May 2, 2005
MBA '05 | Mainebiz checks in with this year's B-school grads
By Taylor Smith
After receiving his undergraduate diploma from Tufts University in Boston, Larry Ciembroniewicz figured he'd had enough of the rigors of academia. So for the next few years, he took advantage of foreign work visas and an opportune Irish passport to spend time on the French Riviera and in nightclubs in Sydney, Australia. But after a few years pouring cocktails for vacationing rock stars, he was ready to get out from behind the bar and get back to the classroom.
A Winthrop native, Ciembroniewicz enrolled in the master's of business administration program at the University of Southern Maine's School of Business. During the past 18 months, Ciembroniewicz has spent his days working at Broadspire, an insurance firm with offices in Westbrook, and his nights in class at the business school on USM's Portland campus. And come May 14, Ciembroniewicz will walk away from USM with a graduate degree and his next challenge ˆ finding a consulting job in Maine.
With graduation season upon us, Mainebiz decided to profile a handful of MBA students from the class of 2005. We asked them why they decided to pursue an MBA, and whether the degree is really that attractive to potential employers. We also probed the working students about how an MBA has helped them in the workforce, and whether their master's will mean upward mobility.
The average age of our students is 32, with the youngest students and the oldest separated by a full three decades, but all have had experience in the workforce. Some, like Bob Chandler at the Maine Business School at the University of Maine, are full-time students, transitioning to graduate school directly from their undergraduate work. Others have reached significant career pinnacles, like Harry Fraser, CEO of Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers in Auburn and an MBA candidate at USM. Travis Hotham, a 23-year-old in the MBA program at Thomas College Graduate School in Waterville, is hoping his master's degree will bulk up his resume. Scott Stevenson, an MBA candidate at USM who runs Brunswick-based Modern Pest Services with his brothers and father, says his studies have given him the managerial expertise to provide some pop in the family business. Ramat Oyetunji, a student from Nigeria, completed her undergraduate work at UMaine and opted to stay in Orono to pursue her MBA ˆ after deciding to switch from the university's graduate engineering program.
Striking a balance
Larry Ciembroniewicz
Age: 30
MBA program: University of Southern Maine School of Business, Portland
Expected graduation: May
Current job: Project manager, Broadspire, Westbrook
Post-graduation plans: Hopes to land a business consulting job north of Boston
When I came back [to the United States after three years abroad]. I wanted to study international relations ˆ I was an international studies and political science major ˆ to kind of get the formal education behind all the experiences I just collected, to just understand it all. In all honesty, it just didn't work out. It didn't work with the schools and the timing wasn't right. There aren't a lot of international relations programs ˆ there are a few on the East Coast. But even they said your job opportunities when you get out of it [are limited].
You can be a diplomat, [but] you're still going to have to work your way through. So I refocused, stepped back and said, wow, I have an equally strong interest in business. So that's when I started looking at MBA programs.
I grew up in Winthrop, so it was kind of a no-brainer for me to stay local. In the end, I didn't get into Columbia, I didn't get into Wharton and I didn't get into Harvard. It turned into a natural to stay real local, for the funds and so forth, so I went to USM. If I'd gone down to Harvard [Business School] or Sloan [School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], I'd be spending $40,000 to $60,000 a year.
I spent a lot of time researching those top-tier schools and really finding out what they were all about. I went down and visited them and got the whole spiel. I had a pretty good idea of what a formal, typical MBA program would be like. [At USM,] it was slightly different; it wasn't as formal. At another school, you might get MBA students and that's their life, period. They're studying and not doing anything else for the next two or three years. That's not the case [at USM]. You have people with real lives where studying business is just one portion of their lives. Perhaps the most valuable is the intrinsic fact that these are not full-time students; these are managers already in the workplace.
You also have tremendous access to doing things in Maine that you would have no access in other parts in the country. Here I am studying in Maine, and in an arguable way that's a disadvantage, but on the flip side, it's also an advantage. I'm talking to an executive from Fairchild [Semiconductor in South Portland], and I wouldn't have a chance to do that someplace else. Most of the time, Mainers are so open to a sincere inquiry: I'm so and so, I'm a student and I'm interested in what you're doing. They will definitely schedule you, and they won't schedule you six months from now, they'll schedule you next week. There's no layers before you get to talk to the principals. You're talking to the principals. In fact, they might even be answering the phone.
Just because you have an MBA, it has zero correlation to your ability to manage. And in the end, management is the most valuable skill in any organization. What people are struggling with on a national and international level is how to balance the two. You can get an MBA, but that's just one tool that you have. You also need a great manager to go with it. In Maine, they can't afford to hire these [MBA] skills, they can only afford to spend the money on management. But a lot of firms in New York or Boston, they can afford to have both.
If I purely wanted to work [as a consultant] at a firm that did business consulting, I'd be in Boston or New York. But if I want to balance it out with quality of life, I don't want to be commuting to downtown Boston everyday because the compensation won't be worth it in the end. There's always a balance between quality of life and compensation.
