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This is a demanding program, but we’ll do everything we can to make it more bearable and as hassle-free as possible. Our support staff takes great pride in the concept of southern hospitality! Once you arrive for a residency period, you’ll find that we have taken care of everything: hotel reservations, transportation, materials, meals, study rooms, computer connections, and even the occasional sporting event or evening on the town. Class sessions start every 90 minutes with 75 minutes of instruction and 15 minutes to take a break or interact with the professor.
Here’s what a typical day might include:
6:45
Meet some friends for a quick run or work out
7:30
Vans transport you from the hotel to class in time for a light breakfast
8:00
First Session: A discussion of the strategy case your team prepared last night. There is no lecture — just class discussion — and the accounting professor leading the discussion utilizes some of the slides your team pulled together to share your analysis of a key point with the rest of the class.
9:30
Second Session: An operations management professor picks up where the case discussion left off. She uses a computer simulation to illustrate the application of production planning options to address the problems you uncovered in your case analysis. The class ends with a discussion of where failures to link suppliers severely limits the ability to fully utilize the tool, and a couple of classmates share stories of where they have seen success in overcoming these problems. You take notes because what they are discussing is directly relevant to your team’s Application Project.
11:00
Third Session: A management professor has you involved in a three-way negotiation. It’s another installment of the Volunteer Aerospace Research saga. VAR is the mythical company the faculty features in their yearlong mega case, and this time it’s you, your customer, and your key supplier negotiating on how the application of enterprise planning software will be used to better link your operations together. You totally bomb the negotiation, but that is okay because you come out of the debrief with a long list of takeaways. You are starting to see how the problems identified in the morning’s sessions might be addressed in your part of the industry’s supply chain.
12:30
Time for the quick working lunch that is always catered in. Your advisor joins your Application Project team and you discuss how you might go about implementing the ideas that you’ve been discussing in class. You agree to meet online between the residency periods to carry on the conversation.
1:30
Fourth Session: A statistics professor picks up where he left off yesterday and you start to see the power of using this analytical technique to sort out a problem that has had your IPT stumped for the past three months. More notes for ideas to try when you get back to work.
3:00
Fifth Session: It’s finance and you’re studying how something called “real options” can be used as an analytical tool to assess alternatives and make strategic investments. It sounds like bleeding-edge stuff, but you are less skeptical when the professor walks you through an example he was personally involved in implementing.
4:30
You meet with your advisor to discuss your research project, or catch up with your personal development coach.
7:00
Team study session: Two hours later, you’ve finally figured where the spreadsheet analysis was off and you’re now in good shape for tomorrow’s classes.
9:30
Time to celebrate a little. You find a dozen classmates in the hotel's AMBA hospitality room right down the hall and adhere to the MBA mantra: “Work hard, then play hard.”
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