SNA to analyse Fletcher's MIB program

By Anna Valeria Zuccolotto Soto, not taking the second module this semester but planning to take this project next year as second module or as independent study.

Overview:

In the US only there are thousand of master programmes from where to choose. It is true that there are only 8 Universities in the US that are considered “very prestigious” and are called the Ivey Leagues, but because education in the US at the master level is excellent, other schools have increased their level and a new label has been created to allocate them: “Mini Ivey Leagues”.

Rankings are a good source of information when taking the decision of where to go to school, but they offer limited information. Many of this school spend many of their budget in marketing their brand to keep the recognition. However, how much of what they sell us is actually true? What do they mean when they say “strong community sense” or “high alumni network”? I believe many of these schools are not able to quantify how really strong is their community sense or their alumni network. Most of these schools do know how many alumni they have and in which sectors they are working, but what about the connections among them and among current students?

I believe Fletcher could be the perfect school to try to understand more about its community sense, especially for their MIB program, which is 5 years new and there is a lot of work going on in trying to market it better every year in order to compete with the traditional MBA programs like HBS, Sloan, Wharton…etc.

Objective:

To compare what are the connections made during and after going through the MIB program at Fletcher. Is there any link of how these connections were made? Who is the most central person, and who has the highest betwenness?

Answering these questions will help understand more about the conformation of the MIB class and to understand what most of the people is looking for, in order to improve the program for future classes. The information provided by using SNA will definitely be interesting for the Admissions Office.

Methodology: 

Two surveys will be needed. The first one will be longer because it will need to build the attributes for the class of 2014 (gender, age, nationality, focus industry previous to Fletcher, focus industry after Fletcher). The second one however will be more important because it will let us know how strong the connections are, so to measure Fletcher contribution.

In both surveys it will be vital to address the Network Question. I am suggesting having 2 main questions. One question will be addressing the connection made in the personal arena, and the second will address the work/school related connections, to learn weather connections are made based on experiences in industries previous to Fletcher or new industries of interest acquired during their Fletcher experience.

-        Name 5 people from the MIB 2013 class that you feel more related to?

-        Who do you usually talk to regarding school/work related issues? Name 5

Some hypotheses:

MIB class is very diverse and come not only from different countries but also industries. So, maybe connections are initially made in base of industry interests but later probably moved to new interests. Perhaps nationality also plays a very important role.   

Any complication?

As with all surveys, there is always the risk of low participation from the class, especially for the second survey that will take place once the program has ended. Many people would have already moved ahead, get busier with work and may not be as excited about participating in this type of exercises. However I think this might not be an issue for this class, especially if another classmate, instead of the school itself, is doing the survey. Then again I also believe I could be very persuasive J