I'm looking at Maine itself, [but] there are only a handful of consulting organizations. There are a lot of small independent firms, but in order for me to really catapult and leverage what I've learned, I need to be working in a [large] firm. Those two firms here [Pierce Atwood Consulting and Berry, Dunn, McNeil & Parker] are always on the fence as far as hiring goes. You have to be a rainmaker, you've got to bring in business because otherwise it's tough for them to meet that bottom line. So I've expanded my job search to New Hampshire and Boston ˆ there's a huge market there. So I'll probably try to find something in Portsmouth, maybe north of Boston. Or maybe I'll get lucky and convince a firm in Portland to add on a promising young MBA from a local grad school.
Not just an engineer
Ramat Oyetunji
Age:27
MBA program: The Maine Business School at the University of Maine, Orono
Expected graduation: May
Current job: Project engineer, Georgia-Pacific, Old Town
Post-graduation plans: Continue to pursue a business-oriented engineering career
My undergrad is in mechanical engineering, and I got a minor in business at the University of Maine in Orono. When I came back for my master's degree, I started out in mechanical engineering but I found out that I was more interested in getting more of a business experience because I enjoyed my business classes that I took as an undergrad. So I switched into the MBA program after one semester. And a lot of the people out in the field and in the companies that I worked with have told me that an engineer with an MBA is a great combination. It makes you so much more versatile ˆ there are so many more opportunities open to you with an MBA.
I'm from Nigeria, but my dad graduated from Orono in 1967, so that's how I ended up here. I did look at other schools, but at the time I was looking at a master's in engineering, not an MBA. I was looking at schools that had engineering programs, like UMass-Amherst and Harvard. I came here because I felt the most comfortable here.
In terms of the program, it's very different from the engineering experience that I had, where most of the classes focused on formulas and the teacher teaching stuff. But for the MBA classes there's more discussion. We're expected to read ahead and read on our own ˆ not only the textbooks, but a wide variety of sources like newspapers, the Intenet and television. Anything to get information. And classes were more like discussions and sharing of ideas and bouncing off ideas. That was a huge difference; it was such a different experience than I was used to, and I found it really enjoyable.
I'm going to school full time, but I'm also working full time. Because I'm a project engineer at Georgia-Pacific, I have to do a lot of cost benefit analyses, taking the cost of a project and comparing it to the benefit we're getting from it. The company has some programs that it uses where most engineers will put in the numbers and get what the payback will be, but I actually understood what the program was calculating because we do that as part of our classes. For a lot of the projects I've done, it hasn't made an impact knowing what those variables were and what the spreadsheet was actually doing behind the scenes, but if for whatever reason I needed to change a variable or I didn't like the variables that were being applied, I'd know how to change that. As an engineer, I might not understand what was going on behind the scenes or be able to make changes like that.
Because I've done quite a number of internships and because I'm working, I can understand some of the real-life situations that the textbooks are talking about. They try to give us a lot of real life cases, and a lot of the projects we do are with real companies. But some of the people in class who haven't worked ˆ or who have gone straight from undergrad to the MBA program ˆ the things that they suggest, while they might be able to work in theory, just having been out there in the workforce, people know that it's not very realistic. So it's been a great help working and having work experience.
I'm currently working full time, so I don't need to be looking for a job, but I've also been on interviews to see what's out there. A lot of the interviews I've been going for have been engineering-related, since that's what most of my experience has been in. And I want to use my MBA as a way to further my career. There are different areas that an engineer can go into. Some people are pure engineers, designing things, calculating things and that kind of stuff. But most engineers work in manufacturing or in areas where you have to manage people ˆ you have to manage a project or calculate the efficiency of your equipment. So there's a lot of engineering mixed in with what I would call business skills or business acumen. So that's how I plan to use my MBA: to enhance an engineering career.
A way to stand out
Travis Hotham
Age: 23
MBA program: Thomas College Graduate School, Waterville
Expected graduation: December
Current job: Sales representative, Valley Distributors, Oakland
Post-graduation plans: Land a job with a Maine company
I just think that overall, an MBA makes you that more attractive for promotions, for new jobs. With the job market the way it is, especially in Maine, I thought that anything that I could do to help myself out, to further my career, was obviously going to help.
I started working at Valley Distributors in Oakland. I'm a sales rep for them, and I've worked for them for a couple of years. The main thing was that it was such a change worrying about nothing but classes, then you graduate and you have a full-time job. I knew there would be an adjustment period, and that six months I took off [between graduating and starting the MBA program] was just getting used to balancing a full-time job and then getting myself back into college.
I work between 50 and 60 hours a week, and then I have two classes on Mondays and Wednesdays. They're about three-and-a-half hours each, and I have homework on the weekends. It's a full week.
Just about everybody in the program is older than I am, and a lot of them have families and work full time. But it's good to have classmates who are out in the workforce. They've experienced all these things. They've had different ideas and different things in the past that have worked for them. And I can relate that to what I'm doing now and try to help out my company. The things I've learned in classes, I've been able to take those things and apply them to work to save time, to save money.
