Dean’s Q&A: NYU Stern’s Geeta Menon

Stern undergrads on an International Studies Program trip in Vietnam. Photo courtesy of NYU Stern School of Business

What are some more innovations you’ve spearheaded as dean?

First, using New York City to our advantage and trying to look at what are some of the areas in which students can specialize in. Typically, if you look at a business school, it’s divided by core disciplines, so you see finance, accounting, marketing, etc. But one of the things we do in general across the school is give the ability to have departments talk across departments, because departments can pretty quickly get siloed.

So we started what we call tracks. And tracks are typically areas that cut across these disciplines. We have professors that take ownership of each of these tracks and try to figure out and bucket courses across these different departments. It allows students to specialize in things like asset pricing, business analytics, corporate finance, digital marketing, or real estate. And now we are thinking about putting something together along the lines of luxury marketing.

This also helps us use New York City because we have access to people who can come into our classroom and teach very practical issues from the point of view of what they encounter in their workplace.

We also started a dual degree—a BS/BFA with film and television. The NYU Tisch School of the Arts is one of the premiere institutions for film and TV. We joined forces with them and came up with the degree that is a BS in business and a BFA in film and television where students enter either through Stern or Tisch and, in the freshman year, they apply to do a dual degree, which extends to their fifth year. It’s a very rigorous curriculum. Just by definition, we’re talking about business and film and TV, so you need to have artistic and analytical skills. This is a small, talented group of students who are really using the city to their advantage.

How do you think people perceive Stern and how has that changed over the past few years?

It’s interesting because I told you I’ve been here for a long time, and the university has really evolved over the time I’ve been here. The global aspect of our education has really taken us into the forefront of business. When I first started here, it was really much more of a regional university. And over the last 25 years, I’ve seen us metamorphose into a really international player. And I think there are some statistics—I don’t know the exact numbers—but I remember seeing that NYU has the largest number of international students going here. We also have the largest number of students who study abroad. So we’ve gone from having this local perception to one of being a real global powerhouse and I really am in awe of that trajectory and it’s really interesting to see that happen.

At Stern in the Undergraduate College, no other business schools does global at the scale we do. We have more than 50% of our students study abroad at least one semester through the global network university. We have another 8% or so who study abroad through the International Business Exchange Program, which is the traditional way in which you exchange students with partner schools in different parts of the world.

But what really makes it unique is the Barr Family International Studies Program, which is a requirement for juniors in their spring semester to go either to South America, Asia, or Europe and spend one week there studying a company that they’re examining in the (International Studies Program) class during the semester. What ends up happening is every single one of our students has some global experience by the time they graduate. And that started sometime around 2001.

If you think about it, the world has shrunk. Business has become much more universal and much more global. That sensitivity to a global marketplace is really important and through the International Studies Program, everybody has a global experience and through the study away, they have a more immersive experience in these different regions of the world.