Student Stories
Find out what it's like to take an HBS Online course from current and past learners.
Find out what it's like to take an HBS Online course from current and past learners.
The course content is well designed and helps investors get a basic understanding of what sustainable finance is, its challenges, the path forward, and its key players.
Daily, I use the accounting principles succinctly enumerated by Professor Narayanan. I especially use what I learned in the volunteer work that I do as a board member for two nonprofit organizations.
Sustainable Business Strategy should be required learning for everyone, regardless of their sector or beliefs about business. Professor Henderson’s approach empowered me with a fundamental understanding of economic systems, in the U.S. and abroad, in order to make it possible for me to question the assumptions upon which they are built and challenge me to rethink how we construct entities—public and private—to ensure long-term success.
HBS Online doesn't teach you knowledge or prescribe to any cookie-cutter solutions to problems. Rather, it teaches you how to think about business problems and arrive at a solution yourself.
This course is excellent for executives and managers who constantly grapple with finding new ways to make their work impactful and useful for their target audience.
An excellent course: world-class content, perfect delivery, excellent and diverse cohort, and finally wonderful collaboration with both the organizers and the class.
I'd never taken any official coursework in negotiation. I was drawn to learning to master a skill that would help me in both my personal and professional life.
The CORe program will help me to better understand the world around me…and to hit the ground running in any job after graduation.
No matter the size, depth, or reach of any organization or your role in that organization, a foundational understanding of the finances that drive performance is essential. Mihir’s style is one that is inviting, energetic, and thought-enhancing. He really instills the fundamental belief that in our careers we are really only there to complete one task and that is ‘think.’ He makes you ‘think’ about what we are viewing, turn it over, and makes you ‘think’ about what falls apart and how to put it back together.
I expected CORe to be much more of an overview. I never was expecting the depth that it truly delivered. I received a strong foundation to be confident enough to build my own startup.
CORe has provided me a dynamic understanding of how to measure and understand those outcomes. I can now confidently translate statistical data into a graphical presentation or employ different statistical techniques to help me better understand the pulse of student progress.
Professor Wheeler helped me to change the way I think about negotiation. Negotiation can be complex and chaotic, but if you seek to understand and embrace that chaos instead of fearing it, you can achieve outcomes better than your expectations.
Mihir Desai was able to bring a relatively dry and inscrutable page of numbers to life in a highly engaging and interactive way. He has a great teaching style: clear, sharp, entertaining, and challenging. Mihir was able to truly engage our leaders of all levels of financial experience on the key levers of performance and how this applies to their own businesses.
The notion that economic stability is mutually exclusive from creativity, from non-profits at large, is something I have recently committed myself to debunking. I took CORe to arm myself with the tools and language of business for this reason, to move my art forward responsibly.
I believe anyone looking to better understand business strategy would gain a lot from this course.
My favorite part of Entrepreneurship Essentials was the financing and equity module. It taught me the basics of how to look at spreadsheets and make sense of them—one of the most vital things for any company or start-up to understand.
I honestly use something from CORe nearly every day. In general, I have a much better appreciation for my client's business.
The business skills and concepts I learned through CORe will be invaluable in helping me assess the Chinese market, the demand and pricing of our service, and how to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.
I now have a better understanding of sustainability and which companies are doing it right. I’m armed with talking points proving that sustainability is good for business, the environment and its people.
The program gave me a framework and a great toolbox for the cases that I am currently developing.
The collaborative environment encourages you to help your peers learn and will help you become engaged in the material. It's not an easy program, but every ounce of effort you put into CORe will yield results in your understanding of the complex world of business.
I think what I took from CORe or what I enjoyed was how it shaped me to think and apply all concepts simultaneously.
Not only was I able to expand my network so that I know someone in every major city around the world, but it also helped me land a job at a company that I absolutely love.
I'm now more mindful of how my colleagues are experiencing me, and less averse to having difficult conversations.
Already, knowing the fundamentals of business has deepened my understanding of the context and consequences of the commercial disputes I manage daily.
