MIT Sloan

MIT may not have the history or the beauty of the Harvard, but it makes up for it in it's appreciation of technology, and the level of personalisation and comradery within the school. I took part in the Sloan Ambassadors Program today, a well-organised 3-hour session in which a group of prospective students get to have a Q&A session with a member of the Admission staff, followed by lunch and Q&A with a couple of current Sloan students, followed by attending a typical class (in my case, a technology strategy class in which Xerox Technology Ventures was discussed).


The facilities at Sloan are not that impressive, perhaps even a little dated, but the school has recently raised over $100 million from alumni and the industry in general that will be spent on new buildings and facilities over the next few years. The entire school is set-up with a wireless network, and all the classrooms are also wired, so it's an interesting mix of old and new. Of course the Sloan students also have access to the facilities of the entire MIT campus as well.


I quite like the structure of the curriculum at Sloan. The class size is mid-range (around 325 students), and it's broken into cohorts for the first year. There's a fairly fixed core curriculum for the first year, and then in the second year you undertake a management track, which is reasonably equivalent to a major. Unlike Kellogg however, you can only do one management track, however it is common for students to switch between tracks in the process of completing the MBA. There's a large range of electives, and they also have a reciprocal agreement with HBS, so you can take electives down the road at Harvard as well (Sloan and HBS are about a half-hour walk apart).


No surprises, I guess, but I've now added Sloan to my short-list as well. Sloan and Harvard were the only two schools that I was reasonably certain would end up on my short-list even before I left Australia, but it's been fantastic to see the schools in action, attend classes, and meet some of the students. The difficultly I have now is that I already have five schools on my short-list, and I've still got to visit Stern (NYU), Columbia, Wharton (U Penn), and Texas ! Maybe I need to be more selective ;-)


No doubt at the end of the process I'll get a chance to evaluate the short-list as a whole, determine what's really important to me in terms of curriculum and general experience, and hopefully narrow the final short-list down to around four or five schools.