We're having issues with one division at work that's kind of inefficient. Turns out it was just the way the pay scale was set up more than anything. I've been able to come up with some suggestions through some classes, like an [employee] selection and placement class I took last semester. They were able to change some policies and put some different procedures in place, and, so far, it's resulted in some really good things. They say production's been up and that the quality of work is better from that division. I was pretty proud to hear something like that.
Most classes are very interactive in the MBA program. People have such good ideas ˆ things that they've experienced or things that they've seen, different policies and procedures that they've initiated or that have been initiated since they've been in the workforce. Some of them are really amazing ideas, and you say, "Wow, that could really help me out." It could help you out personally or for the company as a whole.
When I started at Thomas as an undergrad, they were known as Maine's business school. They don't formally call themselves that now, but I've always felt they have a very strong business program. The instructors are willing to work with us if our work schedules mean we can't make it to a class, so they're overall great to work with. It's also a smaller college, so the atmosphere is a little closer and there's a lot of personal attention. That helps so much rather than just being a number or a face.
It's a very tough, competitive market and there aren't a lot of jobs out there. A lot of people I went to undergrad with had a really difficult time just finding work at all. I don't feel that changing. It's really tough around here, and a lot of the jobs don't require any kind of college degree. I felt like, okay, I have a college degree and that's great, but I needed something that could take me to the next level and help me stand out from a lot of the other people in the area.
When I was getting ready to graduate with my undergrad degree, I was really thinking about going back for my MBA. I asked a lot of companies interviewing on campus if an MBA really helps, and whether it's something that these companies really look for. They said absolutely, and that companies might even try to outbid each other to get someone with an MBA. I don't necessarily expect that to happen, but it's definitely something that I felt couldn't hurt.
Running the family biz
Scott Stevenson
Age:38
MBA program: University of Southern Maine School of Business, Portland
Expected graduation: May
Current job: Director of operations, Modern Pest Services, Brunswick
Post-graduation plans: Continue to grow Modern Pest Services
Modern Pest Services was founded in 1945 by my grandfather, Howard Stevenson, and in the 1970s he sold to my father. I joined the company in the late 80s and started full time in 1990 after I graduated from USM with an undergraduate degree. In 1990, I took over as general manager and we've just been growing since then. Now we have six offices ˆ in Bangor, Augusta, Brunswick, Portland, Manchester, N.H., and Woburn, Mass. We have about 110 employees and about $7.5 million in [annual] revenues. There are four people on the executive support team: me, my [two younger] brothers and my father, who's now semi-retired. Now, I'm director of operations. One of my brothers is getting an accounting degree, and the other one has an entomological degree.
A lot of people get an MBA to move up in their current company or because it looks good on their resume. I didn't do it for any of those reasons. My reason was just to learn more so I could manage that much better and so the company could grow that much faster. I manage the day-to-day business side of things, and I just needed more information. Marketing and branding was something that we needed to do and we've spent the last few years learning more about it. Personnel management is always a challenge, and finance and the budgeting process ˆ I mean, how do the bigger companies do it?
Some of the stuff I'm learning doesn't apply so much ˆ not that it doesn't apply to business in general, just that it doesn't apply to my situation. For example, some of the IT stuff has applied, but one of my brothers seems to handle that area so maybe I haven't paid as much attention as I should have because I know my brother's got it.
And then sometimes I sit in class and I take two sets of notes. I'll take a set of notes for class, and one set of notes on things I want to do tomorrow based on things that I've learned in class. In the past I've run projects at work that were graded at school, and I've been able to kill two birds with one stone. That's worked very well.
Last semester I was in the MBA practicum with Dean [Jack] Trifts, and the project was on Modern Pest Services. I'd mentioned to the dean that I had a family business and we needed some help. He said, "That sounds like a good idea, and if the team is interested in it, we'll do it." A group of four of us looked at how to better utilize our company's service team.
The real process of the project was putting together a framework that could help determine where our next service center should go. The team looked at our current demographics, client mix and growth strategy, and utilization of traveling time, and all these different matrixes and decided where the next service center will go. It built a framework we can use into the future [to focus on] what things we need to be looking at and measuring and what weights to give to these different [items on the] matrix to decide where the next service centers are going. About every other semester, something comes up where I'm able to do that. The new stuff that I'm learning, I apply to the day-to-day stuff at Modern.
If I went back to school right after my undergrad, I don't think I would have gotten as much out of it because I didn't have all that work experience and I didn't have the direct link to work, you know? Of course, I would have learned a lot of things faster than I've learned them during the past 16 years. There's some stuff I've learned in classes now that I already know, but that came from experience. Had I gone directly to grad school, I would have learned them much faster. But I'm glad I did it the way I did.
