The final six weeks of the first year of the Rotman curriculum is what we call the “Capstone Term.” In this term, firms come to Rotman and present our students with a real business challenge they are facing today. For the Capstone Course in this term, our students are then tasked with coming up with solutions and presenting them to the firms facing those business challenges. In other words, our students participate in live cases with firms who in the past have included Labatt (AB InBev), the Bank of Montreal, among others.
Through these live cases, our students get the opportunity to showcase their skills in front of employers and get comfortable tackling real world, messy, ambiguous problems, much like what will be expected from them from the first day on the job post-MBA. –This is in stark contrast to the “prepackaged” cases that one downloads from a website from other business schools which are designed to take students down one particular line of thinking to arrive at one specific conclusion (and of course, the real business world is not quite as neatly packaged !).
We’ve received a lot of great press about the Capstone Course so what follows are some handy links to help you better understand it and how it helps our students become better problem solvers:
From the co-designers of the Capstone Course, Professors Mara Lederman and Bernardo Blum:
- The Capstone – Recorded at our 2013 Open House, Professor Lederman explains how the course works.
- A course that aids integration and insight – An interview with Profs Lederman and Blum in the Hindustan Times.
- MBA In Canada: Rotman MBAs Network With CEOs through Big Data – An interview with Profs Lederman and Blum with the website, Business Because.
From our students who have participated in the capstone course:
- The Practice of Model Based Decision Making at Rotman – Hear from our students as they prepare their Capstone project and present it in the Bank of Montreal boardroom.
- The Capstone Project – The best learning so far – Blog post by class of 2015 student, Anand Inbasekaran.
Hopefully this gives you a sense of the huge benefit the Capstone term gives our students to help them stand out from their peers across the world!