Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. I'm your host, Graham Richmond, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about something that sits right at the heart of the MBA experience, the curriculum itself, and how leading business schools are rethinking what and how they teach. In a world that's changing incredibly fast. From artificial intelligence and data fluency to ethics, leadership, and career readiness, MBA programs are under real pressure to evolve, not just incrementally, but in meaningful ways that prepare students for what comes next, not what worked 10 years ago. Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business recently announced a redesigned MBA curriculum that takes these challenges head on, with a strong emphasis on AI, ethical leadership, global perspective, and helping students build career momentum earlier in the program. Now, to help us unpack what's changing over at Georgetown and why, we're thrilled to welcome back a returning guest to the show. Joining us today is Sudipta Dasmohapatra. She is the senior Associate Dean of the MBA programs and a professor of Business analytics at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business. Sudipta oversees the full portfolio of MBA programs at McDonough and brings deep expertise in analytics and AI and curriculum design. She's been on the podcast before to talk about flexible and online MBA programs, and today she's here to walk us through how Georgetown is reimagining the academic core of the MBA itself from the opening term all the way through to graduation.
Sudipta, welcome back to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. It's so great to have you with us again.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Thank you, Graham. It's great to be here. I am really thrilled to hear about my amazing introduction that you gave.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: So I will say, as we were, you know, before we came on air, I was telling you, you know, I've been doing a lot of reading about what's happened at McDonough with this overhaul, and I'm really excited to kind of dig in because, you know, I'm a bit of a nerd and I feel like sometimes the discussion about business school can be very much like, oh, what's the job you get afterwards? As opposed to, like, wait, we're going to actually be in an academic program for two years learning things, and so I'm kind of excited to talk about curriculum. And I also think it's an area that, you know, students don't think as much about as they probably should before they begin an mba. So let's start with the big pict.
What is an MBA curriculum? Like, what are the big forces that kind of prompted you all to sort of rethink your curriculum as it was. That could be employers or technology, student expectations, et cetera. So yeah, take us through, like, what is this? And yeah, what's led you to these changes?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: So we think that an MBA curriculum is essentially, you think about it as the academic and experiential blueprint that prepares students to become effective leaders and business decision makers. It includes the fundamentals of business as we know it, strategy, finance, operations, marketing, accounting, with something that we include called power skills, leadership development, communication, applied learning, and opportunities for students to specialize based on what their career goals are. That is essentially what an MBA curriculum includes.
And you talked about external forces shaping how we are thinking today about businesses. And so the environment for management and business education is changing really fast. As you know, technology is reshaping every role in every industry.
AI is no longer a nice to have skill, right? So it is now a part of every leadership work. Whether you are in technology, whether you are in consulting, finance, healthcare, marketing, entrepreneurship, any career options that you are thinking about.
Technology is a big part of it.
Employers today are also asking for not only the traditional MBA skills of leadership, but they are also asking for students that can make decisions under pressure, that can lead the teams through uncertainty, that can talk about AI and the outputs of AI in non technical language.
Then that's one side of it. Then we have students that are asking for more flexibility, more personalization. They're asking questions about how is this going to help me advance my career?
And how can I balance my school with my work, my life, my responsibilities, how can I make a difference in the world with purpose?
So these are all of the different things that are impacting how we are doing business today. And not only that there's so much global uncertainty today.
You know, it is the baseline between geopolitical disruption, between economic volatility, between, you know, between supply chain challenges, climate risk, social polarization.
Our leaders today are operating in constant uncertainty. And so at Georgetown McDonough, we saw clearly that the world that our students are stepping into today is changing very, very fast.
And we've been making traditional incremental changes to our curriculum, but that's not enough to keep up with the changes. So we stepped back and we asked a very simple but important question.
What does it mean to prepare someone to lead in today's business environment and in the world that's coming next? So we could not make just a minor tweak. We rethought the whole arc from the opening term and even before that, to career points, to graduation and beyond. How do we match our students to actually how they recruit and how companies hire? The goal with this curriculum is to prepare our students as humans in the loop leaders.
What we hope to achieve is very simple. Career ready graduates who can lead with both competence and conscience.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Okay, so before we get into some of the specifics, because I want to talk about some of these new additions that are, I feel like just sort of super innovative in terms of some of the things you've added. But I wanted to just like step back for one second and say, like, how do you define what the curriculum should accomplish in 2026 vis a vis like maybe even 10 or 15 years ago? Like, what are. I mean, I think you've hinted at some of this stuff in your comments, but you know, if you had to just briefly summarize, like, what are some of the things that you think are really different now when it comes to prepping?
