By Jason Young, MBA

If you’re thinking about getting more education, make that investment if yourself. If you’re thinking of reskilling or upskilling, do it. And don’t be afraid to do any of it online. It’s years overdue that we dump the stigma against online education. The pandemic only added to a mountain of proof.

I work in communications, public relations and marketing. These fields are changing rapidly – so rapidly that a colleague confided his fear of “becoming professionally obsolete.” It made me think of the MBA graduation speech I was privileged enough to give to my Smith School cohort colleagues back in September 2018. My thesis was: Online education… technology-enabled education… education without borders is setting a new gold standard.

Why?  Many reasons, but:

• For most, it will expand your network more broadly and more deeply than any other endeavor you’ll engage in outside of your work, and
• It will challenge you to become the epitome of productivity, time management and prioritization – skills at the pinnacle of relevance in today’s always-on world. Did I mention that becoming an ace commuter to campus or anywhere else is as passé as driving to Blockbuster to return a movie rental.

Simply put, the three-stage life – school, then work, then retirement – is less relevant now. Online education is the jolt your career needs, or perhaps it’s the staging ground for a career change. 

I shared my speech with my appropriately-worried-but-not-at-all-obsolete colleague. Now he’s exploring graduate programs that will fit into his life to see him through the next 20 years of his career. (Yes, yes, yes!) So I thought I’d share the speech here, too – delivered at my Smith School OMBA Graduation Weekend, Sept. 21-23, 2018:

Education Without Borders As The New Gold Standard

“Thank you, Dr. Frels. For all the friends and family here today, we want to welcome you to what feels to us like a class reunion.

See, 21 months ago, in January 2017, this class met in person for the first time… as brand-new MBA students.

And for many of us, this weekend has been only our second time face-to-face.

Nonetheless, we know each other quite well.  We are classmates, teammates, study partners, and friends.  We hang out, but… I only mean that mostly in the Google Hangout sense of the word.

We’ve had 131 classroom sessions online together.  And lord knows how many Skypes, conference calls and discussion board posts we’ve shared.  I’m telling you, people get married after spending less time online together.  The only strange part of connecting and reconnecting this weekend is to realize how tall Zakee is.  Webcams are great equalizers, at a minimum between the very tall and the very short.  Right Emily?

Why are our personal connections so relevant?

I want to make two arguments today.

First, some would say we now live in bubbles – networks of like-minded people – and that we consume only the news we agree with.  The state of the nation is so bad that the famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein recently diagnosed Americans as living in “a cold civil war” where we are unable to agree even on basic facts.  I live in D.C., so I’m not going to tell Mr. Bernstein he’s wrong.

But as a Smith OMBA student, I am going to tell you he’s wrong about us.  Our program is a Top-10 program; this elite education has grounded us in facts, principles, equations, and case studies.  Our country may be yelling at one another, but in 200 hours of class time together, I’ve never seen us yell at each other.  Our debates have been rigorous, and sometimes lively, but they’re anchored in facts.  We are living proof that the internet does more than divide and debase; it brings people together for education and, often, collaboration to solve societal ills.

I could stop here, and you might say, wow, cohort 1701 is a civil bunch.  We’re the adults in the room, and we’ve earned our place as leaders of businesses, nonprofits and government agencies.

But I want to get even more real now.

In some quarters there remains a stigma against online education.  Those views are years out of date.  So my second argument to you today is that online education… technology-enabled education… education without borders is now setting a new gold standard.

Here’s why:

First, this program has helped us develop a strong global network.  We are not all co-located, though many of us live in the DMV (that is, DC, Maryland and Virginia).  Our network spans from Raleigh and New York to Chicago and San Francisco… from Birmingham to Liberia, from Calgary to Italy.  Thanks, Giulio, for checking two boxes.

The reach of our network expanded when we became the first OMBA cohort participating in Smith’s international residency.  Sarah and Will went to China; Jim and Hunter studied in the UAE… and even if we couldn’t join, we benefit from their extended networks.

Second, we are the epitome of productivity, time management and prioritization.  Most of us complete this program as full-time students and full-time professionals.  While we have had less time for friends, the majority of us has spouses, partners and children.  We’re not sure if everyone can have it all, but we’ve proven we can have it all.

Third, we have made it to the other side of what Seth Godin calls “The Dip.”  His 2007 bestseller posited that every project or hobby or startup company starts out as fun, and then gets really hard.  Good business leaders know what to abandon.  We say, “Fail fast.”  But here’s the golden nugget: good business leaders also seek out barriers, because surmounting some of them really is worth the time and effort. 

Consider EMBA778B: Entrepreneurship.  December 2017.  Groups were assigned to start up a real business, run them – but only for 2 hours – and the real kicker: with only $5 to start.  Grades were rank-ordered, from greatest to least net profit.  With those constraints, a two-hour car wash was sounding good… but, remember, it was December.

So Steve Simmons, Elvis Crusoe, Heather Skinner and I teamed up, but we didn’t know each other then.  In our first hangout, we learned Elvis lived in – did I mention Liberia a few moments ago?  Whatever our reinterpretation of a car wash was would need 5,500-mile-long hose.  The other sponge dropped when, soon after, Steve was deployed to the Middle East.  Add another thousand miles to that hose.  Our business plans crumbled before we ever started.

Then it hit us: we needed to be fundraising consultants.  We needed a struggling nonprofit, a business willing to donate to it, and room for us as matchmaker.  We chose a homelessness charity in a tony DC suburb, and a new gourmet doughnut shop that needed marketing.  Treats that were worth $2 when sold became worth $20 as thank-you premiums.  Heather and I, and two volunteers, set up outside of a Winter Wonderland festival.  We raked in $1,594 in cash donations in just two hours.  The adversity forced us to think more deeply and refine our business model.  It was the idea that counted, not our proximity.  We made it through the dip.

What we’ve just experienced at Smith is not a simulation or poor copy of today’s business world; global teams working on problems and doing so through technology – that’s exactly how businesses function.

I have just two closing thoughts.  When we entered this program two Januarys ago, the unemployment rate was 4.8%.  Today it is 3.9% – the hottest labor market in 18 years.  That’s great business acumen, and a little luck on our parts, to up our skills just as demand for talent is rising.  I’m confident employers will embrace us as we market our new skills.

But the most important point is that there is no self-made person.  We all got to today’s graduation ceremony with the love, help and support of others.  To our professors, you have earned our respect and our gratitude.  To our friends and family, we say thank you for sacrificing dinners together, reasonable bedtimes, any semblance of a real vacation in two years, and the last 90 Sundays.  And to one another, I just want to say I learned more from you than from any text or course packet.  Your, and your life experiences, added a whole other wonderful dimension to this accounting period that’s now closing. 

I have argued that our Smith OMBA education has prepared us to lead – and to do so in a refreshingly honest, civil and informed way.  But I have also argued our Smith OMBA is a technology-enabled, borderless experience – the kind of thing any global business will want, and any business that is not yet global will need and demand.  Our group has overcome every barrier thrown our way over some 24 courses.  We are well prepared for the next accounting period.

So congratulations to cohort 1701 and to those who helped us get here.  We did it!  And as Seema, Courtney, and Anthony have signed off on nearly every email: Go Terps!”