Curriculum Overview
The Stanford MBA Program will empower you to reach your full potential. Yes, you will be challenged by the rigor of the academic program. More important, however, you will learn about yourself and develop personal resources that will sustain you throughout your career. We will help you develop your vision and the substance required for achieving it.
Tailored Curriculum
Here, you will gain strong management fundamentals and the ability to tailor learning.
- First-year Management Foundations courses offer a menu of choices in each required discipline, calibrated to your skills, experience, and future goals.
- Throughout your MBA experience, you also can incorporate courses—even degrees—from other Stanford graduate areas.
- We can help you reach your goals faster.
Diverse Teaching Methods
How we teach is clearly different and an advantage.
- By selecting the most meaningful and effective teaching method for each subject, we maximize your learning and bring concepts to life.
- You will learn through projects, simulations, prototyping, role-playing scenarios, global immersions, and case studies, as well as from your classmates' rich backgrounds.
- Few MBA programs offer the diversity of learning opportunities that you find here.
Small Group Connections
The Stanford MBA Program purposely structures your MBA experience to support active collaboration with classmates and faculty in small, connected groups.
- In your first quarter, you will be part of a 16 student seminar, giving you opportunities to build relationships with faculty and to defend your viewpoints in depth.
- Leadership teams and leadership labs help you augment your skills with personalized leadership coaching. Learn more about the GSB Executive Challenge.
- Close connections with faculty enable you to delve deeply into cutting-edge research and groundbreaking ideas.
Global Experience
Understanding global forces and frameworks is critical to tomorrow's leaders.
- You will enhance your cultural, historical, political, and social knowledge through global coursework. And then you will expand and apply this learning through direct exposure in a country with which you are not familiar.
- We offer a variety of Global Study Trips, Social Innovation Study Trips, immersion internships, and international exchange opportunities.
Advising Resources
From the start, we support you with resources to help you make the decisions that are right for you.
- Your advisors know your background and can help you craft an individual study plan.
- Leadership and writing coaches will help you develop critical skills.
- A student life advisor will help you identify and pursue opportunities for putting leadership skills into practice, and career advisors help you identify your next steps.
- Each person on your team is here to help you reach your goals, as quickly as possible and in the manner that best meets your needs.
Students prepare for their Strategic Leadership course.
Learn more about the GSB Executive Challenge.
Dean Garth Saloner discusses the challenge business schools face in educating students for a new world of companies without borders.
» Building the Next-Generation Business Leader McKinsey & Company
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» Classes at Stanford University
"One of the most powerful things for me at Stanford has really been becoming a global citizen. I had the opportunity to go to Kenya and Rwanda with a professor and 30 other classmates to visit companies and government leaders, including the sitting president of Rwanda. As someone who grew up and worked in the United States, this was an opportunity for me to really expand my horizons, to take what you read in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and really see it in action, see what the individual actors and players are doing on the ground."
Pavan Tripathi, MBA 2012