Statement from Dean David C. Schmittlein
This is a great MBA program. While not right for everyone, for many people, it is the best program in the world.
There are several reasons for that. If you appreciate how important successful innovation is for great companies around the world, MIT Sloan is simply more dedicated to creating effective innovation than any other leading school.
If you’re interested in a program that gives you a deep dive into the fundamentals of business, but then lets you customize a program for your own needs, MIT Sloan is built exactly around that purpose. With our high-touch tracks in entrepreneurship and finance, for instance, or a certificate in sustainability, we give you more opportunities to build the program that’s right for you.
Everyone knows that you learn management best by doing it. We have a greater commitment and greater experience base with global Action Learning, project-based learning, than any other leading school. We know more about it because we do more about it, and it prepares better managers.
This is a school that commits itself to real knowledge. I’m proud of our faculty and the way that they have built ideas that are valuable now and stand the test of time. Our alumni really do have the opportunity to have the courage of well-founded convictions.
And finally, we are a real community. We’re not the largest school of management — we are about 400 MBA students each year, and there’s a reason for that. You can really get to know 400 people over a two-year program. And I’m proud of the strength of the network that we create here at MIT Sloan, and the fact that our graduates go out and join over 120,000 MIT alumni around the world. You really get the best of both: close community, and an amazing alumni network.
Welcome to MIT. I look forward to seeing you on campus.
Dean David C. Schmittlein
“At MIT Sloan you have a lot of opportunities to explore entrepreneurship. Especially in a place like Kampala where you have a lot of development, entrepreneurship can be very exciting.”
“One of the reasons I came to Sloan was because I wanted to be at a top MBA institution worldwide. But I also wanted access to working with the latest innovations and the highest technology that was coming out of the MIT labs.”
“[The India Lab] program is one of the reasons I came to Sloan. ... The hands-on learning that MIT offers was a huge differentiator.”
“The assistant to the CEO was like our host mom while we were there. She arranged our housing for us, she took us out to her friend’s game farm, and we got driven around in 4x4s. She was just wonderful to meet, and we developed a personal as well as professional relationship with her.”
“I knew about American business, but not enough about what’s really become a global economy. … You can read about it all you want, but there’s no substitute for being there and seeing the context and seeing how completely different these [other countries] are.”
“It was really rewarding that they wanted to know what we thought. We left there being fairly certain that they will do some of the things that we suggested.”
“The conditions in the neighborhoods we were visiting were different than what we realized before getting there. Beyond that, what was surprising was that there weren’t surprises!”
“Because of the diversity of our backgrounds, when we hit the ground in Tanzania it almost was a natural play where different people assume different roles.”
“For 35 years, we’ve been studying how companies get value from information. … We try to help organizations take a more holistic view of what they are trying to do.”
“Our mission, along with the mission of MIT Sloan, is to both develop leaders who make a difference in the world, and also to make a contribution to thinking about the topic of leadership.”
“I love being in a place that is such a nexus of people and ideas — people coming to learn something new and to define themselves. Being a part of that process is a real honor and a real gift.”
"The relationships that we forged helped us to turn out a better project. We were able to test our hypotheses with the people that we spoke with every single day. And really, I think the friendships that you develop really propel the work that you’re doing."
“We’re very interdisciplinary. Among the faculty in the group are an economist, a political scientist, a sociologist, and an industrial relations specialist. We’ve always made a big effort to be open to a variety of perspectives, but also to go beyond being open to them, to want to bring them in, because it makes for a richer environment.”
“I came to Sloan because of its high rankings within the sustainability community, specifically the professors. The S-Lab class itself is part of what drew me to Sloan. And the reason I came to business school was to learn the business speak that really is what connects with people."
“I think MIT Sloan does a great job of breaking monolithic disciplinary approaches to issues and throws together a group of scholars who are really learning from each other to have multiple approaches to similar problems.”