Timber management
Bob Chandler
Age: 23
MBA program: The Maine Business School at the University of Maine, Orono
Expected graduation: August
Current job: Full-time student
Post-graduation plans: Looking for a forestry job in Maine
I'm from Topsfield, Maine, over in northern Washington county. My dad was a forester. I graduated from UMaine last May with a double major in forestry and wildlife ecology. I went right from my undergrad into the graduate program. The job outlook in the forestry field wasn't the greatest. I want to stay in Maine and there were some [field forestry] jobs, but there weren't as many as I expected. I still want to work in the forestry profession, but I thought that the MBA would augment that nicely. I felt like the MBA would help me be more marketable.
The reason I went to the MBA program was to get some managerial skills and some people skills, and to learn how to manage others. Plus, in forestry, there's a lot that revolves around business, the financial numbers and how the business operates. I worked five previous summers in the industry doing everything from crews and timber to overseeing harvest crews and laying out harvest blocks. I was dealing with a lot of people who were field foresters, but the upper levels, the management people, they didn't have their MBAs. Looking back on it, they said it was something that if they could do it again they'd do it, because they're using a lot of those [business] skills in their day-to-day jobs. That was one of the things that put a bee in my bonnet to pursue the MBA.
I felt that if I left school for too long it would be hard for me to come back. I think a lot of people when they leave school say they'll come back in a few years but it never happens. So I wanted to do it. I was here, I just did my undergrad, I was still in educational mode, I guess. I just wanted to keep rolling. I had some past job experience that, now that I'm doing my MBA, I can look back and see how I could apply the things I've learned. But I just wanted to get it done as fast as I can.
This is kind of a new program [at UMaine], and I'm in the first class to go through it. It includes a residency week, which they termed a "business boot camp," before you even start. There's also an international trip and an internship requirement. For the internship, I'm working with the Society of American Foresters, the professional society, and I'm trying to apply my business skills working with them and doing market research. Where I can, I've tried to apply my interests and my passion in forestry to this MBA program and the skills I'm picking up. I'm working with the chair of the society, who happens to be a professor on campus now.
As far as the job search, I've sent out quite a few resumes, and I went out on an interview last week. Some of it is just whether [companies have] a job open. I'm applying to places in forestry, and a lot of those places look favorably on having that MBA aspect on my education as well. One of those places is a sawmill, and working there would deal a lot with managing people. And they're looking for someone who's got the forestry background, but also has the business background. You don't see that too often. But people in the industry say it will only help me.
Lifelong learning
Harry Fraser
Age: 53
MBA program: University of Southern Maine School of Business, Portland
Expected graduation: May
Current job: CEO, Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers, Auburn
Post-graduation plans: Continue to emphasize lifelong learning at Thos. Moser
At 53, I don't sell myself on my educational degree, but on my experiences and the things I've learned. But I hope my kids learn at least one day sooner than I did the importance of lifelong learning. If you think that you can do all your learning now and then it will be all easy coasting until retirement, you're in for a rude awakening.
My boys ˆ my 22-year-old is in the program at the University of Southern Maine as well, and my 24-year-old is a microbiologist doing research down in South Carolina ˆ I say to them, don't stop. I could have afforded to stop my education and wrestled myself through the last 10 years of my business career, but they're not going to have that option. They say that my boys ˆ five times in their life their job will go away. That was unheard of in my parents' day and when I was growing up. Now, we don't even think of staying at the same company for your whole life.
Most of the people who are in MBA programs come from a more structured [approach], which is that management style from the 60s and 70s: Put the structure in place, get people to conform to the structure and therefore we'll be successful. The younger era doesn't want to go to work to follow someone else's structure, but to be creative.
People like Bill Gates and other people who worked for companies that checked your brain at the door went off and did their own things. And we said, why is this happening in business? Why are we doing this? Because our structure and our autocratic management style wasn't working. So we need to have this educated workforce out there today, and it has to be one of continuous learning.
I dropped out of high school a couple of times before I actually [went to college and] got my degree in finance from Husson [College in Bangor]. But my goal was to get out, be young and work very hard. I wanted to climb up the ladder so that I get to a very high peak, and then I'll have control of things and then I can retire. Well, the reality is that the world is changing so fast today, and will change exponentially in the future, that you can't afford to stop learning. These days, you no sooner put a piece of software on your computer than tomorrow it's obsolete. So either you don't learn the new one and lose its efficiencies, or you go off and learn it.
If I'm a CEO that says I'm not going to continue my learning, then I'm going to guide the company based on my learning. Therefore, I'm not going to be very supportive of my people going back and learning new things. If every CEO in the company, or every senior manager in every company, looked at the fact that your learning has to continue on forever, then I think they would be more open to coming to the university and pushing it inside their own business, and seeing it as a huge value. I've had four or five different projects done here at [Thos. Moser] through the MBA program at the University of Southern Maine. If I had to do that outside, it would have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. What did it cost me? My tuition and my time.
