Online Healthcare MBA Info Session (Oct 2017)

Annie: Hi everyone, so good evening, good afternoon and good morning depending on where you are in the world. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join the George Washington University’s online healthcare MBA program webinar. My name is Annie and I’m the moderator for today’s presentation. Now we have invited Dr. Ayman El Tarabishy, the program director and our admissions’ advisor to speak with us and answer any program questions today. We will start off by introducing our program doctor, Dr. Ayman El Tarabishy and also our admissions team. Then Dr. El Tarabishy will take us through the programs, speaking to its relevancy, practicality and also comprehensiveness for today’s healthcare environment. He will also introduce the core first course, the foundations and management for healthcare, and then we will go over the application and admissions process and then finally wrap it up with a QA session. So now, I will pass it over to Dr. El Tarabishy from here on.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Thank you everybody for joining today’s webinar. I am delighted to be here and it’s wonderful and we’re in Washington DC and the weather here is absolutely gorgeous. I’m just happy to be here today. I went out for a nice walk this afternoon and I was looking around and I said, “This is a nice fall day”. But I want to thank you all for also joining here. A little bit about myself. I’ve been with GW now for over 10 years and I’m a professor here in the department of management. I teach multiple courses on campus and also online, and I must say I got used to the online environment here. I want to again, thank you all for joining, and Annie, thank you very much for the nice introduction here and a little bit about myself.

Dr. El Tarabishy: I used to work at the World Bank prior to joining GW, I worked in the strategy group at the World Bank and I switched here and, my area of focus is of course on innovation entrepreneurship, but looking in particular and in more in detail, in the healthcare domain. That’s a little bit about me, I’m married and I have two kids, twin boys that are seven years old. So they’re ambitious and it’s a fun time to be with them, especially when Halloween coming around here. Let me start the session here and go from here. The GW health care program or the GW online healthcare MBA program here. And what’s important about this… Can you all see the slide, the three circles? Annie, do you see it on the screen?

Annie: Yeah, sure.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Okay, great. All right. Making sure it works. Okay. I think, visuals are very important, especially to portray a message, a clear message of what we’re trying to do and what’s the objective here. With the GW online healthcare MBA program, the driving force, the pillars, the under the foundation itself is what I call kind of a three legged stool or three circles or three spheres that are all interconnected. And any way you look at it, it starts with relevancy. Why is this important? And we know very well that today and with everything that’s going on in the news and the day to day life, that healthcare is becoming more and more critical and especially when it comes to taking care of individuals, the aging population and new opportunities in the market and also new, technological innovations that are bringing this all to the forefront, not to talk about also the elephant in the rule, which is the insurance affordable care act and Congress what they’re planning to do and so forth.

Dr. El Tarabishy: It gets complicated. It gets complicated in the U.S perspective here, but it’s also worldwide as an issue worldwide. The second sphere here is practicality. We can listen to NPR, can listen to all the media agencies forever, but at the end of the day, the question is am I going to get better healthcare and are my kids covered? And is there opportunities for me in my career to be in the healthcare industry? What about the environment, the healthcare industry and either as a physician, administrator and nurse whatever profile that you fit into this. Where am I in this and how do I move up the practicality of it, something that’s tangible, that you could control a little bit of, not all, but some of it. And then finally the whole point of comprehensiveness, how it all fits together, how it all touches everything together.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Why in particular we mentioned healthcare MBA, the words themselves raises alarms, healthcare and in master’s in business administration. But the more you think about it, the more you realize that they are indispensable today more than ever. The business of healthcare and the healthcare as an industry and the business is also important. And that’s what the whole GW online healthcare MBA’s about. It’s about looking at healthcare from many different angles, but also looking at it from a business perspective and saying, “What are we doing? How are we influencing this and how do we better prepare this?” And as you can see here, and which is kind of nice here, if you look in the top left corner here, it is the GW school tagline that’s kind of old. I think we’ve updated it multiple times, but everybody likes it and everybody keeps going back to this one.

Dr. El Tarabishy: By popular demand and we continue to use it here, which is at the center of it all. And really, it’s even like Washington D.C the location is at the center of it all. But the topic itself is at the center of it all. It’s the GW online healthcare MBA.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Let me continue on with the next slide here. Relevancy. Why did GW online health corporate healthcare MBA program as relevant. It it touches on what you see here on the slide, which is very important here, is that I’ll read you some of it here is medical and health services managers also called healthcare executives or healthcare administrators. See this does an excellent job goes outlook, and this is from 2014 to 2024 which is about 17% much faster than average. Okay. So that tells you, “Hey, something’s cooking there.” Something’s happening there.

