Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

The Martin J. Whitman School of Management MBA program received a STEM designation in February for five of its concentrations: accounting, business analytics, finance, marketing and supply chain management.

The certification enables international students on an F-1 Visa to apply for a 24-month extension to their post-completion Optional Practical Training employment authorization, a 12-month employment permission completed after graduation. SU students and staff said the extension can mean better job prospects for international students.

Juan Tavares, director of SU’s Center for International Services, said the extension gives students opportunities to prove their value to employers. The extension can eliminate the extra step in changing a person’s immigrant status to an employer, Tavares added.

Anushree Jagdish, a second-year MBA student from India, said the designation opened up a host of career opportunities for her, including in the technology industry.

“Silicon Valley … it’s mainly been software engineers and computer engineers and computer scientists and all of those things. But recently, it’s opened up for people like me who are doing marketing and want to get into the tech marketing sort of thing,” she said.

To become STEM-designated, degree programs must qualify based on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s STEM Designated Degree Program List. Tavares said the application is costly — the extension and the initial OPT fee cost $410—but said the advantages are worth the investment.

Cathy Mantor, SU’s assistant director for Student and Exchange Visitor Information System Compliance, said students can leverage the change as they navigate the job market.

Following the class of 2022 becoming the first to graduate from Whitman with the designation, Christopher Wszalek, executive director of graduate admissions and student recruitment, said he’s glad he can now promote it to the incoming class as well as to future students.

“It’s (more) a matter of us sharing the good news now and promoting the fact that we are on that list of schools,” Wszalek said.

Eva Morris | Design Editor

Before Whitman received the classification, Wszalek said he had received inquiries about an MBA STEM designation for years, especially considering that four of Whitman’s M.S. programs — including business analytics, finance, marketing and supply chain management — already have a STEM designation.

Jagdish said she still doesn’t know if she will stay in the U.S. or return to India to work, and she still feels the pressure to secure a job position.
Alex McKelvie, interim dean of Whitman, said conversations about implementing the certification for the MBA programs started in 2018. From conversations he’s had with them, eligible MBA students are excited about the designation, he said.

“I emailed them the day it was decided,” he said. “It was like, ‘Hey, you can now officially do this.’”

In his previous role as associate dean for undergraduate and master’s education, McKelvie said he and his staff began to realize the significant emphasis that the Whitman MBA curriculum already placed on STEM fields and their practices.

Around the same time, he added, they began to understand the value of a three-year OPT time for international students that may have come to the U.S not only for academic but professional purposes.

After a year of discussion with the master’s board – which included research into how other business schools have implemented the STEM designation and whether Whitman’s MBA programs matched similar criteria – McKelvie and the team proposed the designation to the faculty, who he said supported the initiative.

“We were delighted that they really saw the value in this and the reflection of what we’ve been doing, but also where we need to go in … modern business education,” McKelvie said.

McKelvie said business programs should be considered STEM because of their focus on developing quantitative skills. Amiya Basu, a professor of marketing in the MBA program, said the practical training that Whitman offers is “a very serious thing” for international students. This training, along with his program faculty’s quantitative background, made the designation appropriate, Basu said.

Wszalek said the designation speaks to the program’s overall strength for both domestic and international students.

“It validates that the math skills and the quantitative skills are in the program now that it has the STEM designation,” Wszalek said. “There’s still value even for a domestic candidate to have that.”

Though Jagdish’s programs weren’t STEM-designated when she decided to enroll in Whitman, hearing the news still gave her a “big sigh of relief”.

“There’s always this pressure with international students that ‘Oh, you have to get that job. You have to get that internship.’ For me personally, I did feel that pressure. Especially because I was trying to … fit in,” she said. “It was really a lot of things that I was trying to manage at the same time and having that out of the way, that peace of mind at the end of it was like, ‘You know what, finally. Thank god.’”

Published on September 14, 2022 at 11:35 pm