Collaborative Environment
The sum is more than its parts
Attaining true excellence requires team effort, multiple points of view, and diverse skill sets. Team building becomes increasingly critical as the world grows more complex, and as businesses have to work across boundaries and borders. Learning to develop effective teams is part of our very structure and a cornerstone of our curriculum, from orientation to classes, and from Proseminars to the Sloan Innovation Period (SIP).
Students at MIT Sloan are quick to praise the refreshingly collaborative environment they’ve found on campus. We often hear students marvel at how everyone pitches in to help you attain your goals, from student peers to faculty, and from alumni to business leaders. Ask anyone what makes the School a special place, and you’ll hear about the people here — accessible, creative, curious, intelligent, respectful, and grounded people — with open doors, who freely work in collaboration toward common goals.
Your Team in Action
The summer required classes and career workshops establish collaboration quickly. Teams of students from diverse backgrounds and careers, and with distinct learning styles, work together through problem sets and cases. Each cohort of 60 students takes the required courses together. Alumni remark that they feel their classmates became an important source of support and friendship.
Proseminars and Clubs
Collaborative learning extends beyond the powerful, shared experience of the summer, both in and out of class. In Proseminars and in the Finance Research PracticumTM student teams tackle problems faced by partner companies from surrounding communities, and from around the world.
Fostering trust and friendships, MIT Sloan's impressive roster of highly active clubs and activities offers speakers, debates, skills competitions, sports, learning treks, teams, and social events — all organized by student groups throughout the year.
Ultimately, MIT Sloan is a premier research institution because of its people. The campus community embraces Action Learning and promotes a refreshing collaborative environment, all while employing an attitude of optimism and enthusiasm. Those who join this special community quickly find that these attributes combine to create a tangible energy — and they are empowered to create some of the most promising innovations and inventions to meet the world’s challenges.
“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.”
"The classroom itself is filled with so much collective brain power . . . it's obvious that I'm caught up in a room full of 124 of the brightest, most curious people from around the world."
“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.”
“These companies are really excited to work with MIT students.They reach out to the community to set up these projects and are great to work with. They give us access to all their resources and are very open to us.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You could talk about watershed management and conservation of energy all you want. But until you put numbers to it and financial analysis to it, you’re not going to get much done. I came to business school to speak that language, speak with people in terms of numbers, financial numbers so that I can get projects done.”
“The concept behind enterprise architecture is that you have all these machines, you have all these business processes, you have all these people doing things, how do you make sure they all come together and achieve business objectives that make you more competitive.”
“We are very much an action-learning environment. The way to learn leadership is not only through reading cases, not only through learning theory — in fact we don’t want people to regurgitate the theory. We want people to take theory and to live it, use it.”
"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."
“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.”
“I can honestly say that when I was planning on coming to business school I never thought that witnessing the birth of a child would be included in the education. It was definitely an experience.”
“As the world begins to rebuild its financial infrastructure from the ashes of this economic crisis, I believe MIT is primely positioned to play a leadership role in shaping the future through its research and educational programs.”
