Calling all HBS 2011 Applicants!! (Including 2+2)

1/23/11

To Newly Admitted Harvard Business School Students:

Congratulations on your admission to Harvard Business School. We are thrilled that you chose to apply here and hope to welcome you to campus in the fall as part of the MBA Class of 2013. With that in mind, we wanted you to be among the first to know about a very exciting development that we believe will significantly enhance your educational experience at the School.

Following discussions among the faculty and after receiving input from alumni, recruiters, and current students, among others, we are pleased to inform you that last week, the faculty of Harvard Business School voted to approve two important enhancements to the MBA Program. The first will create a new course in the Required Curriculum that we're calling FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development). It will focus on developing substantively meaningful small-group learning experiences throughout the first year that are experiential, immersive, and field-based, with the overall goal of advancing the School's mission to develop leaders who make a difference in the world. Like other new courses, it will be designed and delivered by a faculty teaching group, and it will consist of three modules: the first will center on leadership, the second on globalization (including a required global immersion experience during the RC Januarty term), and the final will integrate learning across the year.

The second enables new flexibility in the Elective Curriculum by modularizing the calendar, allowing faculty and students greater flexibility and creativity in molding their courses and building their schedules, respectively.

We believe both of these enhancements have the potential to become a platform for significant innovation in experiential learning in management education. We also believe these changes to the MBA curriculum will give our students an array of exciting field-based opportunities that will serve as a powerful complement to the case method.

We plan to tell you more about these developments at Admitted Students Weekend on Friday February 25th, so please join us then. Should you not be able to attend, we will be posting additional information on the prematriculation site shortly thereafter.

We look forward to seeing you next month.


Nitin Nohria (Dean of the Faculty)
Youngme Moon (Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program)