Educational Objectives

Crafting Your Life: The Tactics and Practices of the First 10 Years Post MBA (LIFE) is an EC course which was created by EC students, for EC students. The course has further been developed in collaboration with HBS alumni, who routinely say that LIFE is the course that they most wish they had available to them when they were at HBS. In our “always-on” culture, in which personal and professional fulfillment grow ever-more elusive, students increasingly want to know how they can approach their busy lives with more intention. This course explores that question, while also building on the conversations sparked by cases in the RC LEAD curriculum, such as those around “Alumni Profiles.”

Fundamentally, LIFE is a tactical course about you. It is about preparing and equipping you to better handle the choices, tradeoffs, and surprises that you will inevitably face in the years 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.

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

1. What does a life well-lived mean to me?

• 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 have a satisfying life? What role does joy, meaningfulness, and achievement play? How will I prioritize and cultivate each of these in my post-HBS life?

2. How can I use my agency for what I can control in life to live consistently with what matters most to me?

• How do I approach decisions and tradeoffs across different areas of my life? How do I think about my choice of geography, career, and partner?
• How do I use my time on a daily and weekly basis? How would I ideally use my time and how do I make those changes?
• How do I think about and manage money?
• How do I manage competing demands for my time, energy, and attention across the different aspects of my life?
• How do I create and change habits that enable me to continue making progress towards the life that I want?

3. How do I stay true to myself in the face of all that I cannot predict or control in life?

• 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 create structures for navigating life with all of its twists and turns with a life partner?

This course is not about creating a rigid 10-year plan. There is no “right” answer for crafting your life – what works for you might not work for others and what works today might not work tomorrow. You will continue to craft your life as your lived experiences (both those within and outside of your control) shape you over time.

With this in mind, LIFE is not your typical HBS class. When you sign up for LIFE, you are signing 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, this course is not and never will be a finished product. We are constantly innovating on new and different approaches to learning, including exercises, workshops, and technology products. We will continue to innovate and expect you to play an active role in helping to shape LIFE for future generations. By getting comfortable trying new and different ways of learning, you practice a “test and learn” mindset and develop skills that you can apply to your own life laboratory.

• Intergenerational Learning. LIFE is a platform to unlock the full potential of HBS’s tremendously broad and diverse alumni network. This course relies heavily on leveraging HBS alumni to learn from their real-world experiences in the years following their HBS graduation. In addition to alumni case studies and vignettes, you can expect to engage with alumni every week in a variety of different ways, including: LIFE chats or informal conversations, panel discussions, one-on-one interviews, and unique events (e.g., a case discussion using HBS Live Online, an alumni reception).

• A Community. LIFE is a chance to learn about yourself by learning with others. When you join LIFE, you are joining a broader community of students and alumni invested in learning with and supporting one another. As part of the LIFE community, you will join a LIFE team, a LIFE section, a LIFE cohort, LIFERs (HBS alumni who completed the course), and a broader set of alumni who are passionate about sharing their life experiences and perspectives with you.

• A Lifelong Journey. When you graduate from the course, you become a LIFER. As a LIFER, you will have opportunities to continue learning with other LIFERs as you grow over time. In a world that is constantly changing, the LIFER community is a place to which you can turn to reflect on how things are going and to both give and receive support.

Course Structure and Requirements

We have fundamentally re-designed the course structure for this coming fall semester. As a result, this represents another exciting opportunity to experiment and innovate together.

Time

This year, we expect to have two class sections. Each section will be expected to attend two class sessions, both held on Tuesdays. The first session will be 80 minutes and take place during the day (either in the morning or afternoon) with their section. The second session will be 90 minutes and take place in the late afternoon with the full cohort of students (i.e., both sections will come together as one for a single afternoon session).

The 80-minute section class is generally designed to enable deep self-reflection and sharing with a smaller group of students through classroom discussions, small group conversations with your LIFE team, and pair-and-shares with section mates.

The 90-minute cohort class is designed to enable both LIFE sections access to opportunities to engage in intergenerational learning with alumni, and experiential workshops featuring experts or guests.

Outside of Class Commitments

In addition to these regularly scheduled classes, we have two outside-of-class commitments in lieu of two of our regular cohort sessions. You are required to attend these two evening sessions:

• Partner Workshop. On Tuesday, November 9 from 6:00 – 9:00pm, we will hold a three-hour evening Workshop on navigating life with a partner. To better accommodate the schedules of partners, friends, or family members you may choose to invite, this session is in the evening and replaces the 4:30-6 class that afternoon.
• Alumni Reception. On Thursday, November 18 from 5:30 – 8:00pm, we will hold an evening Alumni Reception featuring small group conversations between students and alumni to better accommodate the schedules of alumni participants. This session replaces class on November 23.

Final Paper

You will complete a final paper to integrate all of the different lessons which you will learn through the course of the semester. LIFERs have shared that one of the most valuable aspects of the course is the opportunity to learn from the experiences of their classmates and HBS alumni to gain perspective and to reflect meaningfully about themselves. The paper is an opportunity to synthesize these insights to shape your near-term actions, and to serve as a guide or compass moving forward.

Design Partners

Most importantly, if you sign up for LIFE, you are not just electing to take a course — you are also choosing to pick up the baton from those students who came before you, and to 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 that this also requires the full awareness that LIFE is in the process of being designed. Some things will work well from the beginning, while others will need to be reworked. 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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