Should you choose to start an MBA at any point in your life, one thing is for certain; it’ll require 100% of your commitment. That isn’t to say it’s all work and no play; you’d be hard-pressed to find one dull person on campus, let alone in our cohort. So when an intimate MBA class of 32 students are put in a room on day one of orientation and asked to discuss whether the motorcycle brand Ducati made the right choices in the 1980’s, sparks fly.
Stage centre: Associate Professor Ciaran Heavy, the Academic Director for the MBA. There’s an excitement in his voice each time he calls on one of us to answer. I don’t know what it is: either everyone has diligently read and analysed the case, or Professor Heavey’s demeanour has made us drop our guard. We hang on to every word he says. We defend what we say. I learned in a week’s time that it’s not just him, everyone on the academic roster has that effect. For now, there are no wrong answers, we relish the freedom and while it rains outside our classroom, we’ve built our own little ecosystem.
You learn the most from your peers. It is impossible to stay in such close quarters and not feel impacted by opinions that you may not necessarily share but can’t say with absolute certainty are wrong. And all this sticks. UCD is known for having churned out some of the best luminaries in the world, and that doesn’t happen overnight.
All of this happened, of course, after formal introductions and Kathryne Del Sesto, the Program Manager, took us through the bureaucratic portion of the course and reminded us time and again: “I might not be the right person to talk to, but I’m never the wrong person to talk to.”
MBA Careers Manager Bernie Burke will tell you: the seeds of labour must be sown. Day two of MBA Foundation Week is the yang to the history laden, soft-spoken yin of day one. Bernie isn’t here to mess around or sugar-coat the truth. It might not sit well with some people, but I found the reality check almost comforting, necessary and never unkind. The very same day, Dr. Colm Murphy split us into groups of 5 for the autumn trimester and in an attempt to teach us trust and team building, blind folded one of us and had us run a track course, as someone from our respective teams guided the blindfolded member through the course (evidence attached).
Foundation week concluded with a Case Competition. All study groups got the same case and had to come up with solutions for a business in dire straits, a real-life example from 2013. To fan the competitive flames of victory, the stakes included actual prizes as well as eternal glory. The days passed us by and as I write this, in hindsight, I already see some things have shifted in me. It’s really difficult for me to pin it down. Was it when I ran around blindfolded, at the mercy of a stranger to guide me through a track course? Was it when we realised that we’re a part of something bigger than all of us put together? Was it when I saw the library, which used to be a chapel but now has been repurposed to reinterpret religion? There is no right answer and balancing that scale, there is no wrong answer.
What I’ve learned from the very little time I’ve been here isn’t very far from what Professor Dumbeldore famously said, “Help will be available at Hogwarts for those who deserve it.” It’s perhaps the purest form of education that UCD offers: curiosity. Asking either for help or for answers is rewarded, and most importantly, encouraged. All MBA courses across the world look the same, and they’re meant to imbue the same things, at least academically. UCD takes this narrative a step further, it throws in a mental stimulus that isn’t easy to replicate.
In a sense I’ve been rescued. That’s what an MBA from a place as premier as Smurfit will do to you. It’ll make you fall in love with what could be.
—Ritankar Sen, FTMBA Class of 2025