My Year in MBET Condensed into 1:58

I’ve been asked countless times over the past year about my Master’s program at the University of Waterloo, and what exactly we did in the program. Often, people immediately think….MBA? Well, not quite.

As the MBET program enters it’s eighth year (or version 8.0 as us MBETers like to refer to it as) the program is very much still in it’s infancy. Building a name and a reputation not only domestically but internationally takes time. So it’s understandable if people aren’t quite familiar with the program, and how unique it really is.

I usually begin by telling people that MBET differs from an MBA in several ways, but most importantly ‘MBETers learn to create, while MBA’s learn to manage‘. While that’s not always true of all MBA programs (cue the angry emails from MBA students), it’s generally applicable to most programs.

MBET – Where Ideas Come to Life

While it may not always be fair to say that MBA’s are always taught to manage, it’s simply the best way to contrast what we do in the MBET program with that of a typical MBA program. Simply put, the focus of the MBET program is to take a concept from idea to commercialization, all within one year. We call it, our practicum. While that can be a tall mountain to climb, all of us set that as the benchmark at the beginning of the year. MBET doesn’t promote students to write business plans, marketing plans, five forces model, or SWOT analysis (although one can expect to come across one or another during the course of the year!). The program pushes students to examine the current market environment and to identify possible opportunities that may exist.

MBET is all about collaboration, and each idea is cultivated within a team and multi-disciplinary environment. This allows each group to incorporate as much diversity as possible into the practicum. Having an engineer, a business, arts, or a even psychology student work on the practicum encourages each individual to provide their own unique view of the problems encountered during the life of a start-up and possible solutions that we may otherwise not have considered. While each student engages in idea exploration in his or her preferred vertical, each course is taught to compliment where each student is at during the life cycle of their venture. Topics in finance and accounting address items such as pre-revenue issues, or what to think about from a capital perspective before launching a product, not how to manage capital when you’re bringing in a $100 million in revenue annually. Each student is just not at that point yet. In that respect, course content is very unique and the program isn’t structured like a traditional university course where you have 5 different courses each semester. All MBET courses are set up to extend beyond one semester and continue for the entire year. It’s a unique way of teaching that allows students to learn and grow with the course and apply those theories and techniques into their respective practicum.

There is plenty more to write about the program and the lessons I’ve learned over the past year while working in a start-up. I’ll break down each relevant issue in the coming weeks, but for now feel free to take a look at the video below to get a glimpse for what I did in the program and in my practicum this past year.

If you are interested in learning about some of the other practicums students in the MBET program have worked on in recent years, head here to see a listing of the projects.