Dr. El Tarabishy: If people are looking to hire, looking for upward mobility, this is something of interest. Management analysis, often called management consultants. Imagine that you have all these consultants now roaming around hospitals and healthcare clinics offering their services and that’s something more and more become more prevailed. 14% much faster than average. Then social and community service managers, 10% faster than average and physicians and surgeons, 14% and I teach a class now at the foundations class and we had a surgeon there, a student of mine talking about it and he’s talking about a whole new way of surgeons actually dealing with patients that now they make sure that the email or follow up with them, this comprehensive care model. So that’s something that we talk about, but it’s also to kind of what I, what I mentioned in the webinar, and I remember saying this and I got some LOL means that laughing out loudly, but also some surprises was saying it’s a new breed of surgeons that we’re seeing here.

Dr. El Tarabishy: It’s not what we typically saw in the past where surgeons were just doing surgery and that’s it. Now these surgeons have added more to their portfolio when it comes to management than leadership. The GW school of business, why GW school of business, and I say this and I say it out of pride here, we saw this coming. We saw the changes coming in the healthcare domain. We saw it a long time ago. We saw it almost 10 years ago and we saw it and we said, “We’re going to have these cadre of individuals in the healthcare domain and people in the business world looking at the healthcare specifically and saying we need to connect both of them together.”

Dr. El Tarabishy: Because they can’t just be standalone. This is why GW starts to offer the online healthcare MBA. And some of you are going to chuckle or laugh right now, but I remember the first classes we offered on the online GW MBA, we were using an electronic platform. We didn’t have any videos, we didn’t have any, all these bells and whistles flying left and right. We basically did discussion threats. Imagine that discussion threads. That was our cutting edge technology, and it was back then. But this is where it started. I think this is kind of looking back, I mean nothing and the same, but look where we are today. Today it’s like back to the future. We’re doing so many different new things with technologies, it’s amazing.

Dr. El Tarabishy: The GW healthcare MBA and this slide you might say, “Oh, it’s a little bit of a marketing push to do it.” But, I want to point the first one here, which is, I really think it’s critical. That makes a big difference here is this whole spirit of innovation, the pioneering aspect of it. We were in it from the beginning. We were in it when things didn’t work properly. We were in it when things, we had to kind of figure things out as we went. Until today, we are innovating. I think a couple of years ago we realized that everybody was basically doing the same thing. And we said, “Let’s change it again. Let’s kind of break what we’re doing and do something totally different.” And you’ll see a little bit about this in our certificates programs. See what we have done that we said, “Let’s figure it out, let’s try it and see what happens.”

Dr. El Tarabishy: But I think that differentiates us here. The best of both worlds. Exactly. You know, it’s what I call this kind of having both at the same time and healthcare and business coming together and, and you can go back and forth, back and forth between both but picking what you think is most important to you from a learning, from a career perspective. Personalized MBA. And that’s something that we uniquely do. We have our classes here, but we have also our sync sessions, which basically we say to faculty saying, “Listen, you know you’re going to have weekly webinars with your students and we’re going to offer multiple times.” But you get to talk to the faculty and you get to talk to the faculty assistants that are working with them on this one. And you have these weekly sessions.” So it’s not like an audio book, when you’re just listening to things, you are actually having live interactions.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Elite faculty. I think that’s very snobbish of us. But if you ask faculty, everybody will nod “Yes, yes, I’m elite.” But why don’t we say informed faculty, faculty that care faculty that are actually enjoying what they’re doing. And that’s what we all are about here. And diverse community. You’ll see this in your classes, you’ll see this in how you communicate with people and what we do. And I think that’s what makes GW interesting. This whole kind of spectrum of individuals coming in from different use.

Dr. El Tarabishy: GW online healthcare MBA is comprehensive and we start and I’ll explain it to you. You always remember things in threes and yeah because it’s easy, take your phone number, you put your area code 202 then you give them your first three digits and then the four digits. People remember threes and threes. I’ll give you a three points to this. We have something called the core business cautious. These are things that we say, listen, if you’re going to come and do an MBA at GW or any school, you need to understand the business world. So we’re going to offer you these core classes that you’re going to have to take. You’ll have, understand you’ll, you’ll struggle with them, but we’re going to teach you the core of business.

