Trivia Tuesday: Breaking Down Harvard's 900

With the round one deadlines for many of the top MBA programs just a month away, this is the time of year when many applicants are narrowing down their lists of target schools and buckling down on their essays, which often leads to an appreciation of how important it is to understand how programs compare and what makes each unique. Toward that end, we’re starting a new column in which we’ll periodically be sharing a school-specific detail or posing a trivia question to educate our readers and get applicants thinking about the many aspects of a program that play a role in the business school experience. To start things off, here’s an interesting piece of information about the student body structure of one of the most popular programs around:

No matter what the base size of a school’s student body, virtually every MBA program breaks each class into smaller units to facilitate collaboration and socialization and give students a more manageable number of names and races to remember. Harvard Business School divides its student body into 10 smaller groups called sections, who take all of their first-year classes together. In addition to larger cohorts, clusters or sections, many programs also assign students to learning teams, 5-8 person units of varied backgrounds and experience who will work together on projects and class assignments throughout the first year. This is where it gets interesting; while learning team members at most schools belong to the same larger unit (for instance, members of Wharton’s learning teams all belong to the same cohort and cluster), Harvard’s learning teams – just introduced to the program last year – are cross-sectional. This is possible because of the unique structure of Harvard’s first-year curriculum, necessary because of the importance of contributing original ideas to classes comprised of one’s sectionmates, and beneficial because it gives students the opportunity to meet and work with classmates outside of their section.

There are many ways to glean this level of information; scouring a school’s website is a good start, and speaking with current and former students is another great way to get an insider’s perspective on a program. Alongside the hundreds of applicants who’ve been looking into schools and drafting essays, we’ve been engaged in a research and writing-related undertaking of our own over the past few months, and are looking forward to sharing more information with you later this week. Stay tuned!