Page 35 - Chester County Chamber - 2023 Guide & Membership Directory

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Executive MBA and DBA programs. “The Executive MBA is highly practical and industry-based,” Dierkes said. “We have these high-level conversations with major employers to find out from them what their leaders need to know, and we incorporate all that knowledge into our Executive MBA. They’re ideas you can bring to work and implement the next day.”
Built onto the executive MBA is the
DBA, a doctoral program designed to
turn students into professional business researchers. “It’s part-time, so the point is to make an executive a professional researcher so they can research, strategize and come up with evidence-based solutions for their own business.”
CHEYNEY UNIVERSITY
The nation’s first HBCU has been educating students since 1837, but it continues to break new ground, particularly when it comes to partnering with employers to provide students with the skills they need.
Some of the university’s employer partners actually operate on campus, said Vanessa Atkins, Cheyney’s Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships & Career Pathways. They include several companies that work in the organic chemistry field, as well as the biotech company Napigen, which focuses on cancer immunotherapy research, and Sure-BioChem Laboratories, which provides laboratory testing services for a variety of clients.
“We also have Urban Farms, a company that produces basil and lettuce here on campus, using wastewater from fish that’s farmed
by one of our faculty members,” Atkins
said. The resulting product is sold at local supermarket chains like Wegmans.
Another on-campus partner coming soon is Advanced Alchemy Labs, which is retrofitting one of Cheyney’s existing buildings to operate a hemp processing facility.
Cheyney’s students can conduct research and gain other work experience through these on-campus partner facilities, as well as other corporate partners offering opportunities off-campus.
For example, Cheyney has a relationship with The Wistar Institute, a leader in biomedical research located on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia.
“Our students have the opportunity to participate in two courses at The Wistar Institute, so they’re learning both from
our faculty and some of the staff at the institute,” Atkins said. “Both of the courses are project-based. Students develop an idea and pitch it in a Shark Tank-like format to get feedback. The idea is to solve a problem that exists in the local industry, mostly related to biohealth and biotech.”
Another component of Cheyney’s relationship with the University of Pennsylvania gives students the opportunity to do hands-on research at
the employees graduate the same as other MBA students. However, “the company dictates their electives, so the curriculum is strong in finance and business analytics.”
In addition, LeBow helps the company with sales and negotiation tactics as well as training in financial storytelling — basically, helping the average person understand complex financial information.
LeBow also offers unique teambuilding challenges, such as those hosted at its historic boathouse on Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row. “We have a workshop where we talk about best practices in creating buy-in and transforming underperformers,” Dierkes said. “And then we give students a chance to go out and row in their teams. It’s all about learning how to work together.”
A lot of the same faculty involved in executive education also works on LeBow’s
Cheyney University
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