Bloomberg Businessweek
Go To Businessweek.com
During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
Georgia Tech
Eighteen years ago, the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College overhauled its full-time MBA curriculum, combining classes on functional areas such as accounting and marketing to break down subject-area silos and give students a more holistic view of the modern corporation.
This fall, the first curriculum overhaul at Olin since then will transform the MBA coursework yet again, the latest in a series of such changes at schools such as the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and the UCLA Anderson School of Management. The goal: to cram business fundamentals into the first few classes students take to better prepare them for internship interviews, and ultimately the internships themselves.
It’s called “front-loading,” and at Babson that meant creating a series of courses on business fundamentals such as finance that students will take in the fall semester, says Robert Turner, associate dean of on-site programs. To accommodate the shift, he says, some information was shifted to later in the two-year program, as electives, and a real-life consulting project was moved from early in the fall semester to December, giving students more time to figure out what they’re interested in.
The front-loading trend is being driven by recruiters, who are interviewing internship candidates just a few weeks after school starts and are demanding fresh-faced students be better prepared. In the past, most two-year MBA programs dispensed core courses in the first year, leaving the second for electives and recruiting. But with internship interviews taking place so early, many schools are revising their curriculums so that the bulk of the core courses take place in the first semester. Many are also manipulating the length of terms to open up windows of time for interviews.
Schools officials behind the “front-loaded” curriculum changes say these give their students a competitive advantage come the interview and the actual internship. Schools that have already made the changes say their students are reaping the benefits with better internship offers, and more permanent job offers when the internships are over.
In 2010, the University of Virginia’s Darden School changed both the order of the curriculum and the length of the classes. The school year is now divided into five terms, rather than four quarters. The first four terms last five weeks and students take four classes each term; the last term is shorter and students take a capstone class. This has freed up a one-week break in the fall for students to schedule internship interviews, and it’s allowed the school to add a second week to the spring break for an international business trip. Fridays are also reserved for interviews, seminars with visiting high-level executives, and other career advancement programming.
First-year Darden students now take four terms of classes such as accounting, finance, marketing, strategy, leadership, and ethics in “lockstep” with each other before diverging to take electives in March.
“These classes are vital to performing well in internships,” says Peter Rodriguez, senior associate dean for degree programs and head of the three formats. Five years ago, he says, students returning from their internships reported wishing an advanced finance elective was available in the first year so they could have performed better. The class is now available to first-year students in the later terms.
At some schools, the curriculum changes were suggested by recruiters, not students. A few years ago, Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business heard from recruiters that as collegial and team-oriented as Goizueta students were, they could be better prepared technically. The school introduced a front-loaded curriculum change in 2008 that moved all core courses into the first semester, introduced a first-semester core course about decision-making using incomplete or ambiguous information, and moved the first day of classes from the first week of September to the second week of August. The next year, first-year students who had typically received internship offers in March or April received them as early as November, and more received offers from companies with structured programs that tend to make full-time offers to their interns, says Wendy Tsung, associate dean and executive director of MBA career services.
