We continue with our Real Humans: MBA Students series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Established in 1914, MIT’s Sloan School of Management MBA program emphasizes innovation through a combination of lectures, team projects, and hands-on Action Learning Labs.
Sloan’s mission is to develop principled, innovative leaders, who improve the world and generate ideas that advance management practices. Students, for the most part, get to tailor their education toward this goal. Sloan prescribes only a semester of core courses—unlike most programs, which require a full year—followed by the freedom of choosing their studies for the rest of the MBA. Woven into the MBA program are hands-on learning opportunities, including Action Learning labs, MIT Sloan Intensive Period, and the MIT Independent Activities Period.
416 people chose to pursue their MBA education at MIT Sloan this year. The new Class of 2021 earned an average GPA of 3.6 during their undergraduate years. Engineering had been the most popular major, as 33 percent had studied it. This was followed by economics, which 21 percent of the class had majored in. Another 18 percent had studied business/commerce and 13 percent humanities/social sciences. Eleven percent pursued math/science and two percent came from a computer sciences background. Overall, the group averaged a GMAT score of 727, with the median landing at 730 and range running between 690 and 760. For those who took the GRE, the middle 80 percent scores ranged between 156 and 168 for both the Quant and Verbal sections.
International students comprise 42 percent of the Class of 2021, with 54 countries represented. Women make up 41 percent of the 2021 class. Altogether, they arrived on campus with an average of five years of work experience. Twenty-six percent had pre-MBA work experience in consulting, followed by 18 percent in tech/media/telecom. Seventeen percent of the class came from financial services and healthcare/life sciences sourced 9 percent of the new students.
The five Sloan students profiled here are future leaders who all hope to innovate within the spaces they hope to enter after graduation. Read on for why they wanted to become part of the Sloan community, what they hope to accomplish and their advice for being successful in the admissions process.
