When Ugonwa Echendu began searching for an MBA to round out her engineering degree, she was drawn to Ivey’s case study approach but it was her conversations with its recruiting team that cinched the deal.

“The whole process seemed very organized and everyone was so receptive and answered all my questions,” recalls Echendu. “They gave me confidence I was going into a well-thought-out program.”

That confidence only deepened as she began classes, especially when she was matched with a group of classmates for her first of three rotating learning teams. These small groups are designed to work closely together to prepare for classes, assignments and exams.

With an undergraduate degree in chemical and biological engineering and a published paper on nanogel drug delivery, Echendu knew her approach to problem-solving would be very technical. But that was okay because others on her team excelled at bigger picture thinking. Echendu, who grew up in Nigeria, also found herself working closely with classmates who grew up in Canada and other parts of the world.

She’d worked in supply chain and operations at PepsiCo after her engineering degree and was able to swap expertise in how to effectively scale up manufacturing systems for her team members’ knowledge of things such as strategy, marketing and finance.

“It was while I was at Pepsi that I began to understand that I really needed this bigger picture, to understand strategy and long-term goals,” she says.

“We all had different strengths and different backgrounds and working experiences. Whenever we were solving cases as a group, someone always had the answer. I think Ivey really thought through these learning teams and put us together purposefully. They seem to recruit the kind of students who are always willing to help others.”

Now with Kearney, a management consulting firm with clients in more than 40 countries, Echendu continues to bounce ideas off former learning team members as she helps clients in the health sector grow their businesses. She also draws on a two-week stint with Ivey’s LEADER program, where she co-taught business management to Vietnamese entrepreneurs, which gave her invaluable insight into international economies.

As she worked her way through classes in finance, accounting and economics – all subjects she says were initially out of her comfort zone – Echendu also found herself grateful for how her professors presented the material.

“In addition to the case method approach, which is the way I like to learn, they’d always have good examples. They’d paint a picture very clearly to help you understand things really well,” she says.

Echendu says she remains a bit taken aback at how much she was able to learn in such a short time.

“While I chose Ivey in part because it was just one year, I almost wish it were a little longer,” she says. “Now that I’m out of it, I want to go back. They just curated the experience so well.”