While I originally enrolled in CORe to determine if I wanted to pursue an MBA, I ended up using the knowledge I gained from CORe to interview for and land my current job.
I now feel that I have a broad overview of finance and can approach topics with a strong, integrated framework instead of approaching them in isolation.
Those skills are all very useful, but I think my biggest takeaway from CORe is a new perspective on complex business challenges. This lens has given me a more balanced perspective on sensitive topics like LIFO reserves, minimum wage, and drug pricing that will make me a more informed citizen and wiser leader.
We leverage HBS Online’s programs to reach employees and executives across our global organization. Participants develop a practical understanding of critical topics like strategic thinking, innovation, management, finance, and negotiations – all rooted in a social learning environment. This approach has made them more effective and engaged members of our organization, and eager to learn more.
A year after finishing CORe, all three classes have been invaluable in my first two quarters in school. I am able to get more out of class because I already have the fundamentals.
CORe will challenge you to stretch yourself. But if you put in the hours and the hard work, it will prove to be an extraordinarily rewarding experience.
Within five days of finishing the course, I had a plan of action for a major part of our business and presented it to our corporate executive. It applied the theories of the customers' Job to be Done and caused us to re-think our strategy to get the customer to “hire” us over the competition.
I found the content [in Economics for Managers] incredibly eye-opening to how the world worked around me, as well as helping to understand several foreign and long-forgotten concepts about how businesses and economies function.
As a consultant running a boutique management and technology consulting practice, I have already started applying what I have learned in Disruptive Strategy towards my own business.
I spent much of my college career fervently annotating novels and loved every minute of it but knew that my focus post college was going to be business.
Learning about disruption theories has proven not only applicable within a business context, but broadly as a predictive prescription toward challenges in life as a whole.
Reading a balance sheet was completely alien to me. Since taking Financial Accounting, I’ve been keeping track of my company’s annual reports, and the accounting that I learned helps me in understanding where the business may head in the future. I’ve also been tracking a few other companies for investment purposes, and I’ve realized that I can make more informed decisions with my improved knowledge of company financials.
The virtual, interactive platform was unique. I was continuously engaged with the course's material and learned a lot from my peers.
By recognizing that every student brought with her or him a wealth of lived experiences, HBS Online empowered me to learn much more from peers than I had imagined.
Participating in the student discussions and answering cold calls was empowering. It ignited a drive within me to learn and absorb as much as I could.
…fun, exciting, and powerful. I believe I learned a lot through this course that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere with my liberal arts education.
By learning these essential business skills, I now feel more prepared to advance scientific discoveries; raising capital, leading a team, developing strategic partnerships with established pharmaceuticals, and other crucial activities are now even clearer to me because of CORe.
The course, through its excellent design, has given me an approach and the confidence to deal with disruption either as an opportunity or a business risk.
I'm using regression analysis and other statistical concepts from Business Analytics to build predictive models, analyze trends, and conduct surveys and hypothesis testing. Business Analytics has helped me pursue a career in data analytics and land a job as a Business Intelligence Analyst at Ministry of Justice New Zealand. I'm leading a few modelling and reporting projects across the Ministry using the knowledge I gained from the course.
I was considering taking economics and accounting classes on the side while completing my master’s degree. However, I realized that through Harvard Business School Online I could get the same experiences I could get in a classroom over time all in only a few months.
…at the end of four weeks you essentially feel like you have taken a graduate course, but have had some fun along the way
Additionally, the program allowed me to acquire a more holistic view of the services we provide, and it is helping me develop new ideas to innovate and generate different sources of revenue.
Taking Entrepreneurship Essentials was an incredible opportunity to learn from the best and to be in a class full of great minds.
The framework of Disruptive Strategy helps you to make strategic thinking something that you do every day, as opposed to an exercise to get a strategic plan put together.
The course provides a blueprint for launching a tech startup. For a founder, an early joiner, or a venture capitalist, it’s like receiving the map and route that enables you to navigate the startup process and adapt to the realities that come up.
If you're looking for more information on how Harvard Business School Online programs can teach you the essential skills you need for success, request more information today.