As the CEO, if I explain to you the values of the company and the strategy of the company, every day you can make decisions without me. But if you come in and I just tell you what to do, then you go off and do it. And if there are 100 employees, that means I have to tell all 100 people what to do. I can't conceivably manage all of that. By explaining to you the vision and the strategy, you can make your own decisions and, therefore, the rate of change will increase because you have multiple people being effective and making decisions under the umbrella of the strategy. But really, we have to stay aggressive and continue with our education. And I plan to keep on going.
A Winthrop native, Ciembroniewicz enrolled in the master's of business administration program at the University of Southern Maine's School of Business. During the past 18 months, Ciembroniewicz has spent his days working at Broadspire, an insurance firm with offices in Westbrook, and his nights in class at the business school on USM's Portland campus. And come May 14, Ciembroniewicz will walk away from USM with a graduate degree and his next challenge ˆ finding a consulting job in Maine.
With graduation season upon us, Mainebiz decided to profile a handful of MBA students from the class of 2005. We asked them why they decided to pursue an MBA, and whether the degree is really that attractive to potential employers. We also probed the working students about how an MBA has helped them in the workforce, and whether their master's will mean upward mobility.
The average age of our students is 32, with the youngest students and the oldest separated by a full three decades, but all have had experience in the workforce. Some, like Bob Chandler at the Maine Business School at the University of Maine, are full-time students, transitioning to graduate school directly from their undergraduate work. Others have reached significant career pinnacles, like Harry Fraser, CEO of Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers in Auburn and an MBA candidate at USM. Travis Hotham, a 23-year-old in the MBA program at Thomas College Graduate School in Waterville, is hoping his master's degree will bulk up his resume. Scott Stevenson, an MBA candidate at USM who runs Brunswick-based Modern Pest Services with his brothers and father, says his studies have given him the managerial expertise to provide some pop in the family business. Ramat Oyetunji, a student from Nigeria, completed her undergraduate work at UMaine and opted to stay in Orono to pursue her MBA ˆ after deciding to switch from the university's graduate engineering program.
Striking a balance
Larry Ciembroniewicz
Age: 30
MBA program: University of Southern Maine School of Business, Portland
Expected graduation: May
Current job: Project manager, Broadspire, Westbrook
Post-graduation plans: Hopes to land a business consulting job north of Boston
When I came back [to the United States after three years abroad]. I wanted to study international relations ˆ I was an international studies and political science major ˆ to kind of get the formal education behind all the experiences I just collected, to just understand it all. In all honesty, it just didn't work out. It didn't work with the schools and the timing wasn't right. There aren't a lot of international relations programs ˆ there are a few on the East Coast. But even they said your job opportunities when you get out of it [are limited].
You can be a diplomat, [but] you're still going to have to work your way through. So I refocused, stepped back and said, wow, I have an equally strong interest in business. So that's when I started looking at MBA programs.
I grew up in Winthrop, so it was kind of a no-brainer for me to stay local. In the end, I didn't get into Columbia, I didn't get into Wharton and I didn't get into Harvard. It turned into a natural to stay real local, for the funds and so forth, so I went to USM. If I'd gone down to Harvard [Business School] or Sloan [School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], I'd be spending $40,000 to $60,000 a year.
I spent a lot of time researching those top-tier schools and really finding out what they were all about. I went down and visited them and got the whole spiel. I had a pretty good idea of what a formal, typical MBA program would be like. [At USM,] it was slightly different; it wasn't as formal. At another school, you might get MBA students and that's their life, period. They're studying and not doing anything else for the next two or three years. That's not the case [at USM]. You have people with real lives where studying business is just one portion of their lives. Perhaps the most valuable is the intrinsic fact that these are not full-time students; these are managers already in the workplace.
You also have tremendous access to doing things in Maine that you would have no access in other parts in the country. Here I am studying in Maine, and in an arguable way that's a disadvantage, but on the flip side, it's also an advantage. I'm talking to an executive from Fairchild [Semiconductor in South Portland], and I wouldn't have a chance to do that someplace else. Most of the time, Mainers are so open to a sincere inquiry: I'm so and so, I'm a student and I'm interested in what you're doing. They will definitely schedule you, and they won't schedule you six months from now, they'll schedule you next week. There's no layers before you get to talk to the principals. You're talking to the principals. In fact, they might even be answering the phone.
Just because you have an MBA, it has zero correlation to your ability to manage. And in the end, management is the most valuable skill in any organization. What people are struggling with on a national and international level is how to balance the two. You can get an MBA, but that's just one tool that you have. You also need a great manager to go with it. In Maine, they can't afford to hire these [MBA] skills, they can only afford to spend the money on management. But a lot of firms in New York or Boston, they can afford to have both.
If I purely wanted to work [as a consultant] at a firm that did business consulting, I'd be in Boston or New York. But if I want to balance it out with quality of life, I don't want to be commuting to downtown Boston everyday because the compensation won't be worth it in the end. There's always a balance between quality of life and compensation.