[00:06:44] Speaker B: That's a great question.
So for us, an MBA curriculum in 26 should primarily accomplish three things. I would say build strong business fundamentals, which is true to traditional MBA outcomes as well, develop adaptive leaders, and then create real career momentum in a world that is fast changing.
So if you think about the MBA outcomes or the MBA curriculum, about 10 or 15 years ago, a strong curriculum was defined as something that is going to lead students through mastery of the core disciplines of finance, your accounting, your marketing, your strategy, your operations, your organizational behavior. And then students would specialize from there.
That foundation is still essential and we absolutely must preserve it. But what has changed is the environment in which the leaders have to apply those fundamentals.
We must help the students prepare to lead in the world which is faster and more uncertain, where decision making is important, with incomplete information, often with global implications, then one that is shaped by AI and technology in every function, one that is focused on outcomes.
Connect early the student, connect the students early to their career goals and then grounded in values and purpose. That's what the students are asking for. Something to think about is how can it make a social impact, my business decisions, how can they create better opportunities for people around me? If I had to summarize it, in 2026, an MBA curriculum should help the students become both high performing leaders and high character leaders.
I would say that even beyond 26, although I would not like to predict here, my core assumption is for the future of work, that the pace of change is going to stay very high and leadership is going to be less about having the right answer and more about how do we navigate this ambiguity well?
How do we become more technology savvy?
That is what we have tried to do in innovative MBA curriculum and program.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: Yeah, So I want to get into that now because I think there are several kind of different elements that you've introduced that I really would love to hear more about. So, you know, one of these things is that there's this opening term course that's focused on ethics, global mindset, and policy driven business decision making. And then there's also an immersive AI boot camp. And these are like, right at the beginning. And so I just wondered, like, what was the philosophy behind sequencing these elements at the very start of the MBA experience?
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Yeah, you're asking Great question. And we are currently in the midst of thinking about how this opening term is all going to shape up for our students.
So I'm going to take a step back and first indicate that we are very intentional about focusing our program on three major elements in the opening term. And then in our program, it starts with the opening term. And I'm calling it three Cs. So I'm basically in the marketing area. So I can't stay without saying everyone.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Loves the C's and the P's. Yeah, that's right.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: So the first C that we are focusing on is our curriculum.
So it's about robust learning, it's about doing action, and then it's about reflecting on it, which is reflection. So the first C is curriculum. The second one is career. Where do the students really want to go professionally and how do we get them there from the beginning? And then the last C that we are focusing on is our community.
The Georgetown Jesuit philosophy of men and women for each other and our community, for diversity and our cura personalis, which is care for the whole person, respect for others. And we bring all of that together in our entire program. And it starts with the opening term.
You alluded to the opening term course. So the focus on the opening term course is to prepare students to think like a principled leader, a value space leader.
So I think what differentiates a great leader from a good one is that a great leader makes decisions that incorporates not only the economic bottom line, everybody thinks about that, but also thinks about the people that they work with in their organization.
They can make decisions that can have a positive impact on the society. And that's what the opening term course is going to focus on.
So if you really think about in today's world, the first question that future leaders should be equipped to answer is not only what is the right business solution, but it should be about what is the responsible answer, what is the global context and stakeholder impact, what are the risks, ethical, the regulatory, the reputational and the human risks, and how do they make decisions when the rules and the data are shifting? And so that's why the opening term course begins with ethics, global mindset and policy driven decision making with communications as a big part of it.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: And at the same time, we placed an AI boot camp right up front because AI has become foundational, like I said. Right. We don't want our students to see AI as some separate elective that they take or something that they will explore later or they will major in later. We want every single student in our program, regardless of the background, to build confidence early in AI, to understand how and what are these tools, how do they work and to start using them thoughtfully and responsibly in their learning across the program. Right. Their first semester is going to start up to the opening term. So they need to be thinking about how do we use these tools in the most responsible way.
This is going to be also very helpful in their career preparation. And so we structured the opening term to help the students develop this mindset and then kind of take these tools that they would need for the two years and in the future years of their career.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Yeah, And I love this idea of a boot camp because as you say, AI is not just a course that you take as a standalone. It's going to be something that they encounter throughout the curriculum. And that's a perfect segue to the next question I had, which is, you know, you're going to. AI is kind of embedded right across everything.
