Brush Up On Business Basics Online
The prospect of returning to school for an MBA can be a bit daunting, especially after a few years in the workforce. Once you get in, you might want to get a head start on your classes. Or maybe you’re considering applying, but you aren’t sure about the classroom experience”what it’s like, whether you feel prepared, if it’s something you really want to do. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can get a taste of the b-school curriculum ahead of time.
Many schools essentially offer entire classes online: lecture notes, classroom handouts, assignments. For example, MIT is a big participant in the OpenCourseWare program, an international consortium of schools that post course materials online, completely free of charge. So you can take a closer look at many of the Sloan School of Management’s offerings before you ever even make a campus visit. They’ve got bits and pieces of an impressive number of classes online, including:
- Economic Analysis for Business Decisions
- Optimization Methods
- Introduction to Financial and Managerial Accounting
Columbia has some seminars posted, and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business posts interesting videos of speakers and panel discussions at their YouTube channel. You’ll have to sort through commencement videos and the like, but it’s worth investing some time to see GE’s Jeff Immelt talking about leadership.
Even if you’ve already been admitted to your school of choice, you might want to brush up on your fundamentals before arriving on campus. You wouldn’t want to be ill-equipped for the dreaded cold call. There are a number of classes that will help lay a firm foundation for your first year coursework. Carnegie Mellon has a stats class, and Berkeley has audio of both micro and macro economics courses available.
Then there’s the just-plain-interesting. Yale University has made Professor Ben Polack’s Intro to Game Theory available here. (Follow it up with Sloan’s Game Theory for Managers.) You can even download lectures onto your iPod, but be careful not to get distracted by backward induction and evolutionary stability”we wouldn’t want you to walk into traffic. Johns Hopkins has a class on occupational health, while Tufts offers one on multilateral negotiation.
And that’s just the beginning of the intriguing b-school resources. Next week we’ll round up great podcasts for prospective and incoming b-school students.