I'm looking at Maine itself, [but] there are only a handful of consulting organizations. There are a lot of small independent firms, but in order for me to really catapult and leverage what I've learned, I need to be working in a [large] firm. Those two firms here [Pierce Atwood Consulting and Berry, Dunn, McNeil & Parker] are always on the fence as far as hiring goes. You have to be a rainmaker, you've got to bring in business because otherwise it's tough for them to meet that bottom line. So I've expanded my job search to New Hampshire and Boston ˆ there's a huge market there. So I'll probably try to find something in Portsmouth, maybe north of Boston. Or maybe I'll get lucky and convince a firm in Portland to add on a promising young MBA from a local grad school.
Not just an engineer
Ramat Oyetunji
Age:27
MBA program: The Maine Business School at the University of Maine, Orono
Expected graduation: May
Current job: Project engineer, Georgia-Pacific, Old Town
Post-graduation plans: Continue to pursue a business-oriented engineering career
My undergrad is in mechanical engineering, and I got a minor in business at the University of Maine in Orono. When I came back for my master's degree, I started out in mechanical engineering but I found out that I was more interested in getting more of a business experience because I enjoyed my business classes that I took as an undergrad. So I switched into the MBA program after one semester. And a lot of the people out in the field and in the companies that I worked with have told me that an engineer with an MBA is a great combination. It makes you so much more versatile ˆ there are so many more opportunities open to you with an MBA.
I'm from Nigeria, but my dad graduated from Orono in 1967, so that's how I ended up here. I did look at other schools, but at the time I was looking at a master's in engineering, not an MBA. I was looking at schools that had engineering programs, like UMass-Amherst and Harvard. I came here because I felt the most comfortable here.
In terms of the program, it's very different from the engineering experience that I had, where most of the classes focused on formulas and the teacher teaching stuff. But for the MBA classes there's more discussion. We're expected to read ahead and read on our own ˆ not only the textbooks, but a wide variety of sources like newspapers, the Intenet and television. Anything to get information. And classes were more like discussions and sharing of ideas and bouncing off ideas. That was a huge difference; it was such a different experience than I was used to, and I found it really enjoyable.
I'm going to school full time, but I'm also working full time. Because I'm a project engineer at Georgia-Pacific, I have to do a lot of cost benefit analyses, taking the cost of a project and comparing it to the benefit we're getting from it. The company has some programs that it uses where most engineers will put in the numbers and get what the payback will be, but I actually understood what the program was calculating because we do that as part of our classes. For a lot of the projects I've done, it hasn't made an impact knowing what those variables were and what the spreadsheet was actually doing behind the scenes, but if for whatever reason I needed to change a variable or I didn't like the variables that were being applied, I'd know how to change that. As an engineer, I might not understand what was going on behind the scenes or be able to make changes like that.
Because I've done quite a number of internships and because I'm working, I can understand some of the real-life situations that the textbooks are talking about. They try to give us a lot of real life cases, and a lot of the projects we do are with real companies. But some of the people in class who haven't worked ˆ or who have gone straight from undergrad to the MBA program ˆ the things that they suggest, while they might be able to work in theory, just having been out there in the workforce, people know that it's not very realistic. So it's been a great help working and having work experience.
I'm currently working full time, so I don't need to be looking for a job, but I've also been on interviews to see what's out there. A lot of the interviews I've been going for have been engineering-related, since that's what most of my experience has been in. And I want to use my MBA as a way to further my career. There are different areas that an engineer can go into. Some people are pure engineers, designing things, calculating things and that kind of stuff. But most engineers work in manufacturing or in areas where you have to manage people ˆ you have to manage a project or calculate the efficiency of your equipment. So there's a lot of engineering mixed in with what I would call business skills or business acumen. So that's how I plan to use my MBA: to enhance an engineering career.
A way to stand out
Travis Hotham
Age: 23
MBA program: Thomas College Graduate School, Waterville
Expected graduation: December
Current job: Sales representative, Valley Distributors, Oakland
Post-graduation plans: Land a job with a Maine company
I just think that overall, an MBA makes you that more attractive for promotions, for new jobs. With the job market the way it is, especially in Maine, I thought that anything that I could do to help myself out, to further my career, was obviously going to help.
I started working at Valley Distributors in Oakland. I'm a sales rep for them, and I've worked for them for a couple of years. The main thing was that it was such a change worrying about nothing but classes, then you graduate and you have a full-time job. I knew there would be an adjustment period, and that six months I took off [between graduating and starting the MBA program] was just getting used to balancing a full-time job and then getting myself back into college.
I work between 50 and 60 hours a week, and then I have two classes on Mondays and Wednesdays. They're about three-and-a-half hours each, and I have homework on the weekends. It's a full week.
Just about everybody in the program is older than I am, and a lot of them have families and work full time. But it's good to have classmates who are out in the workforce. They've experienced all these things. They've had different ideas and different things in the past that have worked for them. And I can relate that to what I'm doing now and try to help out my company. The things I've learned in classes, I've been able to take those things and apply them to work to save time, to save money.