Dr. El Tarabishy: When you leave, when you ever go in a meeting, a strategy meeting, a business meeting, a decision meeting and somebody fills out at your an ROI or KPI or a TOR, or any of the stuff you say, “I know this stuff, this is part of the core, I get it.” That’s what I call, in other words, what I refer to it as, your common body of knowledge, your CBK, common body of knowledge. It’s like my boys, we’re teaching them how to write, we’re teaching them math and I keep pressing them on it because I know this is the core that they need to prosper.

Dr. El Tarabishy: It then comes the fun part, the elective, the healthcare electives, the focused ones. And this is from the school of medicine. This is when we broke what we had before and said, let’s reinvent ourselves again the spirit of innovation, right? So we went to our neighbors, the school of medicine across the street, and we kept talking to them and they kept talking to us. I said, how do we combine forces? How do we bring both universes together and how do we work with all this administration and bureaucracy and put something together? And we worked on it for maybe two years, a year or two years. There were so many meanings but eventually all worked out. You know? You know how sometimes you keep working down and keep working at it. It gets more complex and then somehow at the end everything kind of fits well.

Dr. El Tarabishy: That’s what happened. It all fit. Everybody was happy. So now we have something called the elective healthcare electives in which you take classes from the business school, from GW business school, and there is always electives that are being offered, but at the same time, this is the best of both worlds. This is the more the comprehensive part. You say I want to take a certificate on specific courses dealing in healthcare from the school of medicine and we’re like, perfect. Here’s your portfolio. Here is your catalog of certificates that are available. We’ll pick up and you can take one certificate which will satisfy your electives requirements from the business school, but also will offer you a certificate from the school of medicine. So you graduate with a combination of both an MBA degree and also a certificate. The MBA degree is exactly as if you’re on campus.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Nothing’s different. It’s the same diploma, but you’re doing it online. And then you also get a certificate from the school of medicine. And then if you want to add more to it, if you feel dangerous, see I’m going to take some more electives from the business school “Oh you know what, I’m okay with the school of medicine electives. I’m one more focused on business electives, so I’m going to take some of those.” So you get to mix and match of sorts and you can do a combination. That’s kind of what we call about being comprehensive and I was part of this negotiation. I’m very proud of this because now we say we’re different again, and that’s something that I really like to say.

Dr. El Tarabishy: What are these electives from the school of medicine? He say, okay, he’s really proud of them, so what they are. There is a graduate certificate in healthcare quality and regulatory affairs, clinical research administration, clinical research practice, clinical and translational research. It took me a while to figure out translational research. I’m like, what is that? But it’s there certificate in health sciences and a certificate in integrative medicine. Now if you’re coming in with a healthcare focus and you want to dig deeper in one of those, by all means these are certificates are available or if you come from a business perspective, but you’re interested in healthcare, well here you go. Here’s the dive into this knowledge that you can take. And if you take those, you end up with a certificate plus the MBA degree. That’s how it works.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Now you’re part of our MBA program. What we offer is study abroad programs. That’s kind of the electives that I mentioned before. You’ll be plugged into elective saying, “Oh, do you want to go to Sweden, learn about the healthcare system there, or you want to go to India? Or I think this year they’re going to Singapore, they’re going to … I thought it was Israel, but I’m not sure, Korea, I know for the winter Olympics and so forth.” And you get to pick the whole portfolio of study abroad programs available. I know our healthcare students in the past went to a couple of them and they found it fascinating that they can go for two weeks or 10 days to study abroad and actually be live with students but also counted as part of their electives. That’s the opportunities around the globe. And we’re known for these courses, but a lot of schools offer study abroad. But imagine that you’re online and also you’re doing study abroad. And next thing you know you go into galactic.

Dr. El Tarabishy: The GW online healthcare MBA program is practical and that’s the whole point, when we were designing our program, when we were building it, we could have been very fancy. We said, “Oh, we want the residencies, we want them to do this, we want them to do that, we want them to apply this.” And we said to ourselves, we said, “We need to keep it simple and we need to keep it in a way that they understand that it’s a lot of work, but at the same time we understand that they can do it if they plan and organize themselves in a way that they can actually take the courses online and also do well. We offer all our courses online. We offer different times for the sync session and we actually have courses over the weekend. I teach a course on Sundays, believe it or not, from that two to three for the healthcare MBA.

