Immersive Learning

Would you let a college student invest $100,000 for you? They do at BYU Marriott’s School of Business. MBA students not only study finance, operations, and strategy, but they also spend time doing what they’ve been learning.

The MBA program calls this approach “Learn. Do. Become.” This experiential learning strengthens the vitality of the BYU Marriott MBA program and consistently creates class after class of graduates that draw the attention of industry leaders for their real-world, on-the-job experience.

BYU Marriott offers six options for its MBA students: Cougar Capital, Healthcare Industry Scholar, BYU Analytics, the Silver Fund, Cougar Strategy, and Savage Global Consulting. Cougar Capital, for example, is a student-run venture capital and private equity fund through which students invest in five or six deals a year. That’s a lot of coin to trust to college kids—even if they are MBA students.

COUGAR CAPITAL

Gary Williams, teaching professor of entrepreneurship in BYU Marriott’s Department of Management, is an enthusiastic advocate of this type of experiential learning; it’s how he’s gained much of his knowledge.

“I had performed an LBO [leveraged buyout], several M&As [mergers and acquisitions], and sold my small business,” Williams says. “Yet I really had no academic background in those things. I learned it all on the job—a real learn-throughdoing experience.”

It made perfect sense to him to incorporate learn-throughdoing experiences into the MBA curriculum. The first incarnation of Williams’s experiential learning approach was a single class: Venture Capital Private Equity Fundamentals, which ultimately evolved into Cougar Capital.

“In 2006 we graduated our first students who had taken this class,” Williams says. “Outplacement was phenomenal because the students were highly differentiated in the interview process.”

This fund represents one of the most effective methods for developing critical thinking skills, says Taylor Nadauld, associate professor of finance and Goldman Sachs Distinguished Faculty Fellow. “It is not just a finance class. It is a business class that requires the practical application of business concepts and practices to be successful.”

Sunshine Cardell, a 2013 MBA grad who currently works as a consultant, observes, “The financial, strategic, and due-diligence skills I gained benefited me tremendously in working with young companies and investors. But the greatest impact Cougar Capital had on me was to expand how I thought—to see potential in its infancy, to assess opportunities rigorously, and then to proceed with confidence to make things happen.”

Since Cougar Capital’s founding, the students have created a portfolio with more than twenty companies at any one time. Through the years, they’ve made more than forty investments and had twenty-plus exits.

“The students have achieved just under three times money-on-money, which would make us a top-tier firm,” says Williams. “The industry measures in quartiles, so we would be in the top quartile. It has become and continues to be a differentiation for BYU, something I call career acceleration.”

HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY SCHOLAR

Healthcare Industry Scholar is the only “Learn. Do. Become.” MBA option that students can take in conjunction with another “Learn. Do. Become.” experience in another program.

“Our program is made up of four different business graduate programs: MAcc, MBA, MISM, and MPA,” explains Jeff Knudsen, a 2018 graduate. “This structure helps provide diverse healthcare perspectives in the classroom as well as unique opportunities for group projects.”

William Tayler, Glen Ardis Professor in BYU Marriott’s School of Accountancy, notes that they are looking for students who are passionate about their discipline to apply their expertise to healthcare. “The healthcare industry is a $3.4 trillion behemoth. It makes up almost 20 percent of the US GDP, and it represents an amazing opportunity for hardworking, energetic business students.”

Students from this year’s class competed in a national venture capital case competition that centered around a biotech company. They took first place. What’s more, the judges told the team they were miles ahead of other teams as far as understanding the market forces and trends in healthcare.

“My time at BYU has set me up for success as I’ve pivoted my career from clinical medicine,” says MBA student Greg McDavitt, a physician with more than six years in practice who is slated to graduate in 2018. “Because of the Healthcare Industry Scholar program, I’ve developed a unique skill set that allows me to combine healthcare proficiency and business acumen to align operations and strategic objectives.”

BYU ANALYTICS

As an MBA student-run consultancy, BYU Analytics provides business insights and consulting for business partners in tech, retail, manufacturing, and other industries. In year one—the “Learn” phase of the sequence— students enroll in the Introduction to Marketing Analytics course. In year two—the “Do” phase—they work as analytics consultants with companies on data-intensive projects. The student group functions as an analytics consulting company and works to solve the actual problems of real companies.

The BYU Analytics program played a crucial role in Brady Leavitt’s academic experience and career prep. “I’m currently working for Microsoft deploying big data and advanced analytics solutions,” says the 2015 MBA grad, who works as a cloud, data, and AI solution architect. “We’re fond of saying that every company is becoming a software company. A major source of competitive advantage will go to the firms that can turn their ‘data estate’ into productive assets. Experiences such as the BYU Analytics program help bridge the theoretical aspects of business with the realities and difficulties of delivering business insight with data.”