We're having issues with one division at work that's kind of inefficient. Turns out it was just the way the pay scale was set up more than anything. I've been able to come up with some suggestions through some classes, like an [employee] selection and placement class I took last semester. They were able to change some policies and put some different procedures in place, and, so far, it's resulted in some really good things. They say production's been up and that the quality of work is better from that division. I was pretty proud to hear something like that.
Most classes are very interactive in the MBA program. People have such good ideas ˆ things that they've experienced or things that they've seen, different policies and procedures that they've initiated or that have been initiated since they've been in the workforce. Some of them are really amazing ideas, and you say, "Wow, that could really help me out." It could help you out personally or for the company as a whole.
When I started at Thomas as an undergrad, they were known as Maine's business school. They don't formally call themselves that now, but I've always felt they have a very strong business program. The instructors are willing to work with us if our work schedules mean we can't make it to a class, so they're overall great to work with. It's also a smaller college, so the atmosphere is a little closer and there's a lot of personal attention. That helps so much rather than just being a number or a face.
It's a very tough, competitive market and there aren't a lot of jobs out there. A lot of people I went to undergrad with had a really difficult time just finding work at all. I don't feel that changing. It's really tough around here, and a lot of the jobs don't require any kind of college degree. I felt like, okay, I have a college degree and that's great, but I needed something that could take me to the next level and help me stand out from a lot of the other people in the area.
When I was getting ready to graduate with my undergrad degree, I was really thinking about going back for my MBA. I asked a lot of companies interviewing on campus if an MBA really helps, and whether it's something that these companies really look for. They said absolutely, and that companies might even try to outbid each other to get someone with an MBA. I don't necessarily expect that to happen, but it's definitely something that I felt couldn't hurt.
Running the family biz
Scott Stevenson
Age:38
MBA program: University of Southern Maine School of Business, Portland
Expected graduation: May
Current job: Director of operations, Modern Pest Services, Brunswick
Post-graduation plans: Continue to grow Modern Pest Services
Modern Pest Services was founded in 1945 by my grandfather, Howard Stevenson, and in the 1970s he sold to my father. I joined the company in the late 80s and started full time in 1990 after I graduated from USM with an undergraduate degree. In 1990, I took over as general manager and we've just been growing since then. Now we have six offices ˆ in Bangor, Augusta, Brunswick, Portland, Manchester, N.H., and Woburn, Mass. We have about 110 employees and about $7.5 million in [annual] revenues. There are four people on the executive support team: me, my [two younger] brothers and my father, who's now semi-retired. Now, I'm director of operations. One of my brothers is getting an accounting degree, and the other one has an entomological degree.
A lot of people get an MBA to move up in their current company or because it looks good on their resume. I didn't do it for any of those reasons. My reason was just to learn more so I could manage that much better and so the company could grow that much faster. I manage the day-to-day business side of things, and I just needed more information. Marketing and branding was something that we needed to do and we've spent the last few years learning more about it. Personnel management is always a challenge, and finance and the budgeting process ˆ I mean, how do the bigger companies do it?
Some of the stuff I'm learning doesn't apply so much ˆ not that it doesn't apply to business in general, just that it doesn't apply to my situation. For example, some of the IT stuff has applied, but one of my brothers seems to handle that area so maybe I haven't paid as much attention as I should have because I know my brother's got it.
And then sometimes I sit in class and I take two sets of notes. I'll take a set of notes for class, and one set of notes on things I want to do tomorrow based on things that I've learned in class. In the past I've run projects at work that were graded at school, and I've been able to kill two birds with one stone. That's worked very well.
Last semester I was in the MBA practicum with Dean [Jack] Trifts, and the project was on Modern Pest Services. I'd mentioned to the dean that I had a family business and we needed some help. He said, "That sounds like a good idea, and if the team is interested in it, we'll do it." A group of four of us looked at how to better utilize our company's service team.
The real process of the project was putting together a framework that could help determine where our next service center should go. The team looked at our current demographics, client mix and growth strategy, and utilization of traveling time, and all these different matrixes and decided where the next service center will go. It built a framework we can use into the future [to focus on] what things we need to be looking at and measuring and what weights to give to these different [items on the] matrix to decide where the next service centers are going. About every other semester, something comes up where I'm able to do that. The new stuff that I'm learning, I apply to the day-to-day stuff at Modern.
If I went back to school right after my undergrad, I don't think I would have gotten as much out of it because I didn't have all that work experience and I didn't have the direct link to work, you know? Of course, I would have learned a lot of things faster than I've learned them during the past 16 years. There's some stuff I've learned in classes now that I already know, but that came from experience. Had I gone directly to grad school, I would have learned them much faster. But I'm glad I did it the way I did.
Timber management
Bob Chandler
Age: 23
MBA program: The Maine Business School at the University of Maine, Orono
Expected graduation: August
Current job: Full-time student
Post-graduation plans: Looking for a forestry job in Maine
I'm from Topsfield, Maine, over in northern Washington county. My dad was a forester. I graduated from UMaine last May with a double major in forestry and wildlife ecology. I went right from my undergrad into the graduate program. The job outlook in the forestry field wasn't the greatest. I want to stay in Maine and there were some [field forestry] jobs, but there weren't as many as I expected. I still want to work in the forestry profession, but I thought that the MBA would augment that nicely. I felt like the MBA would help me be more marketable.
