MIT Sloan

Each week we collect all the MBA news that’s fit to print and provide a quick overview of the latest trending topics from top business schools around the world. Here’s your quick MBA News You Need digest for the week of October 18, 2018. Tuck Professor Recognized as Top Marketing Scholar  Sharma’s research has been published in journals such as “Journal of Consumer Psychology” and “Journal of Consumer Research.” Dartmouth Tuck Associate Professor of Business Administration Eesha Sharma was one of 34 marketing researchers chosen as a 2019 Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar. The annual Marketing Science Young Scholar Read more

A decade ago, only a few people knew what blockchain was. Now, blockchain is a practical part of the financial sector with tremendous potential for transformation. That’s why this fall, MIT’s Gary Gensler, a senior lecturer and senior advisor at MIT Media Lab, will teach a new course entitled “Blockchain and Money.” Read more

It’s Friday, and once again we’re bringing you insights straight from current MBA applicants and students as part of our Fridays from the Frontline column. Our contributor this week, MIT Sloan School of Management second-year Brian Kirk (pictured above, second from left), knows his fair share about the frontline, both figurative and real, having served as a U.S. Navy submariner prior to business school. In the post that follows, he offers some incredible insights about humility and its impact on success, drawn both from his time at Sloan and his military service. Worth the read. Kirk and other leaders of the MIT Sloan Veterans Association just hosted Veteran's Ambassadors Day, a day of programming and activities for prospective MBA applicants from the armed forces. They are planning a second Ambassadors Day in the spring, so if you are an active duty service person or veteran considering business school, check it out. Read more

Spoiler Alert co-founders Ricky Ashenfelter and Emily MalinaPhoto credit: Mimi Phan/MIT Sloan How important is a business school’s mission statement to the experience of its students? According to recent graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, the school’s mission—to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice—influenced where they chose to attend business school, the experiences they had there and the future path of their careers. Ricky Ashenfelter knew he wanted a school in a market that had a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, which led him to focus his search on San Francisco and Boston. But more than that, he also wanted a school that valued and would offer coursework tied to energy and sustainability. That narrowed his focus further to MIT Sloan, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Business, he says. “What I liked most about Sloan was that it was part of a larger MIT ecosystem, which was not the case for many business schools,” Ashenfelter says. And so he left his consulting job at Deloitte and headed for Boston hoping to find solutions to the problems of food waste in business supply chains. Read more

In an interview today with Clear Admit, the admissions director at the MIT Sloan School of Management shared the reasoning behind the school’s decision to add an additional round to its admissions process and reduce the number of required essays applicants must answer to just one. For the first time in its history, MIT Sloan will give applicants the opportunity to apply as part of a third admissions round, which will feature a deadline of April 11th and a notification date of May 18th. The change comes in response to requests from multiple applicants, according to MIT Sloan Admissions Director Dawna Levenson. “Many of our peer schools, if not all of them, have a Round 3,” says Levenson. By adding a third round, she says, MIT Sloan provides greater options to prospective applicants whose work situation may have changed after earlier round deadlines passed, for example. Read more

When Building E52, the main facility for the MIT Sloan School of Management, reopens after extensive renovations in January 2016, it will feature a new light installation by artist Leo Villareal, the school announced recently. Villareal, who last year created The Bay Lights on the San Francisco Bay Bridge West Span, was recently awarded an MIT Percent-for-Art commission to create a light installation for MIT’s Building E52. His plans for E52 include a light sculpture in the north vestibule of the building as part of a new, glass-enclosed entrance. The sculpture will feature 240 hanging LED rods – each approximately 9 feet tall with 72 individual LEDs – arranged from the ceiling in rows. As part of the work, Villareal will create a software code programming the LEDs to cycle through a randomly generated series of combinations. Read more

Prospective MBA applicants from diverse backgrounds are invited to take part in an upcoming Diversity Weekend at the MIT Sloan School of Management. On October 2nd and 3rd, MIT Sloan will host a range of interactive sessions designed to help prospective MBA students get to know the MIT Sloan community by interacting with current students and getting a glimpse of the school’s experiential learning curriculum in action. MIT Sloan’s Diversity Weekend events begin on Thursday night, October 2nd, with a welcome reception. Following the reception, Diversity Weekend participants are also invited to take part in the school’s weekly C-Function. These informal, after-hours celebrations, organized by MIT Sloan students, are held each Thursday evening and open to the entire graduate community, faculty and staff. Read more