And I wondered, like, how do you balance teaching practical AI tools so that people can use these tools and as you said, also instilling kind of the ethical, responsible perspectives on AI and business, because there is this impact potentially that these tools have on businesses in terms of layoffs, et cetera. So, yeah. How do you guys balance that in the curriculum?
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's again a great question. And the balance really is actually at the heart of how we are approaching AI and the MBA program at Georgetown. I am myself a professor of practice in business analytics of the been teaching business analytics and AI based courses for a while. And so this is right up my alley.
I believe that AI and analytics, as I mentioned before, should not only be a major certificate or a specialization. We want all of our students to have a strong grounding of this, to be data and AI literate. And so the way we Balance the practical tools and responsible leadership really comes down to, I would say, two or three basic things. First, we start with data and AI literacy for everyone, which is our guiding principle. So no matter which industry, job function the students are going to go to, the leaders today must be able to interpret data, must be able to use AI effectively, think where it can add value, ask the right questions, and then challenge the outputs effectively. And so that's how we are integrating AI into our curriculum. And then it starts with the bootcamp, like I said.
Secondly, we are actually integrating AI ethics and the global context not only as separate lanes, but together with our curriculum. And who better to do this than Georgetown, where principal leadership is built into the core functions of our DNA and into our curriculum.
Just yesterday I'll tell you that I was reviewing and I was working with some of the other faculty members on two of our AI core courses that we are implementing in the first semester. One is on AI and strategy, in which the students learn to lead AI strategy within organizations.
Another course which I'm really excited about is Applied AI and Experiential Learning where the students are going to learn how to play with the AI tools, code, create products and prototypes.
And both of these courses go hand in hand because one is about strategy and leadership and other is about implementation. And so both of these courses are going to include a substantial content on responsible use of AI. Whether you learn to code or not, you need to think about the outputs. You should think about. Is my output reliable? Is it biased? What is the data that is involved?
What is the source of the data? Where is it coming from?
What are the downstream consequences both locally and globally? So we want our graduate students who can use AI effectively and then they can defend their decisions in a boardroom.
Lastly, we build AI capabilities from our entire curriculum. As I mentioned, brief AI bootcamp in the opening term. And that would be really useful for them across the program and through the courses.
Our focus is to help the students build confidence early.
From there we will have core courses and a set of applied electives.
One other thing, Graham, that I want to mention here, which is most important, which is that AI, again not only through these AI based courses, but AI should be embedded across the different courses in many, many practical ways. For example, many of our faculty members today are using custom GPTs and tutorbox that actually help the students learn the course content.
Not just focus on using AI for answers, but can you prompt effectively to learn the different types of course content that we have within a particular course. We are teaching that within our courses, we're designing assignments that allow generative AI use while requiring the students to reflect critically on what did this tool produce? What's missing? What would you challenge?
Our university is offering a free AI certification credential that all employees can take and all students can take. We also support continuous learning through platforms like Data Camp, where we curate AI learning pathways for the students so that they can build skills at their own pace. And so overall, we want to give students not just a map, but I would say, an AI compass that works no matter where the landscape will shift.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: That's a terrific analogy.
So turning to another subject, and this one I'm particularly excited about because it seemed like for the last, I don't know, 20 years, there'd been kind of a downplaying of what people used to call soft skills and an up playing of like, oh, you need to know data analytics and big data and technology and coding. And now it seems like the tables are turning back a little bit. And so you call these skills power skills, or a lot of people call it or durable skills, you know, so communication, ethical decision making, leadership. These are really prominent and I. And these are seem to be prominent in the new curriculum. And so I wonder how have you reimagined these capacities within the curriculum so that they're not like siloed where everyone just takes their one little leadership class or something, but they're really integrated into how students learn and apply business fundamentals.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah, you're absolutely right. We were very intentional about how we approached power skills because we don't see them as soft skills. Right. So we see them as core leadership competencies.
They can be treated as separate workshops or something that the students actually develop only through extracurricular activities. Activities. Power skills for our curriculum is built into the core coursework and then they are added and amplified through our career, our program experiences, and our initiatives. So when the students are learning core finance, strategy, marketing, operations, they're also being asked to do what the leaders do in the real world.
