The First Year: Core Curriculum

The core curriculum, where you gain the breadth of business knowledge and skills expected of MBAs, comprises most of the first year of study.

Your first-year core curriculum concentrates on three fundamentals of business:

• leadership
• strategic analysis
• financial management

You’ll experience these themes over four seven-week modules, developed in partnership with corporate recruiters and senior alumni executives. These intense learning sessions condense and compress a lot of learning in a short time. You will learn the specific tools and techniques to apply to any situation in order to reach the right business decision. The curriculum is also highly pragmatic: no one can become an expert overnight, so we make sure you learn how to ask the right questions as well.

To give you and advantage you may not find elsewhere, you’ll take your first functional concentration classes at the end of your first year instead in the second year. This head start prepares you better for your summer internship and lets you take full advantage of your opportunities.

Executive Panel Case Competition

This twenty-five-year-old rite of passage is a chance to pull together everything you have learned in your first year. You will compete with your classmates in an intensive case competition. Your team will be given a complex business case with only seventy-two hours to analyze and prepare your solution. You will present your strategy to an executive panel comprised of senior executive Smeal alumni and corporate partners.

The Executive Panel Case Competition is a test of your ability to work as a team player, evaluate business issues and devise a solution, and stand up in front of senior executives to convince them that you have the best business sense and strategy in the room. In short, it’s a learning crucible.

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