Adding M.B.A. Expertise to Entrepreneurial Experience

John Wolf took the plunge into entrepreneurship when he was an undergraduate civil engineering major at Illinois Tech, teaming up with one of his classmates to launch a startup fantasy streaming platform called Kolosseum.

Although the pair of budding entrepreneurs closed their venture after three years, the experience had a big impact on Wolf. “We learned a ton and it was the most exciting and engaging thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “It really made me think about what I want to do as a career.”

By then, Wolf had graduated and was working in the engineering department of a construction-related company. While the job was interesting, it wasn’t where his passion was.

“I wanted to build off the hands-on experience I got building Kolosseum,” he says. “I knew that getting an M.B.A. at Illinois Tech would provide me with the fundamental business skills that I didn’t have.”

“Engineering and an M.B.A. is a very strong combination,” Wolf notes. “The M.B.A. is more strategic and management focused and engineering is much more about understanding the system. Being able to merge those two has been really good.”

In addition to his full-time schedule of courses, Wolf dove into internships with two startups to put his new business and analytical skills to work. The first was with a company that upcycles high-end reflective material, such as from emergency vehicles, and turns the scraps into bicycle accessories to increase safety for cyclists. “I created a marketing budget and metric tracker so they could estimate how much money went into advertising,” he says, “and helped build out a strategy comparing competitors and establishing differentiation to inform their advertising.”

The other company is a health care startup that produces simple but effective neonatal vital signs monitors being used in medical facilities that are under-resourced, especially in nursing staff. The company is looking to expand their market and make their operations more efficient. Wolf has developed subscription-based data reports for the company’s clients, conducted cost-benefit analyses of business intelligence platforms, and made recommendations for implementing such a platform and improving business processes.

“The reason I got the M.B.A. was to be involved in early-stage companies, whether that’s working in the early team stage or after a couple of rounds of funding or being a venture capital analyst,” he says. “I want to work with people creating new things and new businesses.”

• Learn more about the Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) program.