Class meets weekly on Tuesdays as a section. There are 11 section meetings during the semester, on all Tuesdays, except for the open Tuesday (11/8) and the Tuesday before Thanksgiving (11/22).

Class also meets on Wednesday nights to enable unique interactions with HBS alumni and other guests.

• Six Wednesday nights during the semester will meet in-person for events which last for two- to three-hours (depending on the event) and will always occur in the 6:00-9:00 p.m. window. These events will include a range of different types of opportunities to interact with alumni and other guests. See below for details and dates.

• Five Wednesday nights are time blocks that are meant for you to conduct the five interviews that are a key component of this course. These five evening sessions do not require your attendance, nor are you obligated to complete the interviews on Wednesday evenings. Rather, you and your interviewees should find mutually agreeable times to talk. The intention of calling out these five sessions is to help you set aside time for these conversations, and in the case of the first two interviews, make sure that there are others available during this window, to make scheduling easier. These interviews typically last about an hour and require some time to capture your post interview reflections.

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 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:

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 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? Am I aware of and making the best use of my strengths?
• 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 create structures for navigating life, with all of its twists and turns, with a life partner?
• How do I think about my choice of geography?
• 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 think about taking risk, and rebounding and being resilient in the face of disappointment or failure?
• 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?

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 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 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. We are committed to continuing to innovate the course—developing and testing novel models, teaching plans, and materials with each new version—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. LIFE is a chance for you 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 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. When you graduate from the course, you will join a community of LIFERs (students who have graduated from the course before you) who are invested in supporting each other in life’s ongoing journey. LIFERs 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 rich 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. Beyond the course, LIFE is developing a suite of technology tools that will enable HBS to surface alumni learning needs across their lifespan, and to better connect alumni to one another. LIFE students and LIFERs are at the forefront of how HBS is evolving its value proposition as early adopters for this broader initiative.

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 six Wednesday nights for two- to three-hours between 6:00-9:00 p.m. Like any other HBS class, there is the traditional preparation required for our Tuesday classes, which includes reading cases, vignettes, articles, book chapters, and completing exercises and assessments. The Wednesday sessions, however, are unique. There are six Wednesday nights where you will meet in person and learn from each other and alumni through special events and experiences. There are five Wednesday nights set aside for you to conduct the five interviews required throughout the semester.

Six Wednesday Evening Sessions Requiring your Physical Attendance.

These six sessions are unique experiences that involve HBS alumni and other guests, and the time is set to best accommodate their schedules. These evening sessions are classes, and you are required to attend all six evening sessions:

• Community Celebration — 9/7. We will start the semester with an informal gathering where we will meet several local alumni. You will have the opportunity to engage these alumni in a conversation about what they thought their life would be like when they were EC students, and how their life actually unfolded with an emphasis on what they learned along the way. We will also start to get to know one another, and think about how we can build community over the course of the semester.
• Partner Workshop — 10/19. This workshop is designed to help you think about—and practice—how to productively structure conversations about important life decisions with important people in your life. It can be easy in a relationship to assume that a partner intuitively understands our needs, priorities, or goals without explicitly discussing them, and it’s similarly easy to assume that we understand what really matters to our partner and act based on these assumptions. This workshop is a way to help close this communication gap and encourage regular conversations. Please note: This workshop has been carefully designed to be inclusive of all students. You need not be in a romantic relationship. 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.
• Alumni Panel: Resilience — 11/2. We will invite several alumni to share their experiences of risk taking and facing unexpected life events that span the personal and the professional—ranging from job loss, to infertility, to divorce, to mental health. You will have the opportunity to speak with these alumni to learn how they worked through—or are working through—these challenging moments.
• Alumni Reception — Tentatively 11/9. 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 identify the topics that you would most like to discuss.
• Alumni Panel: Friendship and Other Support Relationships — 11/16. The relationships that you cultivate with the friends you make throughout your life will have a significant impact on your overall life satisfaction, and your ability to weather life’s ups and downs. Having friends to whom you can turn for support and guidance in difficult moments is critical. But maintaining friendships can be challenging when the demands of career and/or family require more and more of our time. Several alumni will join us to share their stories of maintaining and growing their friendships by introducing structure and intentionality into these relationships.
• LIFER Celebration and Museum — 11/30. This is our final gathering as a class—and the start of our journey together as LIFERs. We will do three related things: 1) Enjoy a museum featuring artifacts created by you that will serve as a reminder of your key learnings from the semester; 2) Discuss how we want to continue to engage during our remaining time at HBS and life beyond; and 3) Be joined by students from past years to welcome you into the LIFER community.

Five Wednesday Sessions Dedicated to Interviewing Alumni.

The remaining five Wednesday sessions are dedicated times during which you can complete the five interviews you will be expected to conduct during the semester. On the Wednesdays set aside for interviews, you can choose to use the allocated time to complete your interviews or use a different block of time—whatever you and your interviewee prefer.

These interviews include one with a current student, one with a former student (LIFER), and three alumni interviews. You will be able to choose any alumni you would like, but we have assembled a rich data base of alumni willing to speak on over 100 topics. If you choose, you will be able to submit your topic and be matched with an alum who has identified their willingness to speak to students on that topic.

These interviews usually last about an hour and then require you to write-up your learnings. These interviews and your learnings will be a core component of your final paper.

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 your three module reflections and five interview summaries, and the intent of the final paper is to tie it all together. 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.

Copyright © 2022 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.