In college--first at Indiana University and later at University of Chicago--Raghu Betina tried to learn to code.
He had always had an interest in tinkering and entrepreneurship, dropping out of college to work on startups in India and Chicago. He figured having some coding experience would be helpful for building the platforms he imagined, without having to hire a technical team to bring those ideas to life.
But when Betina attempted to take CS 101 classes at both universities, he floundered and had difficulty connecting what he was learning in class to what he wanted to build in the real world. He switched his major to economics at UChicago and figured that was the end of his computer science journey.
Then in 2011 he happened upon a call for students for the Starter League, a code bootcamp with a focus on entrepreneurship that was starting up in Chicago. He decided to give programming one more try. Within three to four weeks of starting the code bootcamp, he was building the projects he'd had in his head for years.
"Why did I take this class in college that convinced me that I wasn’t able to do this?" he said. "It’s a travesty. How many legions of students are being turned away from this field because of how it’s being taught?"
"How many legions of students are being turned away from this field because of how it’s being taught?"
Now Betina is making sure today's business school students don't hit the same technical roadblocks.
He's the adjunct professor behind Application Development, a popular course at University of Chicago Booth School of Business that teaches MBAs the basics of code and technical management.
The course gives students a foundational understanding of an application's infrastructure so they more effectively interact, manage and communicate with technical teams. The curriculum is based off Betina's experience working as an instructor for the Starter League (which has since been acquired by Fullstack Academy) and Northwestern Kellogg School of Management, combined with the needs of managers who will work closely with technical teams.
Through the 10-week course students learn to build a prototype of an application using Ruby on Rails. Students don't experience as much of the nitty-gritty of code--Betina has developed automated programs that allow students to see rough versions of their apps as they go along without having to manually code every change. Instead, there's more of an emphasis on learning how software works and how software is built at each stage of development. Students create a first rough draft of their app on the first day of the 10 week, once-per-week class, and submit a more polished version of the app as a final project.
The demand is high: Betina launched the course three years ago with three sections per year capped at 30 students in each class. The course has quickly filled up each time, with a waiting list, and the school recently bumped it up to five sections per year.
While the majority of students take the course to better work as project managers, consultants or investors in today's tech-fueled business world, about a third of the students take the course with an interest entrepreneurship. Several of those have turned their projects into viable, and even New Venture Challenge-winning, startups.
For those students, a better understanding of application development from beginning to end is key.
"It gave me the baseline to understand what I'm asking a developer for," said Chelsea Sprayregen, founder of Provide, the startup that that won this year's Social New Venture Challenge, over email.
Sprayregen came into the AppDev course knowing she wanted to build out the basics of Provide's platform, which offers back office tech solutions for at-home childcare providers. She had some development experience previously, but wanted the experience to be able to build her own minimum viable product and manage technical teams.
"I can make an educated guess about how complex or novel a function is, and therefore how much time it will take [the development team]," she said. "It also gave me a process for managing developers, and for thinking through how their work integrates into our overall business development."
For other students, the course pushed them to think about the opportunity for a tech-focused business.
"TransparentCareer would not exist without this class," said Mitch Kirby, founder of the career development platform, which won the 2016 New Venture Challenge, over email.
"It served as the motivator for coming up with the idea and gave me the tools to get an MVP out into the world," he added. "I actually wasn't even sure about the idea in the beginning, but after creating the MVP and watching it spread across top MBA programs and having deans of Career Services reach out about it, it felt like I was on to something."
It's not that other business schools are totally ignoring the need for MBAs to get technical experience. Top schools, including Harvard, Stanford and Wharton among others, offer dual MBA/MS in computer science and engineering degrees.
But Betina doesn't believe that tacking computer science courses onto an MBA curriculum will work for many students, especially those who are trying out coding for the first time.
"That’s exactly the thing that will turn people away from programming forever,” he said. "It’s like teaching someone chemistry as the first thing if they want to learn how to paint."
However, given tech companies are recruiting from MBA programs at a higher rate than ever and as MBA programs are doubling down on entrepreneurship training, coding is starting to feel as necessary to a business school education as operations and marketing.
"I think every single MBA entering Chicago Booth should take App Development," said Kirby."
"MBAs are supposed to be getting a general skillset to prepare them for the future of business," he added. "Too many think that they shouldn't learn to code because they will never be the one coding. At this point, technology is embedded in pretty much every profession you could choose to go into and coding not only gives you a skill, but a framework to think about how a lot of the world works."