It comes down to making better decisions with data, explains Jeff Dotson, associate professor of marketing at BYU Marriott. “The demand for students with analytics skills has increased dramatically in the past few years. This is true across all industries and job functions, but it is particularly true in data-intensive industries such as tech. In my opinion, BYU Analytics—and all the ‘Learn. Do. Become.’ programs here—are differentiators for our MBA program.”

THE SILVER FUND

Each year, a team of ten to twelve MBA students are selected to manage the Silver Fund, which includes significant portfolios in real-dollar funds. “Being a member of the Silver Fund team is just like being an analyst in an actively managed equity fund,” says Steven Thorley, H. Taylor Peery Professor of Finance at BYU Marriott.

The Silver Fund was established in 1984 through a donation from the Harold Silver family and provides students an opportunity to manage an actual stock portfolio and conduct the associated security analysis and portfolio performance measurement. Students also manage a bond portfolio of Zions Bank funds through which they learn about and apply fixed-income concepts, including credit and duration analysis.

“The Silver Fund experience challenged me to identify investment catalysts that would cause the price of a stock to move toward my assessment of the true value of the company,” says Joe Cook, a 2004 MBA grad and a cofounder and portfolio manager of Apollo Fund LP, an equity hedge fund that profits from volatility in a systematic way.

Because their decisions have real-dollar consequences, the students experience all the ups and downs associated with both good and bad investment decisions. In addition, the individual stock pitches to the group invoke substantial debate and also push the thinking and analysis of the presenters.

COUGAR STRATEGY

Cougar Strategy is a student-administered, in-house strategy consulting firm that helps students learn and apply valuable models and tools in an actual business environment.

“We try to mimic the intensive, problem-based learning that takes place in med schools,” says Paul Godfrey, William and Roceil Low Professor of Business Strategy in BYU Marriott’s Department of Management. “In med school, students spend a couple of years learning background material in a classroom, and then they’re actually out learning by doing in their residencies. They’re guided and mentored through that process, and that’s what makes it so effective.”

One 2017 MBA graduate, Alexander Erickson, says, “The BYU MBA program was truly the most unique and impactful academic experience I have ever had. I am a hands-on learner, so the experiential model allowed me to ingest management concepts by instantly applying those concepts.”

In their first semester, new students study and train to become effective consultants. In their second semester, they begin working on client projects alongside their second-year counterparts. Students spend their entire second year doing more client consulting projects and running the group. “They, in effect, become the executives of our firm,” Godfrey says.

“The experience was amazing,” says Erickson, who currently works for Adobe as a manager of business strategy. “We built a business model and an org structure, developed a product, marketed and sold the product, and operated the business we created. I was the group’s COO. That’s not something I could have learned in class.”

SAVAGE GLOBAL CONSULTING

Savage Global Consulting is an experiential learning endeavor funded by Salt Lake City–based Savage Services and reserved for handpicked graduate students in global supply chain management. “These Savage scholars work together on a consulting team to solve a specific problem for companies,” explains Scott Webb, a BYU Marriott marketing and global supply chain assistant teaching professor. “The students take on projects in process design, quality management, logistics design, strategic sourcing, and service innovation.”

Part of the “Do” phase of the program is called Global Immersion. “This year it was an intensive two-week experience to finish and present consulting projects with Walmart Central America in Costa Rica,” Webb says. “The students also consulted with NGOs in Nicaragua and visited the Panama Canal to understand the entire distribution network of Walmart.”

The students had worked on both projects throughout the semester and then spent three thirteen-hour working days in Costa Rica; however, they encountered a curveball when they arrived in the country.

“The day before the presentation, we met our contact’s boss,” explains Daniel Criddle, a 2018 graduate. “We gave her a brief overview of the strategy that we were planning to present the next day. She drastically changed the scope of our project from what our contact had given us. We made a quick pivot, working until 3 a.m. in the hotel conference room. When the time came for the formal presentation, we delivered a fantastic recommendation as well as specific steps to get there, which they started implementing six weeks later. This is an experience I will always treasure and will utilize as part of the foundation for my career moving forward.”

These are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, Dotson notes. “We study the supply chain, then our Savage scholars take it a step further. They travel the world and solve problems for real companies. They end up flowcharting processes from initial order to backhaul. They understand the DNA of an actual client’s supply chain. They find the significant gaps in the functionality of current systems. They make recommendations, and companies adopt those recommendations. Consequently, these clients report greater efficiency, profits, and savings. That’s not just education—that’s experience that will get you hired.”

ENTER TO LEARN. DO. BECOME.

The immersive learning model of BYU’s MBA program certainly attracts high-quality students who are eager to apply for coveted spots in the six programs. The school is also strengthening its already sterling reputation as it places graduates in prime positions to hit the water swimming.

“Immersive learning—‘Learn. Do. Become.’—catalyzes the learning process,” Webb observes. “And students are in the middle of it all. They’re actually working on things, making mistakes, learning how to recover from mistakes and how to avoid them in the future. It’s the way education should be.”