UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business might be characterized as a
business school with its eye on the future. The School takes pride in
shaping innovative leaders who know how to seize opportunities, challenge
conventional wisdom, and lead with creativity. At the same time, Berkeley
MBAs get a sound grounding in business fundamentals and cutting-edge
research. Haas is a good school for professionals who like to think 'outside
the box,' who care about the wider impact of their actions, and who like to
get things done.
The Haas School is housed in a three-building complex that constitutes
a 'mini campus' of its own within the larger UC Berkeley campus, across the
bay from San Francisco. The approximately 250 students who enter the
full-time MBA program at Haas each year enjoy the many cultural, athletic,
and career opportunities the San Francisco area and northern California have
to offer.
Here is our December 2006 interview with Peter Johnson, Director of
International Admissions for the Full-Time MBA Program at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
What benefits do Berkeley MBA students draw from the larger university?
I think this is a particular advantage for our program.
We have very close ties with a number of the other graduate programs at Berkeley. According to the National Research Council, Berkeley is the number one university in the U.S. 97 percent of our graduate degree programs are ranked in the top 10 in their respective fields.
We feel that because business is interdisciplinary, giving our students the opportunity to take some of their elective courses in
the other excellent graduate programs at Berkeley has been key for some people in terms of preparing them for their post-MBA career goals.
For example, a student who has an interest in digital media and entertainment might find it useful to take a course offered through the Law School in intellectual property.
Someone in the Management of Technology program might find it useful to take an elective course through the School of Engineering. Or someone
who's in the Real Estate program and who's focused on development might find it helpful to take a couple of the elective courses in the School of Urban Planning.
Those courses are relevant to what they wish to do, but may not be topics that would normally be covered in the Business School.
What other interdisciplinary opportunities are available within the Berkeley community?
We also have some joint degree programs.
Our most popular joint degree program is our MBA/MPH, Master of Public Health.
This is a five-semester joint degree program. At the conclusion of it, the student earns both an MBA and a Master of Public Health degree. That's been very popular with people who are going into industries related to healthcare – medical devices, biotechnology, and so on.
We also have a joint degree program between the Business School and the Law School, a JD/MBA.
We also have a joint degree program with the International Area Studies program. Those are all fixed joint degrees.
In terms of interdisciplinary programs, one of the very well-known ones is the Management of Technology program, which is a joint effort between the School of Business, the School of Information Management and the School of Engineering.
Can you explain how the Haas curriculum emphasizes creative problem solving?
There are a number of ways that we do this.
First of all, we actually have classes that address this issue. There's one, for example, that's being done this fall,
"Creativity and Leadership in Marketing." We also have other courses that address creativity in a managerial or a leadership context.
More importantly, we have a number of extracurricular opportunities that are open to all of our students as non-credit opportunities to develop those skills.
To give you an example, we devoted an entire day during the week of required orientation activities
to a project that is related very closely to our brand identity of "leading through innovation."
All of our incoming students attended a presentation on a set of business problems that was presented by a consulting firm that's working with a well-known corporation. They presented a set of critical issues that the company feels they need to address.
We then split our incoming class into smaller groups.
Each group worked with a facilitator to identify a list of potential ways of solving this problem that were different than what the consultants had developed. At the end of the day, they presented these opportunities to the consulting firm and to each of the other teams. The focus was
on coming up with fresh solutions to these business problems, not repackaging solutions that had already been devised.
This was a lead-in to a project that we have going this fall, our Innovation Workshop Series. We have three companies that are working with us initially on innovation workshops: Hewlett-Packard, Hotwire, and Yahoo!.
In each of those cases, we have a Saturday program during which 40 of our students go to the company headquarters.
They hear a presentation from senior executives regarding a business problem that the company is trying to address. Those 40 students then, similar to what we did during orientation, split into groups of 10 students each, and
are tasked for the rest of the day with working with representatives from that company to examine potential solutions to this problem.
At the end of the day, each team will present its best solutions to the executives from the company.
The company will pick a group of those students who will with it work for the rest of the semester to implement the solutions that they felt were most relevant.
We also have a speaker series throughout the fall, addressing issues
surrounding innovation and leadership.
Page
1
2
3
4