Dr. El Tarabishy: I get a lot of people attending because they thought it’s a good time to attend and then you pace yourself. I know a lot of you say, “I need to finish this ASAP or yesterday,” but once you’re in the program, people change their mind and say, “Oh, I can do another semester. Or you know what? I’m really busy now. I just got promoted. I’m going to slow it down a little bit or I, let me, let me just fly through this. I’m going to add more courses in the summer, and that’s the practical approach to it. Courses are always being offered, so you can always go back and forth with the courses you want working with your advisor.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Now I talked a little bit about the program and I think Annie and her colleagues will work. Joe will jump in and talk a little bit more about this, but I’m going to give you a little bit about the first course if you apply and get into GW, you’ll be taking in the first course. This is part of the actual lectures that I do. And so, this is the foundations course imagine, it’s like tonight actually in about half an hour I’m doing a course online or the foundations. So we’ll talk tonight and I’ll bring the topic up and I’ll have the slides up. Kind of similar to this. Let’s have this topic and the topic for this evening is about evolution of thought, how we were thinking about business. And where we are today. So we talk, I do the introduction and then I start talking a little bit about the business world and the evolution of thought. And it starts like this thing. Imagine you were back in the fifties to seventies right? And you were running a business company or you’re in the healthcare domain.

Dr. El Tarabishy: What did we have back then? What was our thinking back then? And what we started with is that in the beginning, in the fifties and seventies everything that we were doing, we were producing data. Everything that we did from factories to companies and stuff. We were producing a lot of data and this data was in paper form and we had it all over the place and if we even organized it, it was so much that we just placed it on top of each other. And we were mainly focused on products, the manufacturing [inaudible 00:20:00] the Cadillac, the forwards, everything that we were doing, the whole economy was focused on production. And more importantly, we were focused on competition. How do we compete against China? How do we did each other up on price, on quality to capture more of the market share.

Dr. El Tarabishy: And that was the fifties to the seventies kind of evolution of thought how we were at that time. There’s something interesting happened. In the 70s the nineties we moved from data to information. So then I stopped and I asked the students in my class, how did we move from data to information? What happened from the fifties the seventies when the seventies to the nineties and a lot of people say, “Well, we’ve got technology.” I’m like “Great, what about technology? What did we get from technology?” They’ll mostly say, “Oh, we got the computer, the mainframe computer. We started using computation to sort out all the data and to organize it”. Then I become a little bit more difficult and I say to them “Do you remember what program that was used in the beginning to start sorting out all this data?” And a lot of them will say “Microsoft Excel and I say “What came before Microsoft Excel?”

Dr. El Tarabishy: And then I’m kind of trying to date some people to see who remembers what and believe it or not, in every session I get one person saying Lotus one, two, three. You all remember Lotus one two, three. That was the first attempt for actually managers, administrators, and so on. The say, “How can we capture all this data and organize it in such a fashion that it makes sense? And this is where the technology came from. The computer, the main frame, the Lotus one, two, three and in Microsoft Excel. So now we started having everything in the organized buckets and these nice, beautiful Excel sheets. And then we laugh a little bit. Then we joke and we say, remember Google controls, the Excel sheet controls all the ultimate power because they can put everything in a little box, and they can fit everything into these eight and a half by 14 sheets and it’s so small and hardly read them.

Dr. El Tarabishy: But that was information. And then we talk a little bit about products. There were so many products that people said, “We don’t need products anymore, we have enough. What we need is solution. We need to solve our problems.” The economy actually has shifted from a product based economy to more of a solution based economy. We were looking more for a service based economy, come solve me this problem. Then we moved from competition to cooperation. Listen, we can keep competing with each other and you lose market share. I lose market share, but if we both collaborate or no, sorry, not collaborate, cooperate, maybe we can stay longer or survive more. And that was the 70s to the 90s. Then I ask what happened after data and information? What’s next? And what’s next really is surprising in all areas, from information to solution to cooperation.

Dr. El Tarabishy: We moved from an information based society to a knowledge based society. we’re now what we called a knowledge community. The knowledge workers. We no longer are looking at Excel sheets. There’s so many Excel sheets there. You don’t need any more Excel sheets. We have Google. While you’re looking at it, give me what is important now. How can you verify that this is actually accurate and that it works? We’re seeking knowledge. We’re also not seeking solutions anymore. We have enough solutions. What we’re seeking for is innovation. How to make things better, different, unique and now we’re what we call, we were in the innovation society and then we moved from cooperation to what we call collaboration. And an example of this, I imagine is the airline industry, they realize, listen, we can keep competing or even cooperating, but cooperating between two airlines is not enough.