Make decisions with incomplete information, justify your trade offs, communicate clearly to the different stakeholders, navigate risk lead through disagreement. And we build these across courses through our teamwork, through our group projects, through our discussions, throughout case competitions, through boardroom presentations, and if I were to name some of the specific courses, students will learn that these skills through our opening term course, which combines communication with ethical leadership and global business.
And then, you know, our. One of our courses in module one in the first semester is Leadership Communication course. You may have heard about our signature executive challenge experience. In the full time program.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: And so they will definitely learn about boardroom presentation there and how to communicate a strategy that they have thought about in just, you know, mere two hours or an hour.
Our second year residency for our part time programs is a focus on leadership communication in a different way. And then there are other courses such as I name another course which is Leading teams for performance and Impact. I really love that course because it focuses on enhancing social intelligence, on self awareness, on leadership skills that can drive organizational change, on implicit bias, conflict feedback. It's an amazing course.
And what makes leadership real for our students in our curriculum is applied learning. So whether it is through the Ethical Leadership project, which is now a whole year on experience starting in the opening term, or the executive Challenge which has shifted from the end of the first year to now first mod of the full time program, or through the global business experience where the students work the entire semester on the global consulting project.
We embed power skills with business fundamentals across our curriculum.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's, I mean we've did. I believe I have to go back and dig up the episode number, but we did a entire episode about that, the executive challenge and stuff. And I think it was, it was so interesting to hear about that.
I did want to talk a little bit about careers and I, you know, this is something that, you know, when someone applies to business school, they're asked to think about potential career goals and they go through that sort of process. But then often they take several months off. They show up up at business school. There's kind of a, you know, preterm and then they're into the curriculum. And this new structure actually emphasizes earlier exposure to career concepts. And I think if I read correctly, you even have a summer career course before matriculation.
And so I wondered, like, how do you see this reshaping the student journey from day one through recruiting and beyond? Because that is a, it's a really interesting idea to get them doing something before they even show up that's going to position them for their career.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
As I mentioned earlier, one of our C's is career. Right. We really wanted to make sure that the students feel the momentum from day one. And we believe that early exposure will shape the student's journey. It's going to give them a head start and they can make the most of the recruiting later on.
So we begin with a career summer course where all the students have to complete the course before they show up in the opening term.
Our focus is to help them think about some of the Key questions, what do I really want to pursue and why?
How do I tell my story with confidence?
And this is reinforced in the opening term with multiple career sessions that we have built into our programming.
Some of the places we are even collaborating with our alumni that are excellent experts in a variety of different industries and in different job functions.
There's going to be industry days, there are going to be sessions on building your own brand, how to build executive presence, on how do you network and do coffee chats and so on. And look, I really want to emphasize that the reality is that the recruiting timelines today have accelerated.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: So if you think about many industries like finance, students are making internship decisions really early in their first year. And then at the same time, the students are more intentional. They want to clarify how our MBA curriculum and our program connects us to outcomes. And so our career services team has really built the opening term and the pre opening term in a great way in order to make sure that the students can start early. Also, I want to mention that the team itself has outstanding leaders. We have industry practice leads that coach the students across multiple industries and job functions. We have coaches from the industry that we hire. We have peer advisors which are the second year students. And these students have gone through the internship and through the first year and can really help the first year students think through a variety of things related to their career. And there are multiple initiatives that we run, such as we have an alumni micro mentoring workshop in the spring of the first year that brings in alums to interact with the students. And so all of these career concepts that the students are learning, they can actually apply continuously in the courses, in their courses, in the curriculum, in team based projects, in experiential learning, and how they build skills like communication, leadership data and AI fluency, and how they position themselves for their internships and their full time roles. So this learning that we are including in our curriculum in our program, I would say overall not only supports the first job, but I would say it supports their long term success.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm sure that you didn't have any trouble getting the career services office to come in and help shape that stuff. Because I would feel like the career services folks love the idea that people are early on in their time in the program, getting to kind of even before they show up on campus, are doing some of these exercises and getting into that journey, which makes a ton of sense.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
Yes. Yes. In fact, I would say that our career services team was involved from the very first, you know, the one and a Half years that we have really kind of curated this curriculum, that we've been at it. They've been involved in every single task force that we have had.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: And I'm glad you're mentioning that too, because I think sometimes our listeners don't know that, you know, redesigning a curriculum at a top MBA program like McDonough, it takes time. And it sounds like, you know, this is like a couple years in the making in order to bring something out, which makes a lot of sense given all the moving parts.
