Class meets weekly on Tuesdays as a section. There are 12 section meetings during the semester, on all Tuesdays, except for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving (11/22).

Class meets weekly on Wednesday nights -- almost always from 5:30-7:30pm -- to enable unique interactions with HBS alumni and other guests. There are 10 Wednesday sessions, every Wednesday night during the semester except the 2 Open Wednesdays (10/25, 11/15) and the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (11/23). On two other Wednesday nights these sessions will be longer – 5:30-8:30pm – to accommodate unique opportunities. Tentatively, these two longer sessions will be held on 10/11 and 11/29.

Paper (Individual)

Educational Objectives

Crafting Your Life: The First 10 Years Post MBA (LIFE) is fundamentally a course about you. It is about preparing and equipping you to better handle the choices, tradeoffs, and surprises that you will inevitably face after graduating from HBS. Throughout the course, you will define what a life well-lived means to you, and discover and implement tactics and practices to enable you to live consistently with what matters most to you. In addition, you will consider how to adapt along the way when life inevitably does not go according to plan.

A unique feature of the course is the emphasis on community – with your fellow students as well as alumni. You will have access to alumni and their lived experiences. There are a multitude of interactions with both alumni 10+ years out reflecting on their lives to date as well as the over 250 former students of the course (known as LIFERs) who continue to be involved and share their current experiences. Alumni and LIFERs interact with students as part of the class in more traditional ways as case protagonists, and panelists, but also as part of small group discussions and one-on-one conversations. These interactions are meant to help inform you about others’ experiences and what they learned from them – and in turn to help you think more deeply about what you want out of your life and how you want to best equip yourself for what lies ahead.

The course strives to help you think deeply and intentionally about the following questions:

1. Defining Your Compass
• What are my values? Who am I at my best?
• How has my past shaped me? What assumptions do I have about my life – which do I want to keep and which do I want to revise?
• What does it mean to me to live a good life? What is important to me, and how will I prioritize my time and energy towards what matters most?
2. Owning Your Actions
• How do I approach decisions and tradeoffs across different areas of my life?
• How do I use my time on a daily and weekly basis? How do I create and change habits that enable me to continue making progress towards the life that I want?
• How do I think about my choice of geography?
• How do I create structures for navigating life, with all of its twists and turns, with a life partner?
• How do I think about career/family choices? What does it mean to be part of a dual-career couple? Would I ever consider opting out of the work force?
3. Equipping Yourself for What You Cannot Control
• How do I take care of myself, and especially take care of my mental health? How do I build my capacity for resilience?
• How do I develop relationships that will sustain me – both at work and in life?
• How do I think about making a “difference” in the world? In what ways can I craft my life and my job in ways that will enable me to achieve my goals?

With this in mind, LIFE is not your typical HBS class. When you sign up for LIFE, you sign up for:

• A Laboratory. We think of life as a laboratory, and crafting your life as an ongoing discovery process of experimenting, learning, and adapting over time. Similarly, the LIFE course is not and never will be a finished product. The first version of the course was developed in close partnership with EC students and we continue the process of co-creation with students every year—and expect you to play an active role in shaping the course for future generations. By getting comfortable with trying new and different ways of learning, providing feedback, and sharing ideas to improve the course, you will also practice a “test-and-learn” mindset and develop skills that you can apply in your own life laboratory.
• A Community for Life-Long Learning. When you join LIFE, you are joining a broader community of students and alumni invested in learning with and supporting each other in the pursuit of a life well-lived. Throughout the course, we will build shared language, skills, and norms about what it means to craft your life, thereby enabling you to engage with one another deeply on personal topics that might otherwise be undiscussed in an academic or professional setting. LIFERs (graduates of the course) will interact with you throughout the semester, and in the final class they will welcome you into the LIFER community.
• Intergenerational Learning. HBS has a tremendously broad and diverse alumni network with a wide array of professional and personal experiences. LIFE is a platform to unlock the potential of the alumni network by facilitating intergenerational learning. Throughout the course, you will engage with alumni in a variety of ways, including: one-on-one interviews, panel discussions on specific topics, and two unique events—a reception featuring small group conversations between students and alumni and a celebration at the end of the semester where LIFERs will welcome you into the LIFER community.

