Smith School of Business

-If your goal in obtaining an EMBA is to improve your leadership skills Smith is the school for you. Upon completion of the program you will have great insight on what makes you act, lead, and solve problems the way you do.

-I would like to see more class periods on strategy, negotiations, finance, accounting, marketing, economics, and operations management.

-The University of Maryland does an amazing job with its EMBA program. We had a cohort full of top-notch professionals, first class professors and best in class assistants. The entire program was challenging, exciting and will be missed. The tools, education and confidence I am leaving with was well worth the money invested.

-Career services at Smith is mostly geared towards the full-time MBA program. In reality, many of the EMBA students also are considering career transitions. The coaching was very helpful for this, however the career services was not as well equipped to help with this as it might have been. It is being addressed better now than it was at the beginning of our cohort experience.

-One of the differentiators of the Smith School is it provided us with personal executive coaches. This was an extremely valuable part of the program as my coach helped me to sort through my personality assessments and better align myself to my goals.

-The cohort style learning was a great experience! The background makeup and personalities was perfectly selected by the administrative staff. The nineteen months that I spent in the Smith EMBA program was a very rewarding and enriching experience. And while initially, I thought the price was a bit on the high side, in hindsight it was $95k well spent. Not just because of the curriculum, but because of the overall learning experience I received from the faculty, staff and classmates.

-The experience was phenomenal. The administrators took feedback from the prior nine cohorts and tailored the curriculum according to feedback. This made for an amazing experience.

-I felt that our EMBA program was isolated from the rest of the school. I think that there could have been a better way of helping us integrate with others in the Smith School.

-The support staff at Smith goes out their way to provide executives with any logistical support needed. They respond quickly with support and solutions. I experienced their attention to detail on my study aboard trip to Hong Kong every thing ran smoothly all I did was get on and off the air plane.

-Given all the class work that need to be accomplished, there has been too little time to discuss current events that not directly related to the curriculum - e.g. latest political development, BP oil spill, middle east crises, etc, - and the impact it might have on us as managers. That said, we have been in the program as the world is coming off a global economic crises and there has been plenty of good and relevant discussions on that topic.

-We had a very engaging class, and we were always asking questions, sometimes at the expense of the length of class period. One improvement would be to control the curriculum or amount of in class discussion to enable the full agenda to be covered in class.

-There should perhaps be more emphasis on student presentations. While we did this in many classes, some opportunities for student - student learning were missed.