Building Community and Camaraderie: The Georgetown MBA Cohort Experience

For incoming Full-time MBA students at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, classes begin with the Opening Term. Opening Term serves as an introduction to the curriculum – as well as to your classmates – and provides the building blocks for the remainder of their MBA experience. 

Here, Kevin Sullivan (MBA’21) reflects on his experience building community during Opening Term and throughout his time in the MBA program.

One of the first pieces of information you receive before you step into class at Georgetown McDonough is your cohort name. The Full-time MBA cohort names (Hoya, Saxa, Gray, and Blue) are just the first piece of identification you get in understanding where and how you fit into the greater Georgetown community. Quickly, this cohort becomes an important piece of your community and your source for information, support, and – most importantly – camaraderie. 

Each cohort is specifically crafted by Georgetown’s MBA Program Office to ensure they reflect diversity of thought, background, and skills. It’s difficult to fully comprehend what that looks like until you walk into the classroom and meet everyone on your first day of Opening Term. For example, my cohort included a former commanding officer of a U.S. Coast Guard ship (the best public speaker I’ve ever seen), a former Aspen ski instructor (who was also hilarious), an auditor from Beijing (an accounting wizard), and a Staples supply chain expert from Puerto Rico (the most organized person I know). Those examples don’t even scratch the surface of all the different types of people in each cohort. Yet, despite our differences, each cohort comes together to become a support system. 

This is especially true in the first year of the Full-time MBA program, where we take the majority of our core requirement classes together. Each cohort develops its own personality and helps each other with coursework, internship recruiting, and daily life. This organically leads to real, lifelong friendships over the course of your first year. It may seem fast, but that’s truly how it happens!

The proof of these relationships came when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Georgetown MBA program, in Washington, D.C., and across the world. As we were all forced to socially distance ourselves and take classes virtually, I was worried I would lose touch with many of the friends I had just made. Fortunately, as a testament to the cohort experience and the strong bonds we made early on at Georgetown, my friends and I remained physically apart, yet socially together. We still spoke regularly, participated in virtual happy hours, and hung out as much as we could. The Saxa Cohort may have brought us together, but it is the friendships we all developed within our shared experiences that kept us together during our time in the program and beyond.

-Kevin Sullivan (MBA’21)