Course Structure and Requirements

LIFE has two sections of 40 students each. This class size is designed to foster deep connections through class discussion, small group conversations, and pair-and-shares.

Time

LIFE has a unique class structure designed to create the best possible learning environment for each topic and experience. Each section meets separately on Tuesdays during a regular X schedule block, and both sections will come together on Wednesday nights from 5:30-7:30 pm except on two Wednesday nights (tentatively 10/11 & 11/29) for special events that will last from 5:30-8:30. These evening sessions are classes, and you are required to attend all of them.

The two special events include:

• Alumni Reception —10/11 (tentative date). We will host approximately 80 local HBS alumni for a reception and small-group conversations around topics of mutual interest. Before the reception, you will have the opportunity to identify the topics that you would most like to discuss with alumni.
• Relationships Workshop — 11/29 (tentative date). This workshop consists of two parts: the first part focuses on who are you in a relationship and how to find and commit to the partner that is best for you. The second part is designed to help you think about—and practice—how to productively structure conversations about important life decisions with your partner. For the second part of this workshop you will be encouraged to bring a guest who knows you well. They need not be a romantic partner! You are welcome to invite a friend, a parent or a sibling, or anyone else whom you would like as your guest for this workshop. Please note: This workshop has been carefully designed to be inclusive of all students and will help those not in relationships think about how to find the right relationship for them, for those in relationships to consider their commitment in those relationships, and for those fully committed to focus on how to thrive in their relationships.

Assignments During Semester

Weekly Readings. Each week you will read cases and/or vignettes about alumni as you do in a traditional HBS class. However, the intent of these cases/vignettes is to help you understand what the person being described did, and for you to reflect on your own reactions and what you would do – not to judge what they did.

Weekly Exercises. Most weeks you will have exercises that accompany the readings to learn more about you, whether it’s looking back at your past, or tracking how you spend your time, or playing a life simulation to uncover the choices and tradeoffs you are inclined to make.

Module Reflections. At the end of each of the three modules of the course you are asked to stop and reflect on what you have been learning about yourself. These reflections are not graded, and rather are built in for you to pause and explore your insights. They all form the basis of your final paper so the more you invest during the semester the easier your task come the end of the term.

Interviews. Throughout the semester you are required to conduct 4 interviews. The first interview is with a former Crafting your Life student (LIFER) and the remaining 3 are with alumni five or more years out of HBS. You can choose your own alumni or use the LIFE Connect tool developed for this course to match you with alumni that are prepared to talk about the topics you are hoping to discuss.

Final Paper

Your final paper is an opportunity to compile all that you have done throughout the semester. Essentially, you will be “writing” your final paper throughout the semester through the weekly exercises, module reflections, and alumni interview summaries. The purpose of the paper is to meaningfully reflect on all that you’ve learned about yourself, and to create something to which you can refer back throughout your life. The final paper integrates what you have learned, and you will also create an artifact as a tangible companion piece to the paper to remind you daily of what you have learned about yourself and wish to stay true to going forward.

Design Partners

LIFE is unique in that it is an EC course created by EC students, for EC students. The course originated in 2019 through a partnership between EC students and HBS alumni and continues to evolve (in both form and content) in collaboration with our students – who we consider to be our design partners. If you sign up for LIFE, you are not just electing to take a course—you are choosing to pick up the baton from those students who came before you, and continue the course development process with all the attendant joys of leaving a legacy that will be part of HBS students’ experience for years to come. Note, however, that this also requires the full awareness that some aspects of LIFE are in the process of being designed, in partnership with you. Your ongoing feedback and help will be part of the experience, and part of the learning that you (and we) take away from the course.

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