Dr. El Tarabishy: What we need is a network of airlines. You have star Alliance, one world and so on and so on. I say it’s better to take a small piece of the pie, but take many of the small pieces of the pie versus picking a big slice for the limited market. And now what we see is more of a collaboration economy. We talk about the gig economy a little bit, we talk about any different types of economies out there, but the collaboration is what we see now, the sharing economy.

Dr. El Tarabishy: This is type of a slide that we go through and talk about the evolution of thoughts. Now as a student, you might say, “Why is this relevant?” Well, it’s relevant because it’s relevant now that if you’re going to move up the ladder in your career that you want the next promotion or your month move into the industry, people will be looking at you saying, “What do you bring to the table from a knowledge perspective, where is your areas of expertise? How do you deal with innovation? What is your relationship with innovation? What is innovation for you and are you ready to collaborate? How do you collaborate? What is your network?” And that’s what we start end up talking about. We talk a lot, then we move into another session.

Dr. El Tarabishy: We talk about this whole concept of disruption. What is disruptive innovation? Where does it come from? How does it come from and what’s happening? And we talk about how Kodak went away because of the iPhone. We talk about the new disruptions in medicine that are making things obsolete. We talk about Alexa, believe it or not, the voice was munition or Google home and how they can help with medicine and what’s the future like. So we bring all of this stuff because now we’re looking in the future. We’re looking at after you graduate, I tell as medicine changes or morphs into different ways. Where do you fit in this?

Dr. El Tarabishy: Remember you’ve just learned about disruptive innovation. That’s a core topic. That’s a CBK of sorts in the business world. Everybody talks about disruption. We talk about electronic medical records, electronic health records, where do they fit in this whole option? We talk about policy perspectives of this and we talk about basically from a different perspective, we talk about the physicians practice business model. We bring some textbooks in that I assign and say “People, let’s have this conversation about about primary care or let’s talk about the specialists in the physician’s world. Let’s talk about primary care and so on and let’s talk about primary care physician and we look at this model and we explore the pros and cons of it. The limitations, the opportunities of it.” As we’re having these conversations, as we’re having these discussions about theory and practice, you will also be tagged with assignments in many different forms.

Dr. El Tarabishy: There are webinars, there are reading assignments, there are group projects, so you become more of a thinker, you become more reflective. You become more critical thinker about things. In my course, I tell my students, “We question everything. Nothing is assumed.” Because I want them to start exploring things with a critical mindset, not just assume what’s given to them as if MBA does work. Maybe we need to throw this theory out and say, “Let’s come up with a new theory.” And that’s kind of what we do in my course. And as we get into this preparation of how to think, the critical thinking aspect, the routine of the blogs, the webinars, the presentations, you start to get a feel of what is an MBA program. It is not just reading a bunch of textbooks or trying to do some exams and graduate, it’s about deconstructing yourself, deconstructing the way you think, the way you plan, the way you practice, and rebuilding it from the beginning.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Within UI on how the world around revolves around you, and what it means for you in the future. That’s kind of the foundations course. And there’s other need courses. I have James Bailey talking about negotiations. As you take his course about negotiations, he’ll always say to you, “Always move the ball forward.” Don’t just stop at one point and say, “I’m going to draw the line here. And if they don’t accept it, I’m not moving.” They’ll counter argue saying, “You’re not doing anything yourself good. You need to move the ball forward because that’s one more step and better negotiation.” And you’ll get into that. Or you’ll talk to Dr. Chris Case, talking about what happened in the crisis and Mount Everest? How did they all collapse on the top of the mountain? What went wrong? Was it communication? Was it trust? Was it a combination of things? So these are the type of conversations that you have with us and at GW. I’m going to stop here Annie, and then did you want to jump in and talk a little bit about the application requirements?
Annie: At this time, I’m going to invite Allana, our mission advisor to speak about the application process in terms of requirements and exerts.

Ilana Thanks Annie. Thanks Simon. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us. As you know, I’m Ilana, I’m part of the admissions team. My associates are Debra and Rajiv and, to assist you in putting together your application and getting your application done [inaudible 00:29:41] I always say to people, “Do not go ahead and make application if you have not spoken with one of us that they’d be able to assist you and more importantly expedite the application with you.” So in terms of the application process, it’s a very, very simple process. What you need to do is you need to complete an online application. We will send you the link for the the online application, so you would fill in the information on the application form. There’s generally an $80 application fee. This is waived for people who attend these live webinars.

