MBA Your Way!

It’s almost time for course registration! A great feature of the Kelley Direct MBA curriculum is that it offers 50% electives across seven different specializations. Students can customize their experience to exactly what their needs may be, from broadening their skill set to deepening their expertise. I’d love to share these two tips on how I approach course registration and picking electives!

Know what electives are offered! There’s over a hundred electives to pick from at Kelley, and you can access all these course descriptions at any time. Some courses are only offered during certain terms of the year and some courses require prerequisites to be completed beforehand. Keep this in mind when you’re starting to build your schedule.

Know what you want! Once you’ve narrowed your list to available electives, then you can further narrow the list to what you want to learn. You can pick an elective to explore something entirely new, to go on an immersion/global trip, to develop your professional skills, and more. There’s lots of exciting options, so you’ll also want to be strategic with your planning to build that ideal schedule.

What this looked like for me:

The Kelley Direct MBA program starts you off with an integrated core experience that helps you develop a strong business foundation. Coming from a non-traditional background, nearly all these classes were entirely new to me, so I also used these classes to better understand where my skill gaps are and how I can fill them.

In my first quarter, I found the course on organizational behavioral interesting and started thinking about team dynamics and strategy. In my second quarter, I loved the course on quantitative analysis and then started thinking about data science and analytics. With this information, I knew I wanted to explore business analytics and picked electives on predictive analytics and simulations/optimizations.

I selected my first electives to explore an area I was interested in specializing in, and that worked for me! With the flexibility to move at your own pace and to adapt your courses to you, you’ll find what works for you too. There are also academic coaches, career coaches, and additional resources along the way to help inform your elective choices and set you up for long-term success.

Next time, I’ll dive a bit deeper into the dual-degree option and how I decided to also pursue a Master of Science in Business Analytics!