School identity
I’ve left this post blank for a couple of days because I knew I wanted to talk about it, but I wasn’t exactly sure what to say. I’m still not 100% sure what I want to say but I might as well take a crack at it.
On Wednesday, I had a good meeting with my friend and current MBAA president, Jonathan. He and I were meeting to discuss some of the issues facing the MBAA in the coming year as well as how to begin and manage a student blogging group. I have some very definite ideas about it as does he. Our administration does too. The only thing is none of us want to have an exact copy of an existing format, so we need to decide how to blend the different formats together. I’m more in favor of a student-led and managed group. From what I understand, the admissions office wants to be involved as well and might have the student blogs posted directly on one of their main pages. My main concern is the difference between blog posts displayed on a student site vs. the admissions page. I think we will have a bit of freedom once we finally decide on a format, but there are obviously still plenty of details to iron out.
The other big issue we discussed was school identity. Being writers, Jonathan and I try not to get hung up on semantics but we do! One example is the word “competitive.” To say our program is not competitive sends two very different messages. Compared to other programs, our curriculum is very competitive. However, we stay away from the word competitive because our program is very collaborative in nature. I don’t see why these two concepts must be mutually exclusive. We can have a competitive program filled with very collaborative students. To me, this is a clear distinction. However, if someone tells me that the program is not competitive, I assume that that means that the program is not challenging or is not on par with similar MBA programs. This is completely misleading.
Here’s my question: When you hear that a program is competitive, what does that mean to you? How would you rephrase it to mean both competitive and collaborative?