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The Stanford Graduate School of Business is indisputably one of
America's great b-schools. If you study here, you will study among
the nation's best and brightest, learn from Nobel Prize-wining
faculty, and gain access to power employers. The first-year
curriculum features a quantitative orientation and is extremely
demanding. It's common for first-years to experience anxiety about
whether they'll make it or not. Despite there fears, almost no one
flunks out. An extensive first-year mentoring and support system
eases the way. Stanford breaks its year into three quarters: fall,
winter, and spring. The core curriculum has been designed to develop
understanding and competence in four broad areas: internal
environment of the organization (organizational behavior and human
resource management)' functional areas (accounting, finance,
marketing, production)' and quantitative techniques (computer
methods, decision analysis, statistics). The first-year core
includes fourteen classes covering these topics. Students can take
exemption exams to place out of cores. During the second year,
students may choose from more than 100 electives. Favoritisms are:
Strategic Management in the Nonprofit Environment, Personal
Creativity in Business, Strategy and Action in The interest in
nonprofit topics is related to the popularity of the school's Public
Management Program (PMP)' which students describe as excellent. PMP
is a certificate that is earned by taking three public management
electives in addition to the required courses. Stanford also offers
a Global Management Program within the MBA. One of the hottest
courses of study at Stanford is entrepreneurship. In fact, MBAs who
take Entrepreneurship: Formation of New Ventures, have been know to
come out with original and successful start-ups. Unique to Stanford
is a de-emphasis on grades: Notes this MBA: "No-disclosure grading
allows you to focus on what's most important/interesting to you." As
for the faculty, while our prior survey revealed that students found
less-than-=exciting teaching in the core, much has been done to
remedy this. A significant majority now rate professors good or
better teachers. Some of the best learning experiences are found in
the visiting speakers program, which features a greater number of
speakers than most schools have in faculty. In a span of just nine
days, Stanford was host to the following celebrities of the cyber
world: Apple Founder Steve Jobs, Jim Barksdale of Netscape, Ed
McCracken, CEO of Silicon Graphics, Michael Nevens, leader of
Mckinsey's worldwide electrics practice, and Andrew Grove, CEO of
Intel. If that's not enough, in a creative pairing of expertise,
Stanford Professor Robert A. Burgelman and Andrew Grove, CEO of
Intel, team-teach Strategy and Action in the Information Processing
Industry. |
Undergraduate