The smell seems to hit you as soon as you step through the large glass doors of the School of Management. It permeates every nook and cranny of the state-of-the-art building. But it’s not the coffee at Starbucks or the sandwiches at Bread Winners – it’s power, and it’s in short supply with no scarcity of people looking to control it.
“I love having power and I want to be in management,” said SMG junior Amie Valpone. “I like to work hard and tell people what to do.”
Valpone is one of a group of six students jockeying to control the world as part of SMG’s famous Core program. Core consists of four classes, usually taken during a student’s junior year, that examine finance, information systems, marketing and operations management. In addition to those classes, students work in groups of six or seven to create a product and a business model, which they present to professors at the end of the semester.
“The idea is that they’re gonna learn the concepts of these four courses, and the fifth virtual course is the project,” said assistant professor of operations and technology management and Core Coordinator Nitin Joglekar. “The best part of it is that they come up with the product – we don’t tell them.”
Core in its current form began about 10 years ago as an extension of a previous program in which students combined coursework and real-world experience, though not nearly to extent they do now, Joglekar said.
“This is really something that we’ve developed as a team over a long bit of time,” he said. “It takes about 40 faculty members to pull this off. It’s really a lot of wonderful people working really hard.”
Working in groups allows students to specialize in areas that interest them as well as learn what it takes to work in a real business environment, Joglekar said.
“When you’re balancing the needs of five or six other students – their learning interests, their own background strengths – the team can produce more than the sum of the parts,” he said.
But more than just working together as business associates, group members can become friends and develop relationships akin to those of siblings.
“We’ve all gotten really close,” Valpone said of her Core group, which is working on the “Heelshield” – a product meant to protect the back of one’s pants from salt or grass stains.
Group member and SMG junior Mohammed Masri, who is working on the information systems segment of the project, echoed Valpone’s sentiments in an interview with all six group members Saturday at SMG’s Starbucks. But Masri said the camaraderie wasn’t always present.
“Even though we’re getting our work done,” he said, “we still have time to have fun. In the beginning, there were some doubts. People were double-checking each other’s work a lot more.”
Trust is a big part of the project because each student has to have confidence in other group members and trust everyone to work hard and meet deadlines, said group member and SMG junior Catherine Shortle, who is working with Valpone on the marketing segment. Each member also has 40 percent of his overall grade riding on the project.
“You really have to give up a lot of control,” she said.
But just in case things don’t go as well as planned, SMG has a Team Learning Center to help groups deal with whatever problems may arise, Joglekar said. The center requires each group member to sign a contract at the outset of Core to establish expectations. SMG officials review the contract three times throughout the semester to ensure everyone is following through.
“We really had a major conflict on the outset,” said group member and SMG junior Nicholas Bokron. So the group went to the Team Learning Center early on, and it unexpectedly helped them out, he said – they haven’t had any problems since.
“I think that’s one of the big surprises in SMG – dealing with people,” he said. “If you don’t like someone, then too bad.”
Group problems can often be the least of a team’s worries as stress builds. Core classes meet Monday through Friday, from either 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. or 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
“Core has been challenging,” said group member and SMG junior Denis Ramos, who is working on the finance segment. “You’re going to have to be on the ball constantly.”
Masri agreed, saying that this is the first semester he’s needed to drink coffee everyday.
“There is no such thing as a weekend anymore,” he said. “If I’m out, I don’t want to hear anything about Core.”
Core students can spend upwards of 50 hours per week working on their projects – and sometimes even more. Group member and SMG sophomore Arief Witjaksono, who is working with Bokron on operations management, estimated his group spends at least 8 hours a day (including class time) working on the Heelshield.
Limiting the amount of time people work and the stress they endure takes preparation, Bokron said. But that doesn’t mean long hours are out of the question.
“A lot of times, that two hours [for a meeting] will stretch into nine,” he said. “You want to be in a position where you don’t have to work 60 [hours] straight,” he said, referring to students who have worked for days straight before the final deadline. “Sometimes the best way to deal with stress is to get the work done.”
Some people have other ways of relieving stress though.
“[Amie and Catherine] drink 16 Diet Cokes a day,” Bokron said.
But the end product can be worth all the hard work, Ramos said.
“When you see someone get up there and do a good job for the team, you just feel proud,” he said.
None of that hard work will matter, though, if all the other groups do a better job, each group member said, describing Core as very competitive.
“Most students in SMG are very driven,” group member Shortle said. “I don’t think anyone even wants to get a B.”
But there are limits to what a group will do to get ahead.
“Even though it’s really competitive, you don’t want to sabotage the other teams,” Shortle said. “You may have to work with these people again.”
Bokron said each of the Core groups works well with the others and tries to help out when they can. In the end, it’s all about how hard the group worked and what it produced.
“At the end you just want to cry because you’re so proud of yourself,” Valpone said.
