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MBA Voices
MBA Voices
When I started at HBS in the fall of 2020, I had one goal in mind: to challenge myself. I previously worked in communications at Cloudflare, a security, performance and reliability company founded in 2009 by two HBS alumni. Cloudflare had started as an idea on the back of a napkin during a school trip, so I knew that HBS was a place where entrepreneurship thrived. [...]
- 01 Mar 2021
Exploring Career Passions through Short Intensive Programs – Moving Beyond Direct to Consumer
Short Intensive Programs (SIPs) are courses that offer students a great opportunity to think about career choices, gain practical skills, and explore topics you might otherwise never get to study. These courses run for one week in January before the start of the Spring term and are often focused on a faculty member’s area of expertise or passion. [...]
Business school is a valuable investment in your future. HBS supports that investment through generous need-based scholarships. In addition to scholarships, many HBS students utilize student loans to help meet their portion of the shared investment.
If you anticipate borrowing to help finance your MBA, you are likely thinking about what repayment might look like post-graduation. HBS graduates pursue careers in a variety of industries and positions around the world. With a median starting salary of $148,750, and median signing bonus of $30,000, HBS graduates are well-positioned to pay off their student loans. Still, taking-on student debt to finance an MBA is a significant commitment, and we recognize that personal circumstances influence how each student approaches that commitment. To better understand how HBS graduates manage and repay their student debt, we interviewed several alumni about their loan repayment journeys. [...]
Although I did not know it at the time, my path to business school began on March 1, 1992. It was my ninth birthday, and I was enjoying the liberty that came with growing up on a farm on the outskirts of a small mining community in Ohio: riding my all-terrain vehicle (ATV) through muddy fields and plunging in and out of puddles of melted snow. My future career was far from my mind, but even at that young age, I was contemplating the world and my place in it. In Appalachia, opportunity ebbs and flows with the demand for steel and coal. And in 1992, many of the factories that had provided the community’s lifeblood sat dormant along the banks of the Ohio River. Consumed by poverty, the soft bigotry of low expectations had crept into the social construct, sentencing families in underserved communities like mine to a lifetime of waiting for steel and coal’s resurgence. Through rust-colored lenses, our place in the world appeared immutable. [...]
The fourth year of Harvard Business School’s Short Intensive Programs (SIPs) came during a month of national upheaval and under the ever-darkening cloud of the global pandemic. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that one course, held the week following the January 6 Capitol insurrection, had the entire class openly in tears. But there we were, Zoom screen after Zoom screen of emotional, vulnerable participants reacting to the deeply personal reflections of Bozoma (Boz) Saint John, the CMO of Netflix, in Professors Frances Frei and Francesca Gino’s SIP, Anatomy of a Badass.
The class was one of 13 SIPs offered during winter break. Now in their fourth year, SIPs are no-credit, no-fee elective courses, offering MBA students an opportunity to engage deeply in a single subject with professors, practitioners, and experts in the field. With all classes running virtually, and one in a hybrid classroom, we observed four: Anatomy of a Badass, Startup Bootcamp, Climate Finance, and The Business of Space. [...]
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The views and opinions expressed in the MBA Voices blog are those of the authors.
Any political views shared by students are their own; HBS does not endorse a
particular party or candidate.