A Day In The Life Of An HBS Student

So what’s it really like to be an HBS student? How do you spend your time?

While every day is different, I will provide an illustrative day’s schedule:

• 6:45: Wake-up, eat a quick breakfast, print off materials for the day
• 7:30 – 8:30: Meet with Learning Team and discuss cases
• 8:40 – 10:00: Attend first class, Leadership and Organizational Behavior
• 10:00 – 10:20: Break, discuss case with sectionmates, grab a coffee, and make plans for lunch
• 10:20 – 11:40: Attend second class, Finance I
• 11:40 – 12:20: Lunch with friends in Spangler
• 12:30 – 2:00: Read a case for the next day
• 2:00 – 3:00: Workout with friends at Shad gym (a world-class fitness facility)
• 3:00 – 4:00: Attend a marketing industry workshop led by my section mate
• 4:00 – 5:00: Attend talk about the financial crisis by CEO of major bank
• 5:00 – 6:00: Meet with Social Enterprise Club Conference Planning team to divide upcoming tasks
• 6:00 – 7:30: Grab dinner with friends in Harvard Square
• 8:00 – 11:00: Prepare remainder of cases for next day

It is the afternoon, after classes are over, where the most variability in students’ schedules lies. Common activities including working out or sports, club meetings, networking events, hearing a speaker, and studying. Many nights also include group dinners, bar hopping, game nights, music and theater put on by students, or even traveling to various destinations around the globe. While you can engineer your schedule any way you want, one thing is for certain: you will absolutely never be bored.

HBS's Housing

HBS is one of the only business schools that has a full campus to itself. As a result, the majority of students choose to live in dorms or 1-3 bedroom apartments right on campus. A quarter of the students live across the Charles River in Cambridge and walk 5-15 minutes to campus, while a handful live in nearby Allston or other neighborhoods. Air-conditioned, covered parking is available on campus, but it’s not cheap. You’re looking at approximately $2,000 per year to park your vehicle on campus.

Further residential information can be found at: www.hbs.edu/mba/studentlife/residentiallife.html.

Students

“What are the students like?” is a common inquiry about any school. I think it’s an unfair question because in a program with 1,800 people, you’re bound to find both people you adore and people you abhor. That said, I will do my best to identify the common threads you’ll find that run through most students and the differences in people that have been purposefully designed by the Admissions Board.

The vast majority of HBS students are exceptionally smart and extremely qualified in their past career. They are ambitious, well-spoken, intellectual, academically rigorous, and competitive. Most could be described as “Type A” people who are very achievement-oriented - they are “go-getters.”

It is also possible to identify the common “tribes” of people that the HBS Admissions Board is so deliberate about creating at HBS. It is a running joke (that seems to have merit) that HBS, when compared to other MBA programs, is disposed toward the “Three M’s”: McKinsey, Mormons, and Military.

Indeed, every section is guaranteed to have roughly 10% McKinsey consultants, a few Mormons and a few folks with military backgrounds.

Another group is the internationals: Chinese and Indian students are common, along with a speckling of many other nationalities including but not limited to: Singaporean, French, Japanese, English, Mexican, Canadian, and various African nations.

It’s also easy to see divides by career. Financial professionals and consultants are common, while marketing, non-profit, manufacturing, and technology professionals are present, but less common.

In a nutshell, while most students are high-achieving, accomplished individuals, there is a wide diversity across professions, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, ages, and sexual orientations.

HBS's Dating Scene

For the singles, you hear complaints that the community starts to feel too small after two years, but I would say the dating scene is quite robust overall. HBS is an extremely social place with events occurring on a near-nightly basis. It’s big enough to where you haven’t completely played the field within a few months. Every section has a few couples that form, and many relationships coming out of HBS end up in marriage. What’s more, if the HBS crowd isn’t your romantic type, you have many other universities (Boston University, MIT, Tufts, etc) and an entire major city filled with young professionals minutes away.

Fortunately for the partners, HBS is quite partner-friendly. As the average age is 26 or 27, many students come to HBS with partners and children, and there is a strong community of families that enjoy the playgrounds, open fields, and interaction among each other’s rugrats.