How Harvard Gets its Best and Brightest
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
What you take out of college is what you put into it. College isn't for everyone, so don't attend if you’re not willing to put in the time and effort, but you can learn so much if you do the work, pay attention, and get involved. This meme that education is a waste of time needs to be put to rest.
Why do you say that?
I’d argue that being well rounded, social, and able to converse on many different subjects will serve you a million times over in your startup. There's far more to building a successful startup than a good idea, design, and code. That’s the easy part and it’ll certainly get you off the ground. But to truly run a successful startup, every aspect of your life and your personality will be tapped. Business by its very nature is a social thing between people and a liberal arts education, and the “college experience,” will serve you well in getting past that first stage and on your way to a legitimate business. If you want to be running things rather than working for someone, you need these qualities.
Disclaimer: I graduated from Yale in 2006 with a Psychology degree after being Computer Science for the first two years. Programming just wasn’t for me. Psychology wasn’t exactly my major of choice (although, lots of it is very thought provoking), but it allowed me the most freedom to choose the courses I wanted.
If your goal is to be a good technology entrepreneur, it's probably worth noting that of all of today's technology leaders with entrepreneurial backgrounds, either zero or very few of them actually studied entrepreneurship or business in school (as a major).
If your goal is to be a well-rounded individual, then learning a bit about a plethora of different fields certainly doesn't hurt.
If your goal is to make a lot of money, then a traditional liberal arts education can be your ticket (historically speaking, anyway) to a well-paying, and hopefully otherwise rewarding, career.
If your goal is to learn as much as possible about everything, then you'll definitely feel at home in a liberal arts environment.
It's a very flexible tool for life, and in a very quickly-moving economic climate such as this, flexibility is key, as any recently laid-off Class of 2005-2008 investment banker will tell you.
The excess demand created by these non-serious people going to college has a lot to do with cost inflation.
Much of the MBA class is Consulting & Investment Banking types, but there are plenty of entrepreneurs & future entrepreneurs at Harvard Business School.
Anyone interested in HBS should read Philip Delves Broughton's book "Ahead of the Curve" about his experience there.
1. It is really how for driven and greedy, (please don't neg me), people to channel their energy into money making, as that is the emphasis.
2. The brand power. It will unlock you doors just b/c of the name, especially in the corporate world. Think of it, nobody will get fired b/c they hired a Harvard grad, just as as nobody will get fired b/c they use java, or xml.
3. Connections. Lot of smart people, and some of them will be bound to be somewhat important one day, so they can help you out. the proverbial old-boys-club kinda of thing. This was true, especially during the wall street's financial bubble madness.
To get a inside look, check this out. It is a good read. http://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/dp...
If you are looking into technology/mobile/internet companies, I am not sure I could recommend it. HBS doesn't quiet get tech. Since you are working with case studies, you by default are looking/studying the past, and not the future. For traditional businesses, yes. Fedex was started there (as a class project), so my favorite dessert place (Finales).
Disclaimer: I haven't gone to HBS, but I know people that have, and have been to few of their classes as an observer, and took some classes at Harvard Extension. (part of fas, not hbs), but who were taught by HBS professors..
Yes, HBS is all about the case method for its classes. It's actually a great way to learn. It is very time consuming, all-encompassing, and incredibly powerful if you commit yourself to it rather than blow it off the way many post-consulting, post-finance students may. The case studies will give you some tools that are really helpful in organizing a business, but they will not show you how to do it. The only way to learn how to start a company (in my opinion) is to actually do it yourself. The reason HBS is a great place to start a company is that you have access to all of Harvard, MIT, Babson, Boston University, several world-class hospitals, and many venture capitalists in the Boston area. HBS offers a protected time where you can get successful entrepreneurs (your professors, case protagonists who come in, classmates, etc) to help you come up with ideas, get in contact with people, and create something of enduring value. You are surrounded by classmates from any industry you could imagine who are connected at the very top who are excited to just have lunch and talk about whatever you want to talk about.
While it's true that many people out of HBS go to work at a company, the statistics show that more than 50% of HBS graduates ultimately do start their own companies, often only a couple years after leaving HBS. If you look at the sorts of companies they start there are many really great companies, not just random me-too sorts of small tech companies based on relatively thin IP.
I think it's really easy to dismiss a place like HBS as a place that just churns out consultants and crappy I-bankers. In all honesty I looked at HBS, and MBA programs in general, like that a few years ago too. I was a techy who thought most business people only had a limited amount to add to any true entrepreneurial endeavor. I still think that's the case for many business types and surely HBS still pumps out its fair share of consultants and crappy-douchebag I-bankers. Nevertheless, there are also some world-class entrepreneurs there. People who will and have changed the world in far more significant ways than most technical folks who think the way I used to will ever really appreciate.
Also, just for the record, I know there are a group of HBS'ers who do read HN regularly and have attended Startup School. I for one have not signed up for hndir.com yet and I'm guessing most of them haven't either. I have my yahoo mail account that I'll use to sign up for random sites, but I'm a bit more selective about how I use my .edu account and it's not clear from the website that they won't use this for spam. Overall I like the idea though. Just my 2 cents.
I loved MIT but I can say without a doubt (unless things have changed dramatically in the last 9 months) that you don't see flyers recruiting for startups, and startup CEOs/CTOs tend to be more than a stone's throw away. The caveat here is that a lot of (compsci) professors at MIT were indeed at one point involved in a startup of some sort, but it's not the kind of thing that everyone knows about (so they might be a stone's throw away, but in disguise, which is effectively the same thing). Almost nothing about being at MIT made me think "after school I want to be involved in a startup". Ironically, I now work for one.
I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same because the CS departments are comparable.
Comparable != same. They're both good, but they're different.