The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley has revamped the format of its evening and weekend MBA program to provide students with a wider array of courses and career service offerings, the school reported earlier this month.
Through a range of enhancements, including new courses, executive education–style offerings and new career services, the school hopes to give its evening and weekend students greater opportunity to dive into the areas that interest them most and to shape their programs to meet their individual career objectives.
“Our goal is to balance providing the fundamental business disciplines and giving students an opportunity to explore some topics of interest,” Dave Gent, executive director of the Evening & Weekend MBA Program, said in a statement announcing the new format. “What is truly exciting about the Evening & Weekend Program is that students are able to take what they learn and apply it the next day in their workplaces.”
As part of the revamped program, evening and weekend MBA students will now be able to choose from a greater range of elective courses in a new mini-course format. For example, weekend students this fall could choose to study three topics – Corporate Financial Decision Making; Game Theory, and Behavioral Finance – grouped together as a series of one-unit electives.
According to professors at the school, this format should prove particularly effective for working students who can bring relevant examples from their jobs into class when they discuss an issue. “Several times students have told me how they are applying the material I have just taught them in a project they are working on, which is a very satisfying part of being a finance professor,” Visiting Associate Professor Raghavedra Rau, who teaches Corporate Financial Decision Making, said in a statement.
The changes to the evening and weekend program also include the introduction of intensive classes modeled on executive education courses. For example, beginning next year, a one-week class taught by Kristi Raube, executive director of the graduate program in health management, will focus exclusively on healthcare in the 21st century. Raube will teach together with Harvard Business School Professor Toby Stuart, and the course will be cross-listed with the Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA Program in another first for the school.
“These courses enable us to provide more opportunities for faculty to teach in the Evening & Weekend Program and give our students the opportunity to network with Berkeley-Columbia students,” Gent said.
And in another change, first-year evening and weekend students will now start off with the Berkeley Innovative Leader Development (BILD) initiative, just like the full-time MBA students. The evening and weekend class of 2013 will take the new Problem Finding, Problem Solving course as a requirement next fall, followed by an experiential learning requirement. The Problem Finding, Problem Solving course will be available this spring to second- and third-year evening and weekend students as an elective.
Finally, recognizing that more and more students today who pursue an MBA while working are actually looking to shift careers rather than advance within existing careers, the Career Services Office has organized a new Career Night for the evening and weekend program. The inaugural event, which took place in October, brought students and alumni together for an interactive Q&A session featuring panelists from wide-ranging fields, including venture capital, high-tech marketing, investment banking and management consulting.
“Each of the panelists had a different story to tell,” Terry Padden, MBA 11, said in a statement. Madden hopes to use his MBA to shift from mechanical engineering to investment banking. “There is no one recipe for success for career changers, but there was one ‘best practice’ that held true for all of the panelists: Leverage the Haas network,” he said.
For more on Haas’s expanded offerings for evening and weekend MBA students, click here.
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