Taking a More Prescriptive Tack with Students
This year we have also decided to become a lot more prescriptive with students. Instead of asking students how many coaching appointments they think they’ll need with our office, we are directing students through a series of modules to get them to a place where they are ready to take that next step.
We told them this year that they should have their first coaching session in our office in July. Eighty percent of the incoming class did it. Building on all of the pre-work they’ve already done as part of the Summer Seminar series, they then have this one-hour intake session with a coach even before they start classes. The second coaching conversation can then dive deeper. This will take place in the September-October time frame, followed by a third, fourth and fifth coaching session.
We now tell students we want them want them to have completed five sessions in the fall before the end of the semester. This helps them understand that one session is probably not going to be enough and 15 is too many. We think this new approach of giving them a recipe to follow is going to make a huge difference in terms of the outcomes. As you can see, we are innovating all along the way with regard to the protocols we are putting into place.
We’ve also given them direction in terms of the coaching sessions themselves. For example, we tell them they should have a target company list by the fourth session with 20 companies on it. That level of prescription helps to signal what each coaching session is going to be about and why it is important.
Industry-Leading Technology Solutions
As much as we have been innovating with protocols we put into place, we’ve also made some important changes as far as the technology products we are deploying to help make the process smoother.
In terms of technology, there are two main things I’d like to highlight. The first is called MBA Career Conversations. In the five years I have been here, a common concern expressed by students has been that they didn’t have an easy way to find alumni or to then schedule informational interviews with them. Some have even shared that it can be hard to connect with fellow students for these kinds of informational interviews.
We encourage our students to think about informational interviews as a kind of pyramid. The first people you should be networking with are your peers—these are the safest, most constructive conversations you can have. From there, you move on to the second-year students or students in our evening or part-time program. And then from there, you target young alumni. Bottom line, you don’t go directly to the CEO.
With this in mind, we have deployed a platform that allows the whole Georgetown alumni community to come together for this purpose with all current students—full-time, part-time and executive MBAs. The platform, which we rolled out in June, is run for us by Firsthand, formerly called Evisors. It’s an online community, and what’s cool about it is that it’s flexible enough that anyone who uses it can be either an advisor or an advisee. You choose your role when you go into the system.
We have asked everyone who uses it to go in as advisors first, which aligns with our principle of Hoyas helping Hoyas. So they approach it as “I am going to offer to help either one of my fellow students or a fellow alumnus to engage in a career conversation of some sort.” Maybe you’ll offer a résumé critique. Or, let’s say I go into the system as an alumna and I offer to conduct a mock interview with someone every third Tuesday at 4 o’clock. Then someone playing the role of advisee goes in and grabs that time. A conferencing system will then call both of us at the scheduled time.
Implicit in this system is an offer to help someone—it allows all advisees to also serve as advisors. We launched it in June, and by September we had more than 700 people registered. We’ve had great adoption, with current students and alumni signing on around the world. What’s so interesting about this is that it’s transactional. It is not a mentorship program. It’s about providing the opportunity to have an informational interview.
The transition to this new system came about after a lot of feedback from students. We looked for a solution for a couple of years, during which time we’d been working with Evisors on mock interviews. They shared that they were about to come out with this brand-new platform, and it appealed to us. To have students advising students—that’s a little unique. Then, once you graduate, you are an alumnus and you are still in the conversation.
MBA Career Conversations are taking place around the world—it’s a virtual play and we want it to be as inclusive as possible. Already other schools within Georgetown University have contacted me wanting to learn more about it and see if they might deploy a similar system.