Ilana: You will receive a thank you and that will form, that will be the receipt that we will use to get you the waiver. In terms of the GMAT [inaudible 00:30:37] school, that’s only where it’s applicable, the requirements to be met in order for us to apply for a GMAT waiver for you, we need a minimum of three years, full time working experience. We also would need, in the case of board-certified doctors where it’s almost a given that it would be waived. We would require a copy of your CV or resume, your transcripts from all institutions that you’ve attended, they don’t have to be originals. These can be unofficial copies and we would then apply for the GMAT waiver. So in terms of board certified doctors, dentists, from these, it’s almost a given that you will get the GMAT waiver and also for people who have five or more years of working experience, generally it will be waived as well.

Ilana: And then as I said, we can apply for anyone who has three or more years of working experience. The suggestion we always make to people is, if you’re undergrad or even maybe you’ve done some post grad work afterwards, if your marks were not stellar, we know that things do happen. Let us have also an accompanying letter to the admissions committee alternatively a short or be called optional essay explaining what happened in that instance so that they can look at the GMAT waiver holistically. We then also in terms of the documentation would require two letters of recommendation. We’re not looking for these from professors that you may have had in your life 20 or 30 years ago. We would like them from people whom you currently work with, who can speak to your abilities. Obviously we want them to know what program you’re applying to and to really give the admissions committee some insight into who you are as a person and why they think that you would be successful in this program.

Ilana: And we have two essays, some statements of purpose as well. The first one is really your means of introducing yourself to the admissions committee. They don’t get to meet you. They are not a gang to do an interview with you. So anything that you want him to know about you, would be in that first essay. And when you speaking with myself, Deborah or Rajiv, when we send you the documentation requirements, we will send you the guidelines.

Ilana: In the second essay, it’s not really an essay. You have a choice of six questions. You need to choose three. They are not that sort of mind blowing and in fact the all day looking for is a hundred words per question. And then as you see on the slide where it says one optional essay, that would be the one for the team at waiver and in terms of the TOEFL scores that would be applicable. That would be for someone perhaps who is not a permanent resident of the United States or not a citizen of the United States. Then they may ask for that depending where you were educated and of the primary language of the country was that you were educated in.

Ilana: So that’s in terms of the application requirements, our next term starts January the 16th 2018. We call that spring, where we are, it isn’t spring. You’re lucky if it is where you are and so I would suggest that if you’re looking to get in for the spring start date, the sooner you get working on your application, the better. That frees you up particularly, if we get the reviews done early for you. It frees you up particularly over the December period where things can be pretty slow. You don’t want to be sort of trying to deal with the financial aid office over the Christmas and new year period. So this way you’re ready to go come the 16th of January. And we are having a priority review deadline. You want a priority review which will be mean that your files must be completed and submitted by midnight October the ninth. I know a lot of our folks on the call are familiar with most of you but in case they haven’t gotten to talk with you, maybe you can go through in terms of how your role as survivor.

Ilana: Yes, of course. So we are here one to discuss the program with you, answer any questions you may have regarding the program. Take you through the process, what would happen in terms of once you go into your application, once you application’s completed, it will be positive, on acceptance, we will notify you of your acceptance and then explain the next steps to you. We will also assist you in putting together, not putting together but enrolling into your your courses and your sync courses as well in terms of the actual paperwork, but the essays, we are always more than happy to read through everything before it’s uploaded by you just to make sure that it meets criteria in terms of the letters of recommendation, we like to look at them just to make sure that inadvertently there isn’t anything negative in any of those letters of recommendation and really to almost hand hold you through the application process.

Ilana: We realize that most of you do not have so much state available that when you game to do something you want to get down to it and get stuck into it and we all [inaudible 00:37:25] to assist you particularly say for example, some people have a problem, they’re not able to upload the essays or they’re not able to upload a transcript. You email it through to us, we will do it for you. And as I said, answer any questions you have, point you in the right direction in terms of resources for funding. If you qualify for yellow ribbon program, we will put you in contact with the VA Bella office on campus who will deal directly with you, get everything sorted out for you. So really we are to facilitate, not only do we have all the information that you need, but certainly we’ll facilitate the applications with you and make your life easier and get you to that goal point of being ready to have your full review as soon as possible.

