MediaTech Club Study

Students and CEOs Share Perspectives
MIT Sloan organizations like the MediaTech Club play a crucial role in connecting students with corporate leaders. Each year this student club hosts dozens of senior executives from a wide range of industries — like Michael Armstrong, chairman of Comcast and former Chairman & CEO of AT&T.

Armstrong and Comcast operate at the heart of the rapidly evolving communication services industry. Formed from the merger of Comcast and AT&T Broadband, Comcast has more than 21.4 million subscribers and an aggregate value of approximately $60 billion. The MediaTech Club brought Armstrong to campus to share his perspectives and engage MIT Sloan students in a dialogue about management innovation.

"Bringing speakers to MIT Sloan is a critical component of our MBA education," notes Justin A. Steinman, co-president of the MediaTech club. "The real-life experiences of business leaders like Michael Armstrong provide a practical perspective to the theoretical lessons that we learn in the classroom. These are some of most powerful and successful people in the world, and yet in these sessions, students get to ask personal and intimate questions, such as ‘How do you balance work and family?’ or in the case of Mr. Armstrong, ‘What was going through your mind when you decided to break up AT&T?’ Because these sessions are closed-door and off-the-record, the students get honest, insightful answers."

With more than 400 members, the MediaTech Club is MIT Sloan's largest student organization. The club educates members about the media and high-tech industries and provides them with opportunities to interact with companies in these fields. In addition to its speaker series, the club sponsors IdeaExchange workshops and TechTreks to leading technology and media centers around the world. In 2003 alone, more than 300 MIT Sloan students visited 300+ companies in 10 geographic regions during MediaTech trips.