A joint program for mid-career professionals that integrates engineering and systems thinking. Earn your master’s degree in engineering and management.
Before coming to MIT Sloan, Sharon Fan, MBA ’26, worked at the intersection of tech and entertainment media for six years. Although she enjoyed her time in that industry, she felt ready to take the next step in her career—she was looking for a place that would help her round out her management skill set so that she could see and solve problems from a high-level view.
“MIT Sloan’s MBA program combines an innovative, entrepreneurial spirit with a comprehensive management education. It’s exactly what I was seeking,” she says. “The environment here encourages us to push boundaries while exploring our passion and values as leaders.”
After completing her degree, Sharon intends to go into strategy consulting. She says she hopes to continue the spirit of action learning that she learned at MIT Sloan.
A Day with Sharon Fan
8:00 a.m.
I begin my day by checking my schedule and preparing material I’ll need for classes and meetings. I love that the MBA program challenges me, and I’ve found that it’s essential to take a few minutes to get organized for the day.
8:30 a.m.
My first class of the day is Competitive Strategy, co-taught by Professors Pierre Azoulay and Don Sull. It’s a case-based class, meaning we analyze case studies drawn from real business issues faced by real companies. Through reading the cases and participating in class discussions, I’m learning to apply different frameworks to structure my analysis, which would be accompanied by data-driven insights. A tagline of this class is “Strategy without data is just poetry!”
9:00 a.m.
As part of the class, we also work in groups to compose recommendation strategy memos that push us to consider each stakeholder’s perspective when offering recommendations on how to address complications outlined in the cases.
10:00 a.m.
Next up is my Data Models Decisions class with Associate Professor Andy Sun, where I’m learning to use data and statistical theories to analyze business problems. I think it’s a great way to connect the dots on some statistics concepts that I had learned in undergrad with business use cases.
10:30 a.m.
This class is teaching me to use data to quantitatively validate ideas and hypotheses—and opportunities to practice those skills.
11:30 a.m.
I always run into friends around campus (or even around Cambridge). It’s nice to stop for a few minutes to say hello and quickly catch up. After my morning classes today, I ran into my SWIM (Sloan Women in Management) mentor Muele Wilcox, MBA ’25. Muele and I meet up regularly to chat about how our semesters are going. As a second year MBA who’s the co-President of the Management Consulting Club, Muele has given me loads of helpful tips and advice on navigating Sloan life and setting career goals.
11:45 a.m.
Throughout the internship recruitment process in the fall, the Career Development Office offers opportunities for consulting firms to visit MIT Sloan so we can learn about the firms, the type of work they do, and their respective interview processes. In this session, we learned how to tackle the consulting case interview, with firm representatives sharing best practices and tips.
12:30 p.m.
Next up is a meeting with my team for a group project for my Organizational Processes class. In our project, we analyzed a post-acquisition integration after our project sponsor, a UK-based company, acquired a firm in the US. After conducting different interviews with employees and going through documents shared by our project sponsor, we’re producing a written report with our recommendations. We use this meeting to discuss and structure our key insights and analysis.
1:00 p.m.
After my meeting with my team, I grab lunch with friends at Sloan Cafe “Slafé.” I like hanging out at Slafé where I’ll see friends in other oceans and classes. Slafé also has great views, with big glass windows overlooking the Charles River, which is especially nice on a sunny fall day like today.
1:30 p.m.
After lunch, I meet with my friend Gloria Wu, MBA ’26, who was a consultant before coming to MIT Sloan. She’s giving me a mock case so I can practice solving cases ahead of my upcoming consulting interviews. Apart from tactical case interview preparations, my friends from consulting are all very candid in sharing their experience working in the industry and their firms. Their perspectives have helped me fine-tune my own career goals. When classmates found out I was considering recruiting (even when it was just orientation week!), they’d already offered to “case” me and I’m immensely grateful for their time and help.
2:30 p.m.
Now that classes are over, I’m headed home to finish up some readings before I head off to a trivia night event with friends this evening!
