Pre-MBA Program Introduces College Students to the Value of an MBA

Yale SOM hosted its second Pre-MBA Leadership Program this past June. The two-week program is designed for college juniors and seniors and recent graduates from under-represented minority populations. It helps students network and develop their leadership skills, and introduces them to many of the ideas and tools in Yale’s full-time MBA curriculum.

The students take compressed versions of several of the Yale core curriculum courses. In an Operations class led by Professor Arthur Swersey, for example, they apply the principals of operations management as they design an assembly line to put together toy sailboats. Other sessions include Microeconomics, Accounting, the Investor, and the Employee.

Throughout the program, groups of students work on the Audubon Street Project, an exercise drawn from Yale SOM’s MBA orientation program. Their assignment is to develop a hypothetical business for a storefront near the SOM campus that is economically viable and in keeping with the Yale SOM mission of educating leaders for business and society. At the end of the program, the students present their ideas, complete with budgets and marketing materials, to a panel of Yale SOM faculty.

The Pre-MBA Leadership Program is a highly selective program intended to introduce students to the fundamentals of management education and give them the tools necessary to hone their individual leadership skills. The costs of tuition, room, board, and course materials are covered by the Yale School of Management. Visit the Pre-MBA Leadership Program website or read about the inaugural year of the program.