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MIT Sloan is the business school for people who have hesitations about joining an environment of Type A, hyper-competitive students -- something business schools have unfortunately become known for. This is supported by three driving forces:
1) Admissions intentionally selects to create a down-to-earth culture
2) No strong requirement (but introspection still required!) to know your career path post-MBA
3) Sloan is always humbled by the engineering presence in the entire context of MIT
Starting with the culture, the famous Rod Garcia, who has led the MIT Sloan admissions team for longer than almost any other business school, is known and highly respected for his ability to pick the right candidates to fill the seats at MIT Sloan. The result is a cohort of humble (instead of proud), collaborative (instead of competitive) and accomplished (although you wouldn't know it if you met them at a party) students. This means, despite lack of non-grade disclosure, the cohort is more than willing to share with everyone else, maximizing learning and development opportunities for everyone. The cohort is encouraged to be proud of being the best "team" material, based on the thesis that teams, not individuals, are what drive business and action in the real world.
In an environment that does not start with a facetious post MBA goal, everyone is encouraged to take risks, with no baggage or excuses, further contributing to the shared struggle and culture described above.
In a way, this culture is necessary, in an environment such as MIT that is so dominated by the engineering schools, who will always remain skeptical of the business school students. The culture goes a long way in connecting these faculties, and can claim to have one of most well integrated entrepreneurship centers, reaching across Sloan and engineering rather than in individual silos.
However, this culture does not come without its opportunity costs. While the focus is internal, and maximises the enrichment of the student cohort, it does not perform as strong at representing and boasting its advantages to the public. As a result, Sloan probably ranks 1-3 spots below where it belongs on most business school rankings, if that matters to you. But it doesn't seem to matter to the students who apply and are ultimately accepted into Sloan's collaborative culture.
The one-semester Core is a great common bonding experience for the whole class, and is brief enough to provide space for 3 semesters of electives. However, the challenge of staffing the core subjects with enough high quality lecturers diminishes the experience of Core subjects. This is in stark contrast to my experience with elective subjects, which have a very high quality. Part of this challenge could be mitigated by streaming students or allowing waivers from certain subjects -- for example, all students need to take economics, accounting or statistics even if they have majored in it.
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Schools contribution (4.0)
Classmates rating (4.0)
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