Meet MIT Sloan’s MBA Class Of 2026

P&Q: Every January, P&Q publishes a “10 Business Schools to Watch” feature that highlights how schools are raising the bar and enhancing the student experience through innovation or expansion in programming or resources. What is one innovation that sets your school apart from your peer programs and makes you a business school to watch? Why is it so groundbreaking?

Nixon: “MIT Orbit, the new ‘one-stop shop’ for MIT entrepreneurs, uses data to offer personalized recommendations and support based on the specific needs of each startup. MIT Orbit further supports MIT-affiliated startups and MBA entrepreneurs by integrating a wide range of MIT resources into a single platform including how to access such essentials as funding, mentorship, and accelerators. By bringing together a wide range of stakeholders including students, alumni, faculty, and industry partners, MIT Orbit fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing. This year, MIT has added ChatMTC to its capabilities, which is a generative AI solution for entrepreneurs so they can easily gain and access knowledge based on the extensive entrepreneurship resources available at MIT. More broadly, the MIT Office of Innovation offers tools to explore MIT’s rich landscape of innovation. Complimenting this is InnovationHQ, a new home for this thriving community of innovators and entrepreneurs.”

P&Q: What types of programs do you offer to sharpen your students’ soft skills? What areas do you emphasize and how do you instill these skills in your students?

Nixon: “At MIT Sloan we recognize the critical importance of communication in effective leadership. All first-year MBAs at Sloan enroll in the Communication for Leaders course with an accompanying weekly lab during the core semester. The course and lab emphasize developing and delivering compelling presentations, communicating effectively across cultures, enhancing listening skills, and giving and receiving feedback – with an overall focus on helping students think strategically about how they communicate with diverse audiences in a variety of situations. New this year is exploring how the presence and use of AI affects the communicator-audience relationship; it includes the roles of both humans and AI in creating, adapting, and delivering messages to audiences; and the possible ways in which AI can better measure communication effectiveness.

Considering them as essential skills, the MIT Leadership Center focuses on soft skills development after the core semester. Through courses like ID Lab, MIT Sloan integrates real-time practice, research-based classroom learning, and integrated executive coaching, all underpinned by systems thinking. ID Lab, followed by Teams Lab and Organizations Lab, is a three-course sequence designed specifically for MBA leadership development at three levels; individual, team, and organization.”

P&Q: What types of programming – through classroom instruction, extracurriculars, and treks – does your school offer to expose students to country-specific and global business practices? What have students told you were the most educational and fun aspects of these activities?

Nixon: “Action Learning at MIT Sloan is pivotal to its mission. Each year, we offer approximately 20 credit-bearing courses, or “labs”, where student teams work with companies to tackle real-world challenges in real time. Many of our Action Learning labs feature an international or domestic travel component, immersing students in both the specific project work and the regional culture. Each year, student teams travel to approximately 20 countries to complete their Action Learning projects. For the upcoming academic year, we are excited to introduce two new courses: Generative AI Lab and Real Estate Lab. MIT Sloan is dedicated to continually updating our offerings to ensure that students are exposed to the most current topics and industries.

Other opportunities for country-specific learning and engagement include student club-organized treks and MBA Study Tours. MBA Study Tours are credit-bearing courses led and organized by students supported by faculty and staff mentors. In 2024, these tours included exploring sustainability in Scandinavia, professional sports in Europe, and entrepreneurship in New Zealand. Students report enhanced appreciation and understanding of regional economies and business cultures and strengthening bonds formed with peers during these explorations.”

P&Q: What are the most exciting new courses that your school is offering to MBAs this school year? What makes them so unique and valuable?  

Hanlon: “Faculty have introduced two new courses designed to equip managers and founders with the tools needed to excel in a future of generative AI: Generative AI for Managers and Generative AI Lab. Both courses are a deep dive into how generative AI works, its use cases, and business implications for those managing developer teams all the way to the executive level.

On the technical side, operations research faculty have designed Hands-on Deep Learning, a course focused on the engine behind predictive and generative AI with emphasis on developing a deep, hands-on understanding of how to build models to solve complex problems involving the processing of unstructured inputs (example: how do we detect if a driver is falling asleep?) and the generation of unstructured outputs (example: how do we summarize the content of a customer-service call transcript?).

In developing the curriculum, we leverage connections of MIT research centers, including MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), and Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI).“

P&Q: Who are two new professors who’ve joined your faculty in the past year? What do they teach and how will they be difference-makers in your MBA program?

