Hey everybody, welcome to Back. I'm a second year student in the elective curriculum, or EC. So in your first year, the day begins with a meeting with your discussion group at eight o'clock in the morning, when you'll go over all of the cases that you have for the upcoming day.
The discussion group is comprised of students from other sections. So they won't be in your actual classes later, but it gives you a chance to compare notes on the projects that you've been working on and the cases that you've got coming up, coming up that day.
Now, after your discussion group, you'll disperse and you'll join your section in your classroom over in Aldrich Hall. It's a group of about 90 other students, and with those students, you'll discuss all of the cases in a variety of classes for each day.
The afternoons are free and wide open for a variety of extracurricular activities, from intermurals to club meetings, and networking with professional firms. In the second year though, your days are a little bit less structured, right.
You have the opportunity to structure it for yourself and pick and choose when and how you would like to have your class meetings. So sometimes you end up with more open time in the morning, and then time in the afternoon for longer seminar-style courses.
Some students choose simply to try to replicate the course structure of the first year, the required curriculum, but it really depends and it's up to you by the time you get to your second year.
So in the second year, or the elective curriculum, you have the opportunity to choose from a listing of about a hundred different courses, spanning the units of organizational behavior, finance, marketing, really anything that HBS has faculty specialty in.
Now for my part, I'm particularly interested in entrepreneurship strategy and negotiations, and my course schedule reflects that. I'm in a course called Building and Sustaining Successful Enterprises, or BSSE, which is the legacy of one of our professors named Clayton Christensen.
This course gives you an overview of business theory and disruption theory. Another course I'm in is a negotiations class, taught by a former private equity partner.
This gives us a really good opportunity to see how deals are structured in the real world, and to find what is a personal negotiating style for each of us. Another course I'm in, this is something that I'm taking for fun and out of a personal interest, is on the business of entertainment, media, and sports.
This course is taught by one of our rockstar professors, Anita Elberse. Now Professor Elberse has made a distinguished name for herself in researching and understanding the business of entertainment, media, and sports.
She's befriended, studied, researched, and advised countless celebrities in the sports and entertainment worlds, and she brings them into class.
We've had everyone from Channing Tatum to Lindsey Vonn come in and speak to us about how they've made the jump from a career leveraging their talent to understanding how they can become business people and really broaden their interests and their involvement in how they are going to leverage their own skills.
That course is also something that dovetails with a program that helps athletes and helps entertainment personalities actually make that transition.
So I'm a mentor to a former professional basketball player who's trying to build a restaurant and real estate empire. And this fits in nicely to the curriculum, which is a unique opportunity for the second year.
I'm also doing an independent project with my lead, or leadership and organizational development professor from my first year. In this independent project, I'm studying the paths and profiles of a couple hundred HBS alumni,
and following and tracing their tracing their footsteps and decisions they've made throughout their career to see if there's anything that we can learn about that is applicable to those of us who are studying here now. Lastly, I'm in a course called Field X.
It's a entrepreneurship practicum that gives us, as HBS students, the resources to go out and work on independent ventures that we're interested in and researching the market for, testing hypothesis around if we can build a product that is going to be desirable in the market,
and the professor in that brings in dozens upon dozens of entrepreneurs who have actually gone and scaled businesses before.
They're available to us to test us our business ideas, and this really kind of gives you an overview of, the first year is very foundational, the second year, which I'm in now, gives you a chance to put everything that you've learned to practice.
Anybody considering applying to business school likely understands the considerable time and financial investment that it entails, and to undertake that sort of investment, and even think about how your application will relate to the need for it,
I think it's really helpful to undergo a really reflective exercise that is, what is it that you may want to do with your career five, 10, 20 years after completing a degree, and what is it about your program specifically that's going to get you to that place?
And really drill down into the very tactical resources and programs, classes, people you're going to meet, all the things that you will take advantage of that will get you to where you would like to be, 'cause without that, you might be directionless.
Now I don't doubt that anybody is going to enter into this investment without understanding that direction.
But going through this reflective exercise also helps you best communicate that through the story of your application and bring others on board so that by the time that you get here, they'll be best situated to be able to help you along that journey.
There are two things that stand out to me that I think really makes Harvard Business School a unique academic experience for an MBA program, the first of which is the case study,
which has been around for a century now, and there are some legacy cases here that thousands of Harvard Business School alumni have worked through and struggled through,
and it creates a common vocabulary and lexicon when you go out into the world because you can think about business decisions that leaders before you have faced.
And then you can understand, maybe it was not just like this before, but there are many elements from something that I saw, this real life business situation that I saw, and a real life business leader who perhaps even came in to visit class.
And you might be able to ascertain where there's commonality there. And who knows, you might also be working with somebody who a decade or two previously, worked through that same problem and can understand it in the same context that you do.
The second thing, and you know, looking around us really comes to life, is that this is a residential campus and a residential learning model at its core.
So the people that you spend your days with in the classroom, in your section, even outside of your section, are also those that you encounter on the intermural fields, walking around, playing spikeball on the lawn.
Even the dean lives just across the lawn from us here, so everybody that you could conceive of meeting, you're going to run into on a daily basis. That creates incredible opportunities for very casual and informal learning and deep, deep friendships.
