A Spectacular Week...
A Summons to Leadership...
The Summer Venture in Management Program at Harvard Business School
Article and Photos by Catherine Walsh
Can a week really change your life? Turn your world upside-down and transform your sense of self and what is possible? Provide you with profound interactions and friendships with a stunning variety of smart people, some of them peers, others professors, all of them partners on a journey of discovery?
Consider the experience of Lillian Hardy, an alumna of the 2002 Summer Venture in Management Program (SVMP). Hardy and seventy-five other SVMP participants came to Harvard Business School (HBS) in mid-June of 2002 after being selected from several hundred applicants.
Spending a week at HBS with other high-achieving young people in order to get a glimpse into what it would be like to be a Harvard MBA student, Hardy says, "was such an incredible opportunity; it was absolutely out of sight!"
Through a week-long immersion experience at Harvard Business School, SVMP demonstrates the excitement and rewards of graduate-level business education to high potential students from the US who might not ordinarily consider pursuing an MBA degree. Specifically, the program focuses on undergraduate students who are from a family with little business education or experience; the first family member to attend college; from a school whose graduates do not typically attend a top-tier, urban university; or a member of a group that is currently underrepresented in business schools and corporate America, such as African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Native Americans. Applicants, who must have completed their junior year of college, are considered on the basis of academic accomplishments, leadership skills, and management potential.
Hardy plans one day to pursue dual degrees in business and law, "hopefully at Harvard," but she wasn't sure what to expect when she arrived on the B-school campus for SVMP."You wonder whether it will be a tough, intimidating week," she recalls. "But then you find out that while this introduction to being an MBA student is intense, it's also social and fun and life-changing all at the same time."
Nominated for the program by corporations and other organizations where they had secured summer internships, participants - all of whom had just completed their junior year of college - represented fifty-three schools, including Colorado State University, Howard University, Morehouse College, and the University of Puerto Rico, and fifty-five organizations, such as AOL Time Warner, the Boston Consulting Group, NASA, JP Morgan Chase, and Coca-Cola.
With HBS picking up the tab for tuition, meals, and housing, and sponsoring organizations covering salaries and transportation, participants were free to focus on making the most of their SVMP experience. And right from the start, the program catapulted students into a community learning experience unlike any other. Instead of using textbooks and listening to lectures, they worked together in intensely interactive study groups and classes, grappling with real-life management situations and cases that ranged from Euro Disney and Sony to inner-city supermarkets and an oil pipeline project in Chad and Cameroon. During the week, students discovered that HBS's renowned case method of instruction taught them not only how to wrestle with complex business issues and improve a company's bottom line, but that it also impressed upon them larger lessons they hadn't expected or anticipated.
Hardy, now a senior at Atlanta's Spelman College, whose historic mission has been to prepare African-American women for academic achievement and leadership, put it this way. "I want to be a leader. My desire lies in making a difference," she says. "What I find exciting about Harvard Business School is that its professors are change agents. Through the case method, they teach you how to ask the right kinds of questions; they help you to see that pursuing an MBA and a business career are ultimately about learning to be a leader who effects change and improves society as a whole."
So how does the case method work? What is a week at Harvard Business School like if you are an SVMP participant?
It's about sixteen-hour days. It's about arriving at HBS alone and leaving with several dozen new best friends, thanks to intense bonding brought about by studying together, going to classes together, playing together, dining together and just plain being together for seven straight days.
SVMP is about fourteen different cases in fourteen classes in areas such as marketing, finance, organizational behavior, and service management. It's about bleary-eyed breakfasts and late-afternoon barbeques; it's about ice cream socials and studying harder than you ever have in your life.
Nine Harvard Business School professors serve as your partners in learning during SVMP, including W. Carl Kester, senior associate dean and chair of the MBA Program. "Mentoring SVMP participants and advising them both formally and informally during and after the program is a key part of what we do," says Kester. "Helping students to plan their post-college careers is a responsibility we take very seriously."
You can also count on receiving support from Harvard Business School's MBA Admissions team, which sponsors and administers the program. "Since we select students very carefully for SVMP, we want to ensure that their experience in and out of the classroom is all that it can be," says Brit K. Dewey, managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid. "We really hope that many of the students will decide to apply to the MBA Program, and that SVMP - an intimate view of the HBS experience and of our community - will be a key factor in their decision-making process."
When you go to class the first day, you notice that the room is shaped like an amphitheater. Seated in ascending semicircular rows, you and your classmates are easily visible to each other and the professor. You get to know each other very quickly, which is important, because the entire eighty-minute class period consists of intense, seemingly freewheeling discussions.
