Columbia Business School student Linda Chew recently shared the top five things that she has learned in business school with The Globe and Mail, a Toronto based publication. Chew, originally from Vancouver, enrolled in the two-year, full-time MBA program at Columbia. She completed the MBA program at Columbia this May.
Chew started her business career at Deloitte LLp. She has worked at the Toronto and Vancouver offices. She most recently has worked in mergers and acquisitions with the company. She is a chartered accountant and a Chartered Financial Analysis charter holder. She has contributed to The Globe and Mail over the course of her MBA program education. This is the last entry for the MBA experience stories for the publication.
The first thing that Chew shares is that she has found that teams composed of very different individuals work well together. She explains that at Columbia, students are divided into clusters, groups of 60 or so peers who take most of the first-year core courses together. Each cluster is then broken into five- to six-person learning teams who work together on class projects.
“The unlikely combination of a Marine from Maine, a Bloomberg sales specialist and an internal strategy consultant both from California, a financial regulatory manager from South Korea and an M&A adviser from Canada turned out to be one of the best parts of my B-school experience,” she told The Globe and Mail. “It’s a team that might have never come together otherwise, but it proved to be an effective one.”
Another thing that she shared is that she found that business school was the best opportunity to try new things. During her time at Columbia, Chew had the opportunity to explore career options that she had thought about but never seriously had the option to seriously pursue. She explains that “the experience of thinking, planning and validating concepts with others was invaluable.”
Read the rest of Linda Chew’s top five take aways from business school, here. Find more information on the Columbia Business School’s Full-Time MBA program as well as other top MBA programs in the New York area at metromba.com.