The reason I went to the MBA program was to get some managerial skills and some people skills, and to learn how to manage others. Plus, in forestry, there's a lot that revolves around business, the financial numbers and how the business operates. I worked five previous summers in the industry doing everything from crews and timber to overseeing harvest crews and laying out harvest blocks. I was dealing with a lot of people who were field foresters, but the upper levels, the management people, they didn't have their MBAs. Looking back on it, they said it was something that if they could do it again they'd do it, because they're using a lot of those [business] skills in their day-to-day jobs. That was one of the things that put a bee in my bonnet to pursue the MBA.
I felt that if I left school for too long it would be hard for me to come back. I think a lot of people when they leave school say they'll come back in a few years but it never happens. So I wanted to do it. I was here, I just did my undergrad, I was still in educational mode, I guess. I just wanted to keep rolling. I had some past job experience that, now that I'm doing my MBA, I can look back and see how I could apply the things I've learned. But I just wanted to get it done as fast as I can.
This is kind of a new program [at UMaine], and I'm in the first class to go through it. It includes a residency week, which they termed a "business boot camp," before you even start. There's also an international trip and an internship requirement. For the internship, I'm working with the Society of American Foresters, the professional society, and I'm trying to apply my business skills working with them and doing market research. Where I can, I've tried to apply my interests and my passion in forestry to this MBA program and the skills I'm picking up. I'm working with the chair of the society, who happens to be a professor on campus now.
As far as the job search, I've sent out quite a few resumes, and I went out on an interview last week. Some of it is just whether [companies have] a job open. I'm applying to places in forestry, and a lot of those places look favorably on having that MBA aspect on my education as well. One of those places is a sawmill, and working there would deal a lot with managing people. And they're looking for someone who's got the forestry background, but also has the business background. You don't see that too often. But people in the industry say it will only help me.
Lifelong learning
Harry Fraser
Age: 53
MBA program: University of Southern Maine School of Business, Portland
Expected graduation: May
Current job: CEO, Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers, Auburn
Post-graduation plans: Continue to emphasize lifelong learning at Thos. Moser
At 53, I don't sell myself on my educational degree, but on my experiences and the things I've learned. But I hope my kids learn at least one day sooner than I did the importance of lifelong learning. If you think that you can do all your learning now and then it will be all easy coasting until retirement, you're in for a rude awakening.
My boys ˆ my 22-year-old is in the program at the University of Southern Maine as well, and my 24-year-old is a microbiologist doing research down in South Carolina ˆ I say to them, don't stop. I could have afforded to stop my education and wrestled myself through the last 10 years of my business career, but they're not going to have that option. They say that my boys ˆ five times in their life their job will go away. That was unheard of in my parents' day and when I was growing up. Now, we don't even think of staying at the same company for your whole life.
Most of the people who are in MBA programs come from a more structured [approach], which is that management style from the 60s and 70s: Put the structure in place, get people to conform to the structure and therefore we'll be successful. The younger era doesn't want to go to work to follow someone else's structure, but to be creative.
People like Bill Gates and other people who worked for companies that checked your brain at the door went off and did their own things. And we said, why is this happening in business? Why are we doing this? Because our structure and our autocratic management style wasn't working. So we need to have this educated workforce out there today, and it has to be one of continuous learning.
I dropped out of high school a couple of times before I actually [went to college and] got my degree in finance from Husson [College in Bangor]. But my goal was to get out, be young and work very hard. I wanted to climb up the ladder so that I get to a very high peak, and then I'll have control of things and then I can retire. Well, the reality is that the world is changing so fast today, and will change exponentially in the future, that you can't afford to stop learning. These days, you no sooner put a piece of software on your computer than tomorrow it's obsolete. So either you don't learn the new one and lose its efficiencies, or you go off and learn it.
If I'm a CEO that says I'm not going to continue my learning, then I'm going to guide the company based on my learning. Therefore, I'm not going to be very supportive of my people going back and learning new things. If every CEO in the company, or every senior manager in every company, looked at the fact that your learning has to continue on forever, then I think they would be more open to coming to the university and pushing it inside their own business, and seeing it as a huge value. I've had four or five different projects done here at [Thos. Moser] through the MBA program at the University of Southern Maine. If I had to do that outside, it would have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. What did it cost me? My tuition and my time.
As the CEO, if I explain to you the values of the company and the strategy of the company, every day you can make decisions without me. But if you come in and I just tell you what to do, then you go off and do it. And if there are 100 employees, that means I have to tell all 100 people what to do. I can't conceivably manage all of that. By explaining to you the vision and the strategy, you can make your own decisions and, therefore, the rate of change will increase because you have multiple people being effective and making decisions under the umbrella of the strategy. But really, we have to stay aggressive and continue with our education. And I plan to keep on going.
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