What does a year look like on the Imperial Full-Time MBA?

So you’re interested in an MBA and Imperial College Business School’s Full-Time MBA has piqued your interest. You can talk to students about their experience on the programme online, you can read about all about the different parts of the programme, but at a glance, what does a year really look like on the Full-Time MBA at Imperial?

Find out below in our Full-Time MBA highlights reel.

Autumn: setting up for success on the MBA

Induction week

You’ve attended information sessions or online webinars, you’ve laboured over your application, passed through the interview and you’ve made it on the Full-Time MBA! To welcome you onto the programme, all students have a highly engaging, social and hands-on induction week.

There are a lot of new faces to meet – 74 students in the Full-Time MBA class of 2018-19 – so induction week is not only a crash course on beginning your MBA, but also the beginning of lifelong friendships. The Leadership and Teambuilding Day during Induction helps to foster these connections very quickly through a high ropes and climbing towers course which requires a high level of trust and empathy.

Core one modules

The MBA is not just about networking, the knowledge and skills are so integral to the journey. After Induction Week, students launch straight into their first set of core modules. These modules begin to build students’ foundation in business, beginning with Accounting, Business Economics, Design Thinking and Innovative Problem Solving, Organisational Behaviour and Strategic Problem Solving.

Careers Week

In the first term of the Full-Time MBA, Imperial College Business School Careers host a Careers Week with all students on the programme. Students attend compulsory sessions and tailored events and workshops that they can choose depending on their career interests.

Vidhi Dwivedi is a Full-Time MBA student who participated in the entrepreneurship session hosted by the Imperial Enterprise Lab. She says, “It was one of the busiest yet most insightful events during Careers Week in all senses. The session is as useful for a professional like me who wishes to return to the corporate world, as it is for those wanting to start their own business straight out of the MBA.”

Natural History Museum

We like to think that we put on one of the best welcome parties in town! After dark, the Natural History Museum, which is just two doors down from Imperial, closes its doors to the public and comes alive after dark for a special welcome event to kickstart the academic year.

The event brings together students across all programmes at Imperial College Business School and is a spectacular way to mark the beginning of their journey. .

Core two modules

Two months into the programme, it’s time to commence the second set of core modules: Corporate Finance, Marketing and Strategy. For Carra Torres, a student in our current class, the module she found most challenging was Corporate Finance, especially not coming from a non-finance or quant background:

I definitely felt I had a huge learning curve when it came to understanding the financial modules, but the Professor for our Corporate Finance module, Franklin Allen was amazing. He’s really good at explaining things in a way that everybody can understand…I’m not going to work in finance after my MBA but I totally get the perspective that you need to have when you’re making big investment or financial decisions.

Full-Time MBA Christmas social

Christmas cheer is in abundance around campus all month with the Natural History Museum turning festive with a beautiful ice-skating rink and Winter Wonderland just a hop and skip away in Hyde Park.

Another highlight of this term is the Full-Time MBA Christmas dinner. Students get to celebrate an early Christmas with their classmates, complete with a ‘Secret Santa’ gift giving. This year’s dinner was held at the beautiful Royal Garden Hotel.

Winter: final core modules and group projects

Core 3 and 4 modules

After an inspiring few days abroad, students return to campus ready to get stuck into the last core modules. This term it’s Decision Analytics, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Investments and Risk Management, Macroeconomics and Operations.

Entrepreneurial Journey/Group Consulting Project

It’s not all core modules in January, this month also marks the start of their key project. The Entrepreneurial Journey is a live, team-based entrepreneurial project where students develop a product from beginning to end, creating a full-fledged business proposition that they pitch to a panel of investors to compete for a monetary prize. One of last year’s Full-Time MBA student, Samantha Madigan said, “The most rewarding part of working with Uteepi on the Entrepreneurial Journey was seeing the ideas being developed into a reality and the launch of the company this summer, which has already started generating revenue.”

The other project they can choose is the Group Consulting Project. In teams, students take on the role of a team of consultants for a company working on a real-life business problem. Groups work directly with the client during the project and are also assigned an informal mentor who is an alumnus of the Imperial MBA and currently engaged in consulting.

Spring: learning innovation, international study tour and customising your study

Imperial Innovation Challenge

The Imperial Innovation Challenge is an engaging week dedicated to sustainable innovation, and is an opportunity for students to deep dive into issues of crucial importance to business and society.

The theme of this year’s Challenge was: The Solar Economy: Harnessing the Disruption of Digital Energy. During the programme, students were tasked with developing a business concept that employs a new business model to re-configure the way an existing technology is adopted by consumers. Students then presented their ideas to their class and were judged by a panel.

Elective pathways

After returning to campus from their incredible week abroad, students return to campus to begin their electives. We offer students on the MBA a wide portfolio of electives so they can really tailor their learnings to their career goals and interests.

There are four elective pathways: Finance, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Strategic Management and Analytics and Marketing. Electives are offered in different formats and can range between on campus or online, and can sometimes be shared across the MBA programme portfolio and offered jointly with MSc students.

Summer: putting MBA learnings into practice on an international exchange, internship, individual project and Capstone

Exchange opportunities (optional)

Our option exchange programme allows students to choose to study some of their electives at one of our partner schools abroad. This gives students the opportunity to learn from the expert faculty in another country and opens up international working opportunities. We have partner schools in cities such as Paris, Shanghai, Switzerland, Texas and more. View the full list of institutions on offer here.

Perspectives on Practice

In June, the programme begins to wrap up with the Perspectives on Practice final pieces of coursework. Lasting between two to three months, students can choose to undertake an internship or work on an Individual Project. The aim of both these options is to provide an opportunity for students to integrate and synthesise all of their learnings on the MBA to one final piece of work.

For the internship, students can choose a company they are interested in. Support will be provided from our Careers team in securing placements. The alternative option, the individual project, is an individual consulting project tailored to a specific organisation or for those with an entrepreneurial interest, it can be a business plan.

Both the internship and individual project can act as a great recruitment tool, springboarding students to a future career opportunity.

The grand finale: Capstone

You won’t even believe it, but in a blink of an eye, it’s the end of the programme and a year has passed since the MBA journey began. All students on the programme come together for a final time for Capstone, the culmination of the MBA studies.

This two-day intensive course is designed to enhance students’ managerial knowledge and communication competencies. It is also an opportunity to celebrate your achievements on the programme and reconnect with your cohort one last time as MBA students, as the next time you are all brought together will be as graduates at your incredible ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall.