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A natural-born networker – Sean’s story

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Originally posted by Scott A.E. Smith.

For our latest blog, we caught up with Sean A. Sinclair, who’s currently on his Corporate Residency with Scotiabank in Toronto. Sean started the Facebook group for the Class of 2013, so we made sure to ask him about that. Enjoy!

So what’s your story, Mr. Sinclair? Where are you from?

I grew up in what used to be the small town of Newmarket, Ontario, located about 45 minutes north of my current home in Toronto. My mother is a nurse, and my father is a retired police officer. As you can imagine, both have had very demanding careers and as a result have provided my sister and me with prime examples of loyalty, dedication, discipline and hard work. I carried these life lessons throughout my childhood and into competitive sports where I truly began to develop leadership skills. I had the privilege of captaining various soccer, hockey and lacrosse teams that represented my town or my schools. When I realized I wasn’t going to make it to the NHL and grew too old to compete in organized sport, I continued to train and participate in intramural and recreational leagues. I even tested the waters with competitive bodybuilding, which taught me about discipline, resilience and spirituality to some degree. Sport is where I developed my greatest friendships. It’s where I learned how to succeed and fail with dignity and pride. It’s where I learned the importance of hard work, but also the place where I first experienced defeat and heartbreak. Because of my experience in competitive sports, I hate to lose. I understand the importance of hard work and preparation. But most importantly, because of sports, I am resilient and mentally tough. I will need these traits as I pursue a career in finance as I know there will be thousands of other candidates out there who will have their own advantages. The difference is that I have the determination and the will to network my way to success, and I can suck it up and get going when the going gets tough.

What brought you to the Corporate Residency MBA program?

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A unique perspective – Scott’s story

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Originally posted by Scott A.E. Smith.

This is not the first time I’ve been featured in the dalmba.ca blog, but it has been a while! If you were to look back in our archives to April 23, 2010, you’d find the rather uniquely titled edition called “A Twitterview from Toronto” featuring yours truly: Scott A.E. Smith.

In that long-ago edition, our former editor (and noted social media guru) Jordy Fujiwara thought it would be cool to make a bit of a splash with the weekly interview format by taking it into the previously uncharted waters of social media: namely, Twitter. And rather than interviewing a then-current student, he decided to exchange 140-character questions and answers with me, a fourth-year student at Queen’s University at the time, who had recently been accepted to the Corporate Residency MBA program.

I, too, had taken an interest in social media, particularly by starting the Facebook group for the Class of 2012. And that interest continues. In fact, I’ve taken a leading role, along with my partners at Coburg Consultants Ltd. (fellow Corporate Residency MBA students James Ewart, Blake Jeffrey and Sean A. Sinclair), in managing the Class of 2013’s presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as in this very blog!

But wait a minute! I was the founder of the Facebook group for the Class of 2012, not 2013! How is it that I’m now so involved with the Class of 2013?

The short answer is that I’m now part of the Class of 2013! I chose to defer my acceptance for one year in order to gain some work experience before starting the program. I landed a job at an advertising agency in Toronto, where I worked primarily on the company’s TELUS and Scotiabank International accounts, and even got to do some in-house consulting on social media, of all things, and where it may be headed in the future!

What’s most fascinating about looking back at our “Twitterview” nearly a year and a half later is how few of my answers I would change. Even today, when people ask me the moment, or the reason, that I knew I wanted to be part of this program, I tell them the same thing I told Jordy then: it was Dean Peggy Cunningham’s interview with the Globe and Mail in March 2009. It’s also interesting to reflect on the potential employers I had in mind 17 months ago—especially since, just last month, I accepted an offer from one of them, American Express, and will be starting my corporate residency there (in Ottawa, specifically) in January!

Most of all, though, the words that resonate are these (if you’ll allow me the indulgence of quoting myself, for the first and last time ever):

“I would say: if you think this MBA program is for you, it probably is. The people are first-class every step of the way. Apply!”

If I could ‘re-tweet’ anything from our “Twitterview” that day, that would certainly be it.

So there you have it: my unique perspective on the Corporate Residency MBA program here at Dalhousie University. Since I’m inheriting this blog from the recently graduated Jordy Fujiwara, I thank him for his pioneering efforts writing about the program and the wonderful people in it over the past two years. He will continue to be a friend of the blog, and I look forward to telling the stories of our students, alumni, professors, administrators and partners in the way that he did so well.

From a broad to narrow scope – Jordy’s story

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Originally posted by Jordan Fujiwara.

That’s me, by the way. That’s right, this week’s blog is about my experience with this program thus far! People have been asking when I was going to blog about myself so I figured I’d dish one out. They’ve also been wondering when a prof might show up here; that is also in the works! So, about me: I’ll be 24 in exactly one month. I grew up in Eastern Passage, a then-small but now-bustling fishing town just northeast of Halifax, right across the harbour. I’ve been going to school in this neck of the woods for pretty much my whole life, receiving my BSc in Psychology from Dal (2009) and now, of course, the Corporate Residency MBA at Dal.

I’m doing something a little different for my Corporate Residency. While my peers have all gone off to work, I am working for me. The program’s flexibility allows for entrepreneurial residencies provided you put together a solid case for a business. For me, the opportunity was obvious. For decades there have been MBA student–owned consulting firms operating out of Dalhousie’s School of Business. Traditionally they were run full-time in the summer months by MBA students entering their second year and sold to fresh students around April. However, the new CRMBA curriculum has all its students off to work for 8 months, starting in January… tossing a wrench into those decade-long traditions.

Like I said, the opportunity was quite clear for me. I’d buy one of the firms and do that as my residency, and be able to work for myself for 8 months while learning the ups and downs of running one’s own company. It was a good choice for me because, despite having a BSc and starting a master’s degree, I was one of those classic students who didn’t reallllly know what he wanted to do. I knew I liked psychology (but not lab work, so much), and I knew I was interested in marketing or advertising or PR, and that was about it. Quite a broad scope. I felt the whole sandbox situation with the consulting firm would be a great way for me engage with the local business community and test many pieces of the business world at once to help guide me towards that narrower scope. So I went ahead with the plan. Randel Madell and I purchased Coburg Consultants Limited. Randel is an equal owner but works part-time. She is also a Corporate Residency MBA student with a full-time residency; can you say ambitious? You’ll meet her in the weeks to come.

Here’s the cool part: three months in and I’ve achieved that narrow scope! Yep, I know what kind of career I’m aiming for. The story goes like this: one of our first contracts was with Dal itself, to help market and promote the Corporate Residency MBA program. As current students who work in the building and are constantly accessible and have genuine connections to the rest of the class, Randel and I (and consequently, the company) were viewed as a huge asset. Part of the marketing contract involves a social media campaign. In fact, this blog is a part of that campaign, as well as the new Twitter feed and revamped Facebook page. Before rolling out all those shiny toys, I had to do a lot of research into social media and social marketing. And I kind of got hooked. Like a lot of us 20-somethings, I grew up as the Internet did and was around to see the birth of Google and Facebook, so I was pretty knowledgeable about how to use social media… but I had never truly looked at it through the lens of business and especially not with the tools and techniques that the program had provided me with.

What I found was mystifying. The entire landscape of marketing is being transformed at an unprecedented pace by the explosion of Web 2.0 tools and online communities. It’s changing so fast, in fact, that tons of companies find they can’t or can barely keep up. I want to ride that wave, since as long as the Internet is around, it won’t be stopping. Social Media and its applications to business / marketing is my narrow scope, and now I have 5 months in this “sandbox” as well a bunch of elective courses in the 2010/2011 school year to actively position myself to land a tremendously inticing career upon graduation. All thanks to Coburg and the Corporate Residency MBA.

I could write a lot more, but this blog is long enough as it is. If, as a prospective student or a curious individual, you have any questions about Coburg and how it’s been going, feel free to get in touch with me! You can find my email through the Coburg website (linked above) or ask a question on the Facebook fan page wall (also linked above). Cheers, and see you next Thursday (or earlier)!