As you attend three classes a day each day, you notice that the professors are like orchestra conductors or coaches in the way they guide the discussion and move it forward. They scribble students' comments on moveable blackboards, start and stop videos, and run around the room to elicit comments that will further everyone's understanding of a case.
In a finance class taught by Professor Ben Esty, faculty chair of SVMP, students have to decide whether a European consortium should spend $13 billion to build Airbus A3XX, which would be the world's largest commercial jet. The case also presents counter-arguments made by the consortium's American competitor, The Boeing Company, which believes that the future of aviation will consist of smaller airplanes flying point-to-point routes rather than larger planes flying through major hubs.
A couple of students attempt to take the sides of both Boeing and Airbus, but Esty pushes them to take a stand. "You can't be middle of the road if you're going to spend $13 billion," he says. "How are you going to answer this $13 billion question? Smart people at both companies have come to radically different views. What is your view in this high-stakes poker game, based on your financial and strategic analysis of the data?"
Hands shoot up around the room. Students vie with one another to make concise, well-reasoned arguments; they cheer and nod approvingly when someone advances his or her position with compelling logic.
Later, after class, Esty says he was impressed by how well the students had prepared and performed.
"We've been raising the selectivity of SVMP by promoting it to students who might not have considered a career in business, who perhaps haven't gone to a well-known school or, who weren't sure they could get in and excel at a place like HBS," he says. "The ideal participants are students who have strong academic records, who are motivated to excel, and who want to make a difference - students who, in other words, could be candidates down the line for the MBA program at Harvard Business School and other top business schools."
Jonathan Lee Kelly, a 2001 alumnus of SVMP and a graduate of Wake Forest University in North Carolina, hopes to come to HBS eventually for the MBA Program. He says the School's impact on his life "has already been enormous." While attending for SVMP, he learned about HBS's Initiative on Social Enterprise, an ongoing and comprehensive effort to involve students, faculty, and alumni in shaping successful nonprofit and other public-sector organizations.
"I was very excited to find out that HBS has a long tradition of support for social initiatives and public service," says Kelly, who developed leadership programs at Wake Forest for high-school age women and African-American male youth and now works for UBS PaineWebber. "A light bulb went off in my head because I realized that coming to HBS would be the logical next step in getting the skills I needed to merge my interests in business and social justice."
For Nkeka Morgan, a student at Princeton University who came to SVMP in 2002 from an internship at Merrill Lynch, the concept of studying and learning through Harvard Business School's famed case method seemed daunting at first. But she soon found that the case method stood out as "an approach that's unmatched" for analyzing and understanding complicated business situations.
"The case method helps you to become a more precise thinker and a better speaker," she says. "You only have this little bit of time, ten seconds or so, to say what you think and why you think it. In order to stand by your words, you have to have a sufficient argument and data to back it up. You learn that there are many different ways to think about a scenario and that at the end of the day there may not be one right answer."
Currently at a personal crossroads about the steps she will take after graduation, Morgan is considering both the Peace Corps and a position on Wall Street (and perhaps, later on, an MBA degree). "SVMP was a training camp in that it has made me ask myself: 'How am I going to be an entrepreneurial leader who makes a difference in other people's lives?"
Guillermo Amezcua, a student from DePauw University in Illinois who came to SVMP in 2002 from an internship at the Northern Trust Company, a private bank, says he was also "amazed" by both the case method and the way in which it was taught.
"I couldn't get over how well the professors presented the material," says Amezcua, who was voted co-president of the 2002 SVMP class. Along with all the other SVMP students, he burst into applause at the end of a class taught by Professor James I. Cash Jr.
"It felt strange and wonderful - and very emotional - as we clapped for Professor Cash," reflects Amezcua, who says he "absolutely" wants to come to Harvard Business School for his MBA. "It was unlike any classroom experience I'd ever had before."
Jim Cash is one of the most popular professors in SVMP. The first African-American to receive tenure at Harvard Business School, he helped start the program in 1983.
Along with a group of other HBS professors, Cash, who is a member of the General Management Unit at the School, saw that for some reason, maybe a lot of reasons, bright young people from African American, Hispanic, and Native American backgrounds weren't hammering at the doors of HBS or other business schools. And thus minority groups like these weren't as represented as they should have been in the executive offices of the business world.
"We found that there were two barriers in particular to participation by underrepresented minorities in the MBA Program. One was financial and the other was self-screening - the tendency for students to assume that they lacked the qualifications to come to a place like HBS," says Cash, who in addition to his teaching duties serves as a senior associate dean at HBS and as a director of both General Electric and Microsoft.
