I'm excited to learn that the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design has just launched a new master's program that is intended to fill the gap in education between design and real estate development. It's called the Master of Science in Design with a concentration in Property Development and Design (or MSD-PDD).

From the sounds of it, it's an expansion of the certificate program in real estate development that I did while I was there. Good. It's also something that I've been advocating for at the University of Toronto for over a decade. We need more bilingual city-building professionals who understand both design and real estate development.

My initial comment is that I hope they're really drawing on and leveraging the resources of the Wharton School. That's what will really make this program stand out against many similar programs. When I was there, I remember them having two different real estate finance classes: one for MBAs and one for designers (which had been made deliberately easier).

I thought this was bullshit, so I met with the program coordinator and requested to be admitted to the MBA one. He strongly advised against it and said that it's, you know, really hard. But that only made me want to take it even more. I ended up getting an A.

So my piece of unsolicited advice for this nascent program is: don't baby the designers when it comes to business and finance. Because the market certainly won't.

I had coffee this morning with an engineer who is going back to business school in order to segue into real estate development. This is a fairly typical journey. Lots of people come into development from a related discipline. In my case, it was architecture (even though I never practiced architecture). It was also the case when I went to Rotman that something like a third of the class had a background in some sort of science or engineering field.

However, one thing I did mention this morning was that he will likely find that he will need to unlearn certain things as he moves forward. Every discipline tends to indoctrinate us with a certain way of thinking about the world. Lawyers tend to be a certain way. Engineers tend to be a certain way. And architects tend to be a certain way.

In my case, I found that architecture school taught me to be, among other things, an intense perfectionist. The modus operandi in design studios is that your project is never ever complete. The more you work on it, the better it will become. And as a result, you should feel a deep onus to work on it as much as humanly possible. But in business, this isn't practical. In the vast majority of cases, speed over perfection will serve you better.

I believe wholeheartedly in multi-disciplinary backgrounds, and maybe this is one of the reasons why. It shows you what you should unlearn. What would you say your biases are?

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) just announced a new 12-month degree called the Master in Real Estate (MRE). Here's a short excerpt about the program:

The MRE program is designed to train future practitioners to address new and urgent realities facing the built environment and cities today. Whether undertaken by for-profit businesses, not-for-profit organizations, or public entities, real estate occupies a pivotal role in determining how the places where we live, work, and play are equitable, environmentally sustainable, and appealing, in addition to being productive for the economy.

The key takeaways are that this is a graduate program being designed for aspiring real estate entrepreneurs and that it will live within Harvard's Graduate School of Design. So there is an implicit recognition that the world of real estate doesn't need to run counter to the pedagogical goals of a design school.

Anyone who went to architecture school will tell you that real estate is often viewed as the "dark side." Either you commit yourself to the pure world of architecture and design, or you sell out and seek profits in the world of real estate. But I have always considered this to be a false dichotomy.

Real estate is a fundamental component of how we shape our built environment. And so if one's ambitions are to improve the built environment -- which is something that architecture schools do teach you -- why should the delivery vehicle matter? Shouldn't we be encouraging people to optimize for maximum benefit?