Speaking of all that, after the opening term, I feel like students have more choice in both core and elective timing and focus areas than before. And so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about personalization and how that seems to be more built into this curriculum and, you know, kind of allowing students to sort of tailor their journey a bit more.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's something that we found from our surveys with our students, from our prospective students into what they are looking for and then talking to the alumni as well. So following the opening term, we have some foundational core courses that the students have to go through. And then we have a combination of something that we are calling custom core, and then we pair that with early electives. So electives now come really early in the curriculum to help our full time students think about what their career aspirations and how do they want to align the courses and their curriculum with their career aspirations. Personalization really was a key design principle for us. After the opening term, the students will have the ability to shape when they can take certain core courses and then certain focus areas as well, that they want to pursue based on their career interests. In addition to that, the students can also tailor their path with early access to electives, as I said. And so the applied experiences. So instead of a one size fits all sequence, the students will have the ability and the flexibility in how they take certain core courses and what courses they take, especially through this group of courses that we call our custom core.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: You guys like the C's custom core curriculum careers?
No, but one thing I was thinking about with regards to, to this is that for anyone tuned in thinking about business school, it really makes sense to investigate this stuff because I feel like there's such a range of ways that schools deliver the education in the mba. I mean, some schools have a very rigid curriculum where, you know, all the core classes are going to be the entire first year. Other schools, in this instance, you know, in the case of your newly designed curriculum, it's going to be allowing people to sort of jump into electives much earlier. So definitely something to kind of be considering. I will say, you know, you've hinted at this. You talked a little bit about the Jesuit tradition and Georgetown's kind of reputation and this sort of emphasis on values based leadership and global perspective. And I wondered if you'd be willing to highlight a couple of spots where those distinct aspects are showing up in the new curriculum and maybe why they're even more important in today's business environment.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. As I indicated earlier, the opening term course is focused on principal leadership, ethical leadership, global business, and policy and communication.
The ethical leadership project, especially for us, is key, where the students are learning about how to do good for the world with an applied project. And that is now starting in the opening term instead of at the end of the first year, the students will be working on a project to do good for the whole year. And that will be culminating with presentations in the ethical leadership course. So throughout the whole year, the students would be working in their team thinking about how do we do good based on what they are learning across the curriculum from the courses. And then they would be advised by the faculty. And so that will culminate with a final presentation early in the program. What we are really wanting the students to think about is like real leaders who have to answer not only what is profitable, but what is responsible, what is ethical, what are the consequences, what are the reputational and regulatory risks? How can we make a difference in the world by the decisions that we make?
That's values based leadership in action. They are actually going to do something with that and then reflect on it. Secondly, you talked about global perspectives in the curriculum. This is not only theoretical, it is applied through the global business experience.
We have another course called the Structure of Global Industries course where they do a project, also a team based project as well. There are multiple other courses in the curriculum, including the opening term course, where this is really, really kind of emphasized.
And in addition to that, these experiences force the students to be exposed to global business right today. We cannot, if you think about any business, we cannot make a decision that actually does not have an impact globally in anything that they are doing.
And so we want them to think about that early on. There are other types of things in the program that are aside from the curriculum that are important to mention here as well.
We have international student tracks, multiple of them across several countries. We have multiple study abroad opportunities and we are adding schools to this and opportunities for our students. We have global case studies inside the classroom in multiple courses.
We have global business experts that are guest speakers in our classroom. And then we have our centers that really help our students get the expert perspectives, such as the Barrado center for Global Business. And then more than anything, I would say that we have a global class of students from 40 different countries that bring in all these variety of perspectives and backgrounds into the classroom and they can have these discussions.
So these experiences are forcing our students to grapple with the realities that the companies are facing today.
The tariffs and changing trade policy. We have heard about that, right? A little bit.
Supply chain disruptions, reshoring decisions, regulatory differences across markets, currency volatility, all of that. And so our students need to learn about how global forces are shaping the pricing, sourcing, expansion, the strategy, the risk, and so on. And so we are trying to do that early on and across our curriculum.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. You mentioned the Ethics project, and I think of that as maybe what we could call like a peak moment in, you know, across the curriculum. The other one that we talked a little bit about earlier was the Executive Challenge. And I just wonder if you could comment a little bit more on that one or, you know, just like, how do these signature, what I would call experiential kind of pieces of the curriculum help to both teach people, but also help them to kind of accelerate their career?