"So we decided to bring outstanding student leaders to campus and let them experience for themselves how a career as a general manager contributes to the well-being of society in ways every bit as powerful as more traditional careers like medicine, teaching, and law," Cash continues. "We want these young people to see how effective business leaders create and sustain jobs that help people pursue their dreams. And we want them to avoid self-screening by physically being on campus and seeing that it could indeed be viable for them to matriculate at Harvard Business School."
The holder of a doctorate in management information systems and a professor at HBS since 1976, Cash always takes time at the end of his SVMP classes to talk to participants about his experience of growing up in the segregated South in the 1940's and 50's. He tells students about what it was like to be the first African-American basketball player not only at Texas Christian University, but also in the area's regional Southwest Conference.
"By sharing some of my experiences, I hope to convey to the students that they should never lose a positive attitude toward humankind, that they should never become cynical, despite the very real challenges that still exist in our nation around issues of race," says Cash.
These days Cash coaches, cajoles, and yes, leads underrepresented minority students into business careers. He always ends his talks to SVMP participants with a straightforward question: "I ask these young people to ask themselves, 'What would you do if you were not afraid?'"
For their part, SVMP participants consult with Cash in his office and by e-mail about the journeys of their lives and careers. Says Nkeka Morgan, the 2002 SVMP alumna from Merrill Lynch, "Professor Cash is seriously accomplished and now he is reaching back I felt like my teacher was reaching back for me and pulling me forward."
When Corey Thomas, Harvard MBA '02, applied to SVMP in 1997, he never dreamed that he would one day graduate from HBS as a Baker Scholar - an academic distinction given to those in the top five percent of the class - and that he would be a manager at Microsoft.
Raised in Fayetteville, Georgia, Thomas was the first person in his family to go to college. He majored in electrical engineering and computer science at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and found out about SVMP from students who had participated in the program the year before. When he attended SVMP, his reaction startled him.
"I loved it," says Thomas. "SVMP gave me a totally different perspective about what I could do with my life. I had never imagined myself doing anything but jobs related to engineering and technology. I'd certainly never imagined myself running or helping to run a company, for instance. But SVMP opened a lot of avenues for me that I never knew existed."
Presentations by HBS faculty and students on careers he had never heard of, such as consulting and investment banking, convinced Thomas to apply for jobs in those arenas. After graduating from Vanderbilt, he went to work for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, a consulting firm that works with companies around the world on strategic decision-making.
"I knew I wanted to go to HBS and figured that consulting would broaden my horizons and show that, even though I had a technical background, I was capable of doing non-technical things," he says. "Two and half years later, I was accepted at HBS."
Because of his SVMP experience, Thomas says, he felt at home as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. "While the MBA Program was intense, what also made it enjoyable and a lot of fun was all the cooperation among students and the encouragement provided by professors." He points to the School's encouragement of student study groups as one way of fostering a supportive environment. "As students, we would also do practice interviews with each other to get ready for job interviews, even though we were competing for those jobs," he says.
Today Thomas draws often on his technical background in his work as a business manager for Microsoft. He plans one day to serve in government or to run a nonprofit. One of his own role models, he explains, is the late John Shad, Harvard MBA '49, who served as chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission under Ronald Reagan after a career as an investment banker.
"John Shad used to say that for the first third of his life, he learned; for the second third, he earned; and for the final third, he served," Thomas says. "Too often, unfortunately, people don't realize that business skills can be applied broadly to all sorts of needs and causes."
Michael Sergio Hernandez-Soria, SVMP '99, currently in the first weeks of his first year in the Harvard MBA Program, calls SVMP "the defining factor that has shaped my career decisions and my life."
An electrical engineering and biomedical major at Duke University, Hernandez-Soria found himself increasingly drawn to the "business of medicine" as an undergraduate, after considering a career as a doctor while in high school. "I wanted to change the world through designing medical products," he says. His managers at GE Medical Systems, where he worked as a summer intern, sponsored him for SVMP. But it was the professors at HBS who made him reconsider his life's direction.
"I'd never encountered their level of professionalism and skill," says Hernandez-Soria. "Every single professor I had in SVMP was superb. Not only did I find the classes at SVMP very intellectually stimulating, but the professors at Harvard Business School also helped me to realize that as a business leader, you could have an enormous impact on the world. "
Yet what also convinced him to apply to HBS were "small, subtle things," he says. "Everything at HBS is carried to such a high level, not only the consistency of excellence across the professors, but also things like the great food in the dining hall and the beautifully manicured grounds."
Smiling, Hernandez-Soria adds: "SVMP was just a week-long program, but it made me feel that I had learned so much; it made me feel that it would be great to come to Harvard Business School as an MBA student."