Cornell Admits First Students for New NYC MBA Program
Cornell University has admitted approximately half of their first class of MBA students at their New York City tech campus. The university will be offering a one year MBA program at their new Roosevelt Island location. The inaugural class will have 35 to 40 students, to ensure that there are similar numbers of business students and science graduate students.
Cornell’s new NYC tech campus was founded in 2011. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had encouraged anyone willing to build a new graduate school of applied sciences in New York City to do so by offering them $400 million in infrastructure upgrades and real estate. Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology submitted the winning proposal. Students began attending the new school’s masters in engineering program in May 2013 in the university’s temporary space in Google’s headquarters. The business school will also operate in Google’s headquarters before the school moves to its permanent home in 2017.
Since Cornell’s new graduate school has a technological focus, Cornell is looking for potential MBA applicants with math, engineering, or computer science backgrounds. Ninety percent of the students that Cornell’s NYC campus has admitted so far have science-related degrees or quantitative backgrounds.
The Cornell MBA in NYC will offer a unique curriculum and class structure. MBA students are required to spend part of their year working in a start up company. The school will not have semester-long courses: instead, students may spend a full day finishing a course, and then apply its information in a project. At this time, the school does not expect any courses to meet for more than four days in a two-week period.
Students at Cornell’s new graduate school will also have a chance to have a more traditional business school experience. Students will begin their MBA on Cornell’s main campus in Ithaca, New York, where they will network with other Cornell students and take general business courses. After a few months, they will move to Cornell’s New York City campus to finish their degree.
While in the program, MBA students will have the opportunity to work closely with graduate science and engineering students at Cornell’s NYC campus on company-hosted projects. The school has formed relationships with several companies that might offer projects, including eBay, Google, Intel, MasterCard, Citigroup, LinkedIn, and Nielson. The school is negotiating with companies to hire adjunct professors from companies like Google and Bartle Bogle Hegarty.
Cornell will be accepting applications until February, and admissions decisions will be made on a rolling basis.