[00:32:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, we are so proud of our signature experiences. These are the highs that the students talk about all the time in Georgetown. And so these experiences, like the Ethics Project and the Executive Challenge, really force our students to apply the business principles, the power skills and the leadership skills in real situations.
And, you know, there's no one perfect answer to any of these situations that the students are going through. So they have to learn about making trade offs under pressure, about leading teams through ambiguity, about communicating decisions early, about making business decisions that are ethically sound by bringing stakeholders into the analysis. And so in the ethical leadership course, I'll explain a little bit about what happens. It's very exciting.
The students receive about $1,000 to $1,500 of real money, not fake money, to actually go ahead and do good in their teams.
So they learn about various ethical leadership concepts and principles in the classroom, and then the only thing that they are being told is go ahead and do good.
This is an experiential project that now the students are going to learn throughout the year with coaching from the faculty. They have done amazing projects in the past, and they have to define what doing good means to them as a leader. So that is Amazing experiential learning. And then you talked about the Executive Challenge, which is my favorite piece in this entire curriculum, which is the final exam for leadership communications course. And on this day, over 100 alums from all over the world on their own dime show up to McDonough in person and then they role play to give a real boardroom experience to the students.
So the students get cases in the morning and then they have to kind of go ahead in front of this boardroom with the CEOs and the CMOs and CFOs and then they have to kind of lay down and present what their strategy is. It's a great learning experience for the students.
These experiences really help the students build what the employers hire for. So these are just not memorable moments for us and the students. They really are structured opportunities to practice leadership, to build credibility and to stand out in recruiting.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would think particularly the Executive Challenge, if you're spending the day presenting to a bunch of alums, like that's a contact point for you. I mean, you know, so if you're doing a good job, you're, you're, you know, connecting with these folks who are, you know, obviously much further along in their careers than you are. And so, yeah, I can see why you're saying that candidates tell you after the fact that these are like the peak moments within the curriculum for them.
Last question for you, because I know you're busy and you probably have a million other things going on, but I wanted to ask you just, you know, this show, you know, generally the folks tuning in are thinking about getting an MBA and they're often, you know, in the process, process of applying or considering which schools to, you know, to apply to. And I just wondered like if someone's evaluating MBA programs and thinking about curriculum fit, what questions should they be asking and what signals should they look for to understand if a program will prepare them for the future of work?
[00:35:05] Speaker B: Yeah, excellent question. For candidates that are looking into MBA programs, if someone's evaluating MBA programs today and looking into the curriculum, I would encourage them to look beyond brand names and ask what you alluded to, which is will this curriculum prepare me for the future of work, not just the workforce of the past and the present, they should ask, would I learn to be a good or a great leader? Would I learn to lead through competing priorities and making values and purpose based decisions?
Ask, will I graduate fluent in data technology and how business is changing? And so they should look for practical learning that goes beyond theory. They should ask, how will this program, help me clarify my goals, build my story, and prepare for recruiting in the career that I really want to get to. They should definitely ask about will I work on real projects and experiential learning. That helps me not only build credibility but also build confidence as I go out into the harsh hiring world and so look for experiential learning, team based projects, opportunities to solve real business problems, and whether they can show proof of capability and not just credits. Right. So ultimately I would say it is the entire program experience and not only the curriculum that the students should be thinking about, but the curriculum should be a large part of it and something that should prepare them for their future careers.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And I know that a lot of candidates probably apply to a number of schools and they don't maybe get around to doing this level of kind of homework until they've got offers. So I would say even if you're listening and you're like, oh, I should have thought all this before I applied, you can still do this work once you have your offers in hand too. And you can kick the tires on these programs and really see how are they structuring things and yeah, are they answering all the questions that Sudeepta just really outlined perfectly. So Sudipta, I really appreciate all your time today. I've gleaned a lot from this conversation. I suspect that everyone tuning in has as well. So thanks so much for joining us on the show. It was a real pleasure to have you.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Thank you. This was an amazing conversation and we hope that people that are listening to it would think about the MBA program and how we are preparing students for today and making them resilient for whatever comes next. Thank you. And Hoya Saxa.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: Yeah, and I'm sure that they will think about that. I mean there's been a lot of great food for thought here today.
That's going to do it for this special episode of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions podcast. Thanks for joining us and please remember to rate and review the show wherever you may be listening.
Sam.
