Biography
After earning an undergraduate engineering degree, Andrew stepped into a management consulting role. “I learned a lot on the job,” he says, “but I realized that a formal business education would allow me to provide further value and grow personally and professionally.”
Andrew wanted to stay with his employer in Atlanta following completion of his MBA, so choosing a school in the city made sense. However, he wanted more than location and describes being convinced by the strength of Goizueta’s One-Year MBA program, its top 20 ranking, and the program’s size.
There are robust alumni connections at Andrew’s company, where the head of the firm is a graduate and a number of staff have received MBAs from Goizueta. Andrew considers the many recent Goizueta graduates “impressive” after watching them come on strong as emerging leaders in the company.
With the shorter timeline of the One-Year MBA program, Andrew recognizes the value of the Summer Experience, which, he says, “throws a lot at you at once, but it is manageable. Everything you do, you go through together as a group, and in your core teams you have one another to bounce ideas off. The Summer Experience was a great way to kick-start the MBA process.”
He has been especially impressed with the faculty who are “out there” — professors such as Charlie Goetz or Ray Hill, who have a depth of real-world experience starting and leading companies. “Their stories have been, hands down, a huge piece of the value of the degree thus far,” Andrew notes.
When he imagined his future classmates, Andrew expected similar backgrounds to his, whether it was individuals in consulting roles or with large companies. He has admired Goizueta’s approach to diversity and enjoyed meeting students who come from across the spectrum — medical school, law school, nonprofits, the military. “The program helps us identify our strengths and those of others, as well as learn to leverage them,” says Andrew.
Little wonder that, with such a strong emphasis on thinking broadly, the greatest asset of the program is, according to Andrew, “equipping me with a new mindset and new ways to approach problems.”