Changes Within the MBA Student Experience Team

I want to share some exciting news with you, our MBA students.

In April 2021, Lisa Barty transitioned to a new management role in our Student Experience (SE) BCom team.  This was an exciting opportunity for Lisa and her leadership will no doubt benefit the undergraduate student experience. With her departure, we invested time in reviewing how to best support and enhance the MBA student experience.  For the past two months, we have been working to design a SE team structure that best supports our students, our programs and the business school.  One that leverages the strong foundation built to date, with a focus on even greater collaboration across all our MBA streams including; Full-time, Accelerated, Co-op and BLPT MBA programs.  After much discussion and consideration, we are excited to announce a revised MBA Student Experience team – transitioning from a program focus to a functionally focused structure.

Our past:

1) MBA Programs Team – Our MBA Programs team has been in place for many years with two key areas of focus: MBA Recruitment and Admissions, and Program/In-Course Management.  This team has experts who passionately give their best to you, our MBA students.  Every day, this team collaborates to build the best student experience from the time a prospect inquiry comes to one of our Recruiting and Admissions colleagues, through to graduating.  Every member of the team plays a role in our students’ success.

2) BLPT MBA Team – When the BLPT team was created, it was with a vision of a small dedicated team to bring this program from launch to steady state. And as of Winter 2021, we are officially in steady state!  The accomplishments of the BLPT team – Jennifer Dunk and her team built this strong foundation on which to build the next phase of student experience support.

Moving forward:

Effective June 21, 2021, our two new MBA teams will be:

1) MBA Recruitment and Admissions – This team will design innovative recruitment strategies, using the best technology and data management systems.  We will leverage our admissions best practices.  And will continue to engage our newly accepted offer students throughout their onboarding experience, to achieve DeGroote’s annual targets.

2) MBA Program Management – This team will support our students throughout their MBA experience.  Advising.  Wellness services.  Community partner programming.  Residency weekends and operational program support (BLPT). International Exchange. Supporting accommodations.   We are proud to support your transformation through to becoming DeGroote alumni.

These structural changes will keep some things the same for you, as students, and will introduce new points of connections.

What is the same?

You will continue to work very closely with our Academic Advisors, our Program Officer and Program Lead.  Your go-to team members; Maddy, Carolyn, Sandra, Melanie, Megan are all still here to support your success.  You have come to rely on the SE-MBA team to support your student experience and this new structure will not change our ability and capacity to support your MBA journey.

And Dr. John Medcof continues to oversee the MBA Programs, including BLPT as Program Director.

What is different?

The two new MBA teams are:

1) MBA Recruitment and Admissions – This team will design innovative recruitment strategies, using the best technology and data management systems.  We will leverage our admissions best practices.  And will continue to engage our newly accepted offer students throughout their onboarding experience, to achieve DeGroote’s annual targets.  Sarah Alizerig will join this team and partner with her colleagues to leverage synergies across DeGroote’s MBA streams when recruiting high quality students.  And Jennifer Dunk has accepted the Manager, MBA Recruitment and Admissions position. Jenn will be working to smoothly transition the current members of the BLPT team to their new teams.

2) MBA Program Management – This team will support our students throughout their respective MBA experience. Residency weekends and operational program support. Supporting accommodations. Advising. International Exchange. Community partner programming. Whatever our students need to be successful, this team is there to help them over the finish line.   We are here to support your transformational journey.  As mentioned above, Anja Rexha will join this team to specifically support all BLPT students.  This team includes a Program Lead who may be helpful when identifying strong points of intersection across our MBA streams – building the best student experience possible, regardless of program.  On June 23rd, joining the DeGroote Student Experience team as the Manager, MBA Programs will be Chris(topher) Longtin.  Chris can be reached at longtinc@mcmaster.ca after June 23.

Please join me in congratulating/welcoming Jenn Dunk and Chris Longtin – I am very excited to include these two leaders on the Student Experience leadership team, in a new, expanded capacity or as a new member.

More change benefiting you.

Starting this Fall, more talent for Career and Professional Development team will provide more resources and services to our Accelerated and graduating students.  More details to come this Summer!

Know that the Student Experience team continues to evolve to better support our students and each other.  Beyond these MBA team changes, we will have more change in the coming months as we transition back to campus with classroom and support programming. We will work together to identify how to best support you, our students, and each other during this change.  How to leverage the best of what we have learned over the past year and how to design the future of our work.  With our expanded leadership team and the best team of professionals, we will create, build, leverage and deliver excellence in service delivery.   All for our students.  And to be the best team possible.

We will continue to update you with any changes as they unfold. Stay safe. Stay healthy.

And enjoy the summer season!

Jennifer McCleary
Director, Student Experience