Email from Yale's Dean

The following is an excerpt from Dean Podolny summarizing the new curriculum:

1. Orientation to Management

The first six weeks consist of a series of courses designed to develop the basic skills and language of management. This first segment will also provide structured opportunities through class work and other exercises for the exploration of your career goals and aspirations.

2. Organizational Perspectives

This twelve-week segment is made up of eight interdisciplinary courses organized around key organizational roles that a manager must engage in order to achieve success. Instead of being taught Finance, Marketing, Economics and other management subjects in discrete, unconnected classes, you will learn about the functional management disciplines in a series of multidisciplinary team-taught courses that will allow you to develop a coherent, integrated view of management practice. This segment also includes a two-week international experience scheduled in January.

3. Integrative Leadership Perspective

The final six weeks of the year will bring together the material you have learned in a series of cases focused around managerial challenges in organizations scaled from a small entrepreneurial start-up to a large corporation or social sector organization.

My first thought with Yale SOM's changes was "wow, sounds really cool!" Then I read the line about the 2-week international scheduled trip in January and I thought "man, cool just got cooler!" Then my quantitative brain starting calculating the weeks and 6 + 12 + 6 = 24. I'm not sure if the 2 week trip is part of the 12 weeks, but assuming it's not, 2 + 1 (spring break) + 1 (Thanksgiving) + 4 (Christmas break) = 8. 24 + 8 = 32... Does this mean that my summer break is 52 - 32 = 20 weeks long?!?! I must be missing school weeks somewhere, I wonder how everything will add up.