Full-time Fall Curriculum

The course objective is to facilitate an understanding of the financial reporting process and the importance of financial reporting for well-functioning capital markets. The course prepares students for subsequent MSB courses that presume a basic understanding of how to use financial data. Interviewers for graduate-level positions in all functional areas assume familiarity with and a working knowledge of financial data and financial statements. This is particularly true for those in the investment banking and consulting fields.

Although skills in finance, accounting, marketing, operations, and strategy are crucial for achieving success at work, the ability to lead an organization and communicate to internal and external stakeholders are equally important.  An understanding of the ways that leaders communicate to effect change is an essential complement to the technical skills you are learning in other courses. This course focuses on the most critical types of communication leaders need to be successful: ways that leaders build effective relationships, motivate others, and influence outcomes. In this course, we are not going to simply examine the techniques and theory used by effective leaders. Rather, this course will push you to practice those techniques, evaluate your own behaviors, give and receive feedback from your peers, and continually hone your own authentic leadership style.  

Leading Teams for Performance and Impact (LTPI) is a foundational MBA course designed to build the interpersonal, analytical, and behavioral skills required to lead and collaborate effectively in modern organizations. Grounded in behavioral science and enriched through experiential learning, the course emphasizes self-awareness, interpersonal effectiveness, inclusive leadership, and the dynamics of high-performing teams. Rather than relying solely on lectures or case discussions, LTPI engages students in simulations, leadership assessments, reflective exercises, and hands-on team challenges. Students explore team dynamics, including information sharing, decision-making, conflict management, and social influence, all within the context of increasingly global and diverse organizations. Throughout the module, students deepen their understanding of how identity, power, and interpersonal differences shape team culture and performance. Students leave LTPI with a clearer sense of who they are as leaders, how to leverage their strengths, and how to build, motivate, and influence teams for meaningful impact.

Managerial Economics introduces the fundamental concepts of economics—the “mother tongue” of all business. It provides the foundation for understanding a wide range of other business disciplines, including finance, strategy, and operations management. The course equips students with tools to make economically sound business decisions and to understand the conditions that shape profitability across industries. It begins with core economic concepts such as supply and demand, costs, and market equilibrium, and then examines how firms behave under different market structures—from perfect competition to monopoly and oligopoly. It explores how firms set prices, decide when to enter or exit markets, and respond to competitors. The course then introduces game-theoretic reasoning to analyze interactions among firms and concludes by examining relationships along firms’ value chains, as well as sources of market failure and approaches to addressing them. Throughout, students develop the ability to apply economic reasoning to think analytically about real-world business problems and to build a foundation for future coursework in strategic management and related fields.

Statistics is the science and art of extracting useful information from data. It is both Descriptive and Inferential. While the former deals with methods of organizing, summarizing and presenting numerical data, the latter is concerned with methods for making inferences and drawing conclusions about characteristics of a population based on sample information. Business statistics introduces MBAs to concepts, methods, and techniques that are used extensively in business decision-making activities, both in the public and private sectors. The techniques introduced in this course are used in all functional areas of business, including accounting, finance, marketing, production and personnel management. These techniques and methods are tools for analysis, communication, and decision-making in the international business environment. Because the business environment is characterized by uncertainty, statistics also provides business managers with tools necessary to arrive at conclusions and to make decisions in uncertain situations.

Marketing is a complex business function that requires various skills towards strategy formulation and the implementation of a marketing plan. This course introduces a series of frameworks and tools that can be used to solve general business problems and to develop specific marketing strategies or plans. We first focus on understanding the five C’s – customers, the company, collaborators, competitors, and the context in which they all operate. Based on this analysis, we develop a strategy for our product(s), and then discuss how a marketing strategy can be implemented through the elements of the marketing mix, the four P’s (product, price, place/channels of distribution, and promotion).

Applied AI Lab is an experiential MBA course that teaches students to understand, evaluate, and prototype AI applications through direct experimentation. This course emphasizes learning by doing: students use Python and AI tools to build predictive models, develop AI-powered applications, and create working prototypes that solve real business problems. The course progresses from foundational concepts (classification, regression, model evaluation) through modern AI technologies (large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic AI) to culminate in a capstone project where teams build functional AI prototypes. Students learn to make strategic decisions about when to build versus buy AI solutions, conduct cost-benefit analyses, and evaluate the feasibility of AI implementations in their domains of interest.

AI for Leaders is designed for students who expect to use, lead, evaluate, oversee, or govern AI initiatives rather than design AI systems themselves. The course focuses on strategic judgment, organizational integration, governance, and risk—while providing hands-on experience using and building contemporary AI tools. The course is intentionally non-coding and explicitly complementary to more technical analytics and data science courses. It focuses on how best to use AI, including when AI should and should not be used, how it reshapes managerial accountability, and how it should be governed inside complex enterprises. And it enables students to gain hands-on experience of building and deploying simple AI tools, so that they can be comfortable with the underlying thought process.

Finance Essentials introduces MBA students to foundational financial principles and tools critical for decision-making in both capital markets and within firms. Students will learn the mechanics of time value of money, valuation of stocks and bonds, and the principles of risk and return. Through the lens of real-world business decisions and interactive cases, students will build fluency in using financial models to assess value and understand how capital is priced in financial markets.

Corporate Finance builds on foundational tools to analyze how firms make long-term investment decisions and structure their capital. The course explores capital budgeting, capital structure theory, corporate valuation techniques, and the use of derivatives for risk management. Real-world case studies challenge students to apply these tools to strategic financial decisions under uncertainty.