Hanlon: “Catherine Wolfram, who joined MIT Sloan in the fall semester 2023, is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a Professor of Applied Economics. From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury. At Sloan, she teaches Climate and Energy in a Global Economy, leveraging her cutting-edge research in energy and development economics. The goal of the course is to equip Sloan students with the critical skills necessary to explore global climate solutions through a deeper understanding of technological advancements, international climate processes, financing alternatives, and the roles of business and trade in mitigating climate change impacts.”

We also recently hired Michiel Bakker, who will join our Information Technologies group this fall. Michiel will be co-teaching Generative AI for Managers along with a new Sloan Action Learning Lab on applying AI in real organizational contexts. Michiel earned his PhD at MIT in computer science and most recently worked at Google Deepmind. Michiel brings a deep technical expertise combined with relevant business experience to his research and teaching.

We are very excited about these two hires as they will further expand our knowledge base and course offerings in climate and AI to complement our core classes and electives in our programs.”

P&Q: What types of support does your career center and alumni provide to MBA students? How have these services and relationship made your graduates more competitive in the marketplace?

Brennan: “The MIT Sloan ecosystem is designed to support proactive and serendipitous career connections and opportunities. Each fall, the MIT Sloan Career Development Office (CDO) kicks off Career Core, a semester-long series that guides students in creating a career plan and helps them make new connections in their target industries. In addition to meeting with dedicated MBA career advisors, students are introduced to two important communities of Sloanies that will help them expand their networks and prepare them for a competitive job market: the MBA Career Peers and the Sloan Industry Advisors. Here, second-year MBA Career Peers serve as mentors to new MBAs as they explore career paths, navigate the recruiting process, and begin to build their network during their first year of the program.

The CDO-led MIT Sloan Industry Advisors program features experienced alumni from growing and emerging industries including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, consulting, entrepreneurship, finance, private equity, and more. These alumni are valuable industry connections with whom students can engage with to explore industries more deeply, prepare for niche recruiting processes, and gain insights on career strategy from those successfully navigating the industry. Making connections is a core element of any job search, and each year the CDO and the External Relations Offices host Sloanies Helping Sloanies, an event that brings over 400 students and alumni together to network and learn about opportunities.

In addition to those important community connections, MIT and MIT Sloan have invested in the best online research and AI resources to help students prepare 24/7, including Capital IQ, Big Interview, Pitchbook, LinkedIn Learning, and targeted industry preparation tools. Throughout the fall, the CDO team leads weekly opportunities for engagement including career advising appointments, drop-in hours, industry resume review groups, and newsletters to help students stay on track with their search. In the spring, we add Job Search Accountability Strategy Groups to support students’ real-time job searches with peer support and the guidance of an MBA Career Advisor. Our alumni and executive MBA communities show their support for classmates by sharing their company’s opportunities on the MIT Sloan job board. After graduation, alumni continue to have access to Job Search Accountability Strategy Groups – with new groups starting throughout the year – as well as career coaching, job search tools, and the Alumni Job Board.

During challenging times, it’s important for candidates to be proactive and prepared. Since 2020, we have organized an event at the beginning of each term to share updates on what we are seeing in the market and hearing from our recruiting partners. Our career advisors offer their top strategies for navigating changing markets, encouraging students to consider their needs and values, including their risk tolerance and where they can be flexible (geography, industry) to design a strategy with multiple pathways to a fulfilling career opportunity. These last two years have been challenging for job seekers, but the world’s employers need talent that can navigate through market volatility and complexity to identify opportunities for growth and impact. Sloanies are well-prepared to do this.”

Click on the links below to access in-depth profiles of first-year Sloan MBAs.

MBA Student	Hometown	Undergraduate Alma Mater	Last Employer
Rami Chamoun	Beirut, Lebanon	American University of Beirut	Strategy& Middle East
Jarrett Heflin	Wayzata, MN	Williams College	Ergatta
Carlin Lynch	East Greenwich, RI	University of Richmond	Macquarie Group
Jane MacGillivray	Calgary, Canada	University of British Columbia	Harry’s Inc.
Natalie Madden	Boston, MA	Middlebury College	Copley Equity Partners
Marshall Moten	Austin, TX	U.S. Military Academy	U.S. Army Special Operations Command
James Park	Seoul, South Korea	University of Chicago	Woori Venture Partners
Benjamin Paz	Santiago, Chile	Universidad de Chile	Matrix Consulting
Neva Unsal	Istanbul, Turkey	Tufts University	Amazon Turkey
Eliza Weaver	Winnetka, IL	Cornell University	Workday

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