Annie: Thank you with that. Again it’s a wonderful presentation by Ilana. Now, I have been seeing questions come in throughout the webinar. So let’s start with the first question. How many hours do you think a student would need to spend doing the schoolwork each week?

Dr. El Tarabishy: I think about two hours is about right and that’s kind of where I think two hours is right. But it’s efficient two hours and it can go maybe a little bit more, but two hours to three hours. And you’re smart about it.
Annie: Thank you.

Dr. El Tarabishy: But that doesn’t count the weekend because the weekend is where you start real stuff. The week includes the seven days or just the work week. [Crosstalk 00:39:15] let me give an example to understand. So in my class they have to watch a digital session, which is a video that I’ve recorded and that’s about 20 minutes. And then I’ve assigned them a book to read, which I tell them, “Look, here’s the books you need to read. I’m not going to say exactly how many pages to read, but this is a really good book. Please read the book.”

Dr. El Tarabishy: I’m expecting that they’ll read about maybe 10 to 15 pages a week of the book, maybe more if they get into it. So let’s say that’s another 20 minutes, 25 minutes. Then they have to come to the webinar, which lasts about 45 minutes to an hour, with all that stuff. So now we’re close to two hours and then I ask them to do the assignment, which is entering a blog and then meeting with a group. So it adds up. But it’s work. But it’s fun work. It’s in the sense that you’re not just sitting there doing nothing. Your mind is going like crazy. And for me when your mind is going like crazy time flies and you don’t know, “Oh my God, look how many hours I spent on this” Does that answer the question?
Annie: I think so. All right, thank you. Ann Marie here has a question about our courses specific to a specific health care sectors, for insurers or health systems or outpatient clinics, all encompassing,

Dr. El Tarabishy: All encompassing.
Annie: Thank you. Let me see, and I guess this is related as well, how much or how are the core business courses incorporate health care? Are they in cases, are they in discussions?
Dr. El Tarabishy: It’s both. It’s a mixture of everything. And some of it is that you actually see nothing about healthcare, but you take it on a flight in your projects about it or you say, “I’m going to do a project on that specifically on healthcare. And there’s a reason for this, and I’ll explain to you the reason, because when we designed the program, we said, “Oh, we should offer them case studies on healthcare.” Then we got the suit and saying, “Well, you know, thank you, but we would like to see also business cases.” Well here’s business cases. They’re like, “Oh, can we see healthcare?” So we’re going back and forth and we said, “You know what? You decide we’ll do both.”

Annie: Got it. I hope that has answered the question and then also this one is, I guess, Ilana, if you could speak to the deadline for that application we mentioned, the deadline for prior to review. Maybe we could refresh that?
Ilana: Absolutely. So we’re looking at the first batch so to speak, where they’ve offered to do priority reviews for us. We would need the files completed by the 19th of October, one nine of October. That would be a completed file with everything in it. It is of recommendations, your essays, et cetera. If for example, you’re not able to make that deadline, well then we get it completed the following week and then two weeks later your file would go into that batch. So what we’re looking to do is, we’re looking to streamline, but the main priority review will be on, that we have to have a list to them of the files to review by the 20th of October. We could push it out over that weekend if we need to and submitted on the Monday morning after the 20th. I’d have to go into my calendar and look at the date, but in actual fact it is, it’s such a simple application process and I know with a lot of people, the concern is that it tends to take a while to get their letters of recommendation.
Ilana: We’ve tried to accommodate again, we know what the demographic, it’s not always that easy and so absolutely one can, instead of waiting for your recommenders to go online and submit their letter of recommendation online in terms of [inaudible 00:43:29] or the privacy act, that you don’t have to waive your right for someone to be allowed to read the letter of recommendation. And if your recommender has no problem with that, which they shouldn’t because why would they not want you to see what they’re writing about you. They can give you the letter and you can email it through to Deborah, myself or Rajiv, and we’ll upload that for you.
Ilana: That’s why when you check with us, whatever we can do to make the process is as simple as possible. We’ll do that for you. If you want us to approach your recommenders, absolutely we will send them an email telling them, they can email the letter through to us, and we’ll upload it for you. So the 19th which is the Thursday, say 20, if we have everything by the latest, I’d say Monday morning, 8:00 AM on the, I believe it’s going to be the 21st of October. Let me look at my calendar.
Allana: No, it’s going to be the 23rd of October. If we have everything by 8:00 am, we can still get you into that priority review and otherwise, as I said, we will have until at least the middle of November to submit applications.
Annie: Thank you for [inaudible 00:45:07] the questions very elaborate and I see a couple of questions here, Ilana. I know it’s because this is about financial aid, I don’t know how much we can cover here, but a couple of questions come in about what is the yellow ribbon program?
Ilana: So George Washington university [inaudible 00:45:26] disciplines in the yellow ribbon program. What the yellow ribbon program is, it’s something offered to ex military. When I say ex military people who are not currently in the army or the military, the Navy, whatever the case may be and who qualify for the post nine 11 GI bill. What George Washington university will do in the school of business, is anything that is not covered by your book. They will kick in for you so to speak. So generally the people say for example, who are using the yellow ribbon program, the degree does not cost them anything because whatever the value of your book, generally like with an undergrad degree, let’s just say, your GI bill’s worth niche. Say 30,000 GW and most yellow ribbon programs, we’ll match you to that amount. But in the MBA program, through the school of business, basically, not only will they match it, they will put in the balance so that the degree doesn’t cost you any.
Annie: Thank you. And maybe you can speak to how long are your courses and how many courses are usually per semester?

