised to grow, physically, in almost every fathomable direction. In a $91-million expansion to be implemented in the next fi ve years, the business school building will take over its adjacent parking lot—and drive out the campus radio station and sexual education centre from a building across from it. Further expansions, pending approval, make the entire project a $200-million conquest.
Why? Because they’re that good. You may have to work hard at Rotman, but rest assured, your institution boasts “diversity,” as 36 per cent of your peers are international students. “Even the Canadian half has a lot of international students who happen to have permanent residence here already,” says Kenjeev. “We’re tremendously international, which is great.”
I am an international student (by Kenjeev’s standards or otherwise), and I am not here to bring “diversity.” I believe the reason this university values me is the money I bring.
Fortunately, Rotman also has a diversity of academic backgrounds. At the MBA level, most students have at least four years of work experience in various fi elds, with undergraduate degrees from just about any discipline. Kenjeev also points to a diversity of ambitions: “I have some friends who want to become entrepreneurs, other friends who are in fi nance, like banks and stuff. Other people want to do marketing, while others are interested in management and consulting, that’s very popular. Some would like to do public interest work as well.”
• ROTMAN IS FUN
As Kenjeev paints me a picture of world domination, I feel the slightest twinge of envy. And Rotman students do have fun. Vavougios’s favourite Bridge to Business course was one where the class founded their own simulated corporations, entering decisions into a computer that interpreted their success. “I didn’t think that I could think about business strategy like that. It was fun. It’s kinda like playing chess,” she says.
The closest thing to this I’ve encountered in political science was a conflict-resolution simulation organized by Hillel: at least four people brought peace to the Middle East that day at Sid Smith.
And it doesn’t stop there. “The teachers at Rotman give you so much attention,” gushes Vavougios, who was taken by surprise. “Early on in the program they knew our first names. I didn’t expect that from business school, I expected that it would be less personal.”
• ROTMAN HAS SOUL
“The funny thing is, if you told me that I was going to business school when I was 16, I would have laughed in your face,” says Vavougios. “When you’re a young person, you have a lot of ideas about who you think you are, and as you grow up, you realize that maybe not everything’s so bad or evil or whatever.”
This is where I get nervous. Helen says that she was more leftist and idealistic when she was younger, but that she has changed since then. “I can see myself working in a real business or for an NGO…now, I think both are great.”
Is she pursuing her MBA at the cost of her principles? “I think my lefty ideals started to go before Rotman. I just didn’t know much about the business world.”
Kenjeev, finally sensing my apprehension, gives a much more reserved response. “If the criticism of the MBA is that we focus too much on wealth and money,” he says, “I would say that we do need some people in society, the experts, to teach us how to create the wealth that enables all those other wonderful things, like health and education, and other…opportunities.”
