What Should You Know Before You Apply to Harvard Business School

What Should You Know Before You Apply to Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School doesn’t need to do much to market itself to applicants. Harvard is more concerned with identifying which applicants fit the school best than with encouraging applicants to apply. Without a doubt, it doesn’t get more prestigious than HBS. But, before you apply, you really need to understand a few important things about the HBS experience.

We’re not presenting “Secrets of HBS Admissions!” here. None of these four things is a magic bullet that will get you into Harvard. But, not understanding these facets of the HBS experience absolutely can keep you out of the school:

The Case Study Method
HBS adopted Harvard Law School’s dialogue-oriented case method of teaching in 1924 to help students begin thinking like executives, and today, almost all HBS classes are taught using the case method. HBS created this teaching method to foster a dynamic learning environment that hews closer to real life activity than the typical academic assignments. From a skill standpoint, the case method gives Harvard grads increased capacity, perspective, and confidence for dealing with real business situations. HBS produces the majority of the cases they — and other schools — teach: Over 80% of the cases sold throughout the world are written by HBS faculty.

Research
HBS is also a nerve center of academic research, which can be both an advantage and a disadvantage to students. As with any other program — be it undergraduate, law, or medicine — there is a tradeoff when faculty spend a great deal of their time researching and publishing, as that means fewer hours are left for instruction and meeting with students. Of course, it also means that the curriculum is cutting-edge and relevant. HBS addresses the downside by limiting formal teaching responsibilities to as little as one semester-long class per year, ensuring that faculty can balance their workload between research and instruction without compromising either. HBS has a self-funded research budget of $70 million and annually produces over 30 books and more than 300 academic papers authored or co-authored by the school’s faculty.

Sections and Learning Teams
HBS makes a large class smaller and more manageable through the use of sections. Each Harvard Business School class features ten sections of about 90 students each — which means that 90 is the number of students in each course of the Required (core) Curriculum (since a student goes through all the core courses together with her section.

During orientation, new students are assigned to six- or seven-person learning teams composed of individuals from different sections and intentionally diverse backgrounds with whom they will work throughout their entire first year. These teams collaborate on graded projects in certain first-year courses, but they primarily serve as a resource for students to confer on cases.

Global Impact
Believe it or not, HBS’s international presence may be underrated. With research centers and offices in cities as diverse as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Paris, and, as of Spring 2010, Shanghai, Harvard Business School truly has a global footprint. With the Class of 2010, 34% of the school’s MBA students were from outside the United States, representing 73 different countries, and half the cases produced annually by the HBS faculty deal with international business issues. “Global impact” is a popular buzzword in business school circles these days, but few schools can rival HBS in this area of management education, and the emphasis is expected to only increase with the advent of Dean Nohria and his international network.

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