Although the majority of MBA programs will not release their essay questions for the coming admissions season until late summer or even early fall, many applicants are making their summers as productive as possible by researching various schools in order to learn more about the programs, narrow down their list of target schools and gather fodder for their ‘why School X’ discussions in their essays. For this reason, we wanted to point MBA aspirants who are considering Stanford to a news item that the school released yesterday introducing a major restructuring of the program’s curriculum, which will be implemented in the fall of 2007.
The new program will be focused on fostering the development of each individual through pairing students with a faculty advisor who will help them to design a curriculum tailored to their needs and level of knowledge:
“After a common program in the first quarter, students will face no specific required courses, but rather a set of distribution requirements that will give them the breadth of knowledge a general manager requires. The suite of requirements will vary by pace, depth, and assumed knowledge in order to challenge every student regardless of past experience. Further, in some cases ‘flavors’ of a given topic will be offered, so that students can tailor their curriculum to their career goals.”
The full story about the school’s plans – which involve not only the course offerings but new facilities to accomodate the changes these measures will require – is available on Stanford’s website at: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/new_mba_curriculum.shtml. This is a must read for those who are definitely applying to the program, as it will be important to demonstrate knowledge of and enthusiasm about this very drastic development throughout the application process.