Dr. El Tarabishy: I think what they do is how long are the courses? I’m not sure what that means, but there’s the amount of credits that they have to take for it. And usually students take two courses per semester, three credit courses per semester or sometimes three depending on how they want to do it. And it’s about a two year program to do it. So it’s just basically kind of follow the protocol of the courses and then the credits that you want to take.

Annie: Thank you And I remember [inaudible 00:47:33] speaks a little bit about the life sinks section in terms of how does that work in the interaction with the professor and even with the fellow students?

Dr. El Tarabishy: Okay. Once you are signed up, what will happen is you’ll get an email saying, “For this class, we’re providing, depending on the students, we’re providing one, two or three things sessions and here are the dates for the sync sessions and here’s a time, please register for one of them.”

Dr. El Tarabishy: If You’re early, you get to pick which ones you want and if not, and that once sync session is closed and you get to pick the other ones. But once you have it, you basically have now a schedule of where you actually need to show up on what day and what time to login. And once you log in and you’ll become like a live webinar, like we’re doing today in front of a screen or your iPad sometimes and you’ll be hearing the professor speak the presentation and you’ll have students, they’re kind of like, we’re talking today about the topic itself.

Dr. El Tarabishy: Now in about five minutes where I’ll need to leave, I’ll have to join the sync session. I’ll have about 20 students in my sync session or 15 students by sync session, that will be attending my PowerPoint for an ambition that I’ve prepared and we’ll talk a little bit and get into the topic.

Annie: Great, thank you. And I mean if they’re not available for the sync session, what happens then?

Dr. El Tarabishy: Okay. It depends on the instructor. Depends on what happens, is that you can join another sync session if possible. So let’s say you can like, that’s what I do in my class. Listen, if you can do the Tuesday one, come to the Thursday one and vice versa. But We do require that you attend a sync session. At least most of them you attend and if not it might affect your grade. But usually faculty understand and we record all of them so you can go back and watch them. And that’s just where the learning happens.
Annie: Perfect. And there was a couple of questions really very dependent on the background, a deed and not to how I suggest you guys speak with advisors in terms of if the program is right for you dependent based on your background. I think, we’re pretty good with time right now. I mean maybe you can speak to in terms of, are you in touch with any graduates in terms of just wondering how the network opportunity is like within the program.

Dr. El Tarabishy: So you are where you work in cohorts. So we have what we call the informal system in which you end up talking to other colleagues and classmates of yours and you can continue these conversations because you’re working with them in groups. Then there’s events that GW that we hold and host both on campus and there’s the study abroad programs as well that you can connect with. And then we have the career services office which has different events that you can also engage in. So there’s many opportunities here that we do this, we don’t do match making and this has a thing. “You go talk to this person, you go talk to that person.” A lot of it is more of a market driven approach to what you want to do. I’ve seen in my other classes is that once you’re in a group they say “This is great group were high functioning, high performing, let’s continue taking classes together and work together.”

Annie: Thank you and I saw a couple of questions about the certificate in terms of what they are. Definitely get in touch with our advisors and we can send you more of a breakdown of what the courses are like for each of the three certificates. So then you can get to know that as part of the curriculum. And with that, I will pretty much time, so I want to, once again, thank you everyone for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us today. And I especially want to thank Dr. El Tarabishy and also our advisors for speaking with us today.