My MBA journey @ Quantic School of Business
On March 4, 2020 I officially obtained my MBA degree from Quantic School of Business. I started the program in February 2019. Earlier known as Smartly, the Quantic School of Business offers both a full-time as well as an executive online MBA program, and I was enrolled in the former. It is about time that education of all kinds, including MBA is available and legitimized online. Besides my formal education under brick-and-mortar universities, I have been educating myself through online platforms such as Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc. And Quantic is another such platform that I am glad to have found and used for educating myself.
About the institution
These MBA programs under Quantic School of Business are offered by an educational technology company Pedago which was setup in 2013. The full-time MBA program is free as of now (March 2020). I was reached out by their team perhaps because I am an EPFL alumnus and they are looking to strengthen their brand by having individuals with such prestigious university degrees as part of their cohorts.
I went on with the proposal. There were 3 rounds of interviews mostly to assess why I want to do an MBA and am I capable enough to be selected. Of course I cleared all the interviews, and the program started late March. Fortunately, towards the end of the program, right before I graduated, Quantic received accreditation from DEAC, USA.
About the program
The MBA program that was roughly a year long had 10 modules
Each module had roughly 7-8 lessons, making a total of 60 lessons. Each lesson in turn was divided into chapters which were then split into several web-pages. Below is one such web-page.
There were 2 exams - the mid-term and the final exam. Both were open book and had bunch of objective type questions covering the various modules. There were 4 projects dedicated to some of the modules spread at roughly equal intervals during the program. The projects were supposed to be worked in groups (or individually) and the deliverables were usually a (video) presentation and/or project reports.
Students were connected via slack channels which proved effective especially w.r.t communications from the institute. Every week, students were required to finish a couple of lessons, although one could also postpone and finish pending lessons all at once, later. There were exercises as well each week, where we were given a question or topic-for-discussion (that was related to what was taught that week) over slack channel and students would then write their opinions or answers on it. These exercises were not marked and hence did not have much participation to be honest, although they seemed to be a good tool to test and apply one’s understanding of learned concepts in real life.
Lastly, the program which practically was just a web dashboard, came with other helpful resources besides the regular coursework, such as free access to Statista and the Quantic library which contained relevant and valuable external resources, all for free.
About the journey
Doing a full-time MBA in one of those prestigious universities is both expensive and time-consuming. Also, its damn difficult to get an admit to begin with. I didn’t see the opportunity costs on this route being outweighed by the benefits of getting such degree. However, I still wanted to gain some formal knowledge around running businesses. This is why I chose to spend a sizeable chunk of my time on this 1-year program. Here are my few thoughts on how it went:
- Although an online program, it still needs long-term dedication in order to complete coursework in time, deliver on those projects and most importantly pass the exams.
- The content of this program is really great, and the way it is designed, it really helps you to retain the concepts or atleast develop a mind-map of where to look for in their resources.
- Alongside a full-time job it can sometimes get tough to keep going but if you have read the important deadlines well, you can plan for the best and the worst.
- Each MBA cohort is truly international, and hence it gives an opportunity to connect with people from all walks of life and all latitudes and longitudes.
- The program is currently free as they are building the brand, however, I speculate that this offer might not last long and hence, interested ones should apply as soon as possible.
- Now that the program is accredited, it assures the legitimacy and lets you mention the degree professionally. I am a data-science / machine-learning guy, hence this doesn’t directly give dividends for me, but I was here for the knowledge anyways. In the long run, I believe what I have learned here will help in indirect ways.
- My final advice would be : Don’t do this program if you are basing your future on your MBA degree, but totally do this program if you are a working professional and still want to learn about business administration for advancement in your career.
Acknowledgements
I am really thankful to Quantic School of Business for the amazing program and the MBA degree.
Thank you for reading this post. Hope it was insightful.
P.S. My Degree
