Revising The MBA Playbook At Emory Goizueta, One Pressure Point At A Time

Brian Mitchell has spent enough time inside Emory Goizueta Business School to know the difference between a cosmetic update and a structural rethink. What’s underway in the Goizueta two-year MBA, he says, is neither a trendy overhaul nor a superficial reshuffle.

“I consider it more of a revision, a thorough revision, than a redesign,” Mitchell, associate dean of full-time MBA programs and Goizueta global strategy and initiatives, told Poets&Quants during an interview last fall in his office on Emory’s campus in the Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta. The distinction matters. In Mitchell’s telling, the work is about preserving the core fundamentals of an MBA while rethinking how they are delivered – and how new material earns its way into an already crowded curriculum.

Mitchell hit a major milestone at Emory earlier this year – 15 years at the school – and he approaches change like a long-tenured academic operator: Some material, he says, simply has to stay. The challenge is figuring out how to make room for innovation without pretending the classics are obsolete.

The early signal he watches is practical, not theoretical: whether students already feel equipped to engage in serious conversations as internships and recruiting begin to loom.

“They seem to have a high degree of confidence that what they’re learning, they’re able to translate that into meaningful conversations already at this point,” Mitchell says. “And that is great.”

Second-year MBA Jasmin Lopez says that readiness was part of what drew her to business school in the first place. “Coming from engineering, I realized that communication, presence, and leadership are some of the few real differentiators you can still have as AI becomes more capable,” she says.

ONBOARDING, NOT ORIENTATION

One of the clearest expressions of Goizueta’s revision shows up before classes even begin – and it starts with language.

“My philosophy is that we don’t do orientation, we do onboarding,” Mitchell says. “And there’s an enormous difference.”

Orientation, in his view, is transactional. Onboarding is about building organizational commitment, internal networks, and a sense of partnership between the school and its students. It is also where trust is built.

“There really hasn’t been a time when I haven’t felt supported,” says second-year MBA Henry Pereira. “The culture they’ve built around communication, empathy, and connectivity is real.”

Goizueta’s onboarding now spans two weeks – longer than at most peer MBA programs – and the structure is deliberate. The first week is community-focused, centered on team building, trust, and helping students reacclimate to the rhythms of school after time in the workforce. The second week pivots sharply toward preparation.

“That second week is fully AI and quantitative foundations,” Mitchell says.

The sequencing reflects a recurring MBA challenge: uneven preparation. Students arrive with different levels of comfort in statistics, finance, and analytics, yet the program itself is “very rigorous, especially on the quantitative side.” The goal is to level-set before the first graded class ever meets.

Just as important, Goizueta moved away from outsourcing that preparation.

“We’ve tried, like a lot of schools have tried, ‘Oh, let’s do a mod, MBA Math, or some external product,’” Mitchell says. “We’ve found over the years the most effective way to prepare students for what they’re going to see in JB Kurish’s finance class is JB Kurish saying, ‘Here’s what you’re going to see in my finance class.’”

The benefit goes beyond mechanics. Students hear expectations directly from faculty, understand classroom norms, and get to practice before “day one, before it gets real.”

“That two weeks goes by really, really fast,” Mitchell says. “But the feedback has been overwhelming that that model helps get students to a level of comfort and confidence that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to get them.”

For Maddie McMurray, that sense of connection began even before classes started. “Coming on campus for Welcome Weekend really confirmed everything I’d been told,” the second-year says. “The close-knit community wasn’t just talk – it was very easy to see myself here.”

REARRANGING A ZERO-SUM CURRICULUM

Once classes begin, the revision becomes even more visible. Marketing – a core course – was pulled out of the traditional semester flow and moved to the very front of the academic experience.

Mitchell’s explanation is refreshingly unsentimental. “The curriculum is a zero-sum game,” he says. If a program wants to add something new – AI content, additional career preparation – something else has to move.

Marketing now runs as a two-week accelerated course immediately after onboarding. Students spend “all day every day” immersed in the subject, taught by two marketing professors who cross-teach between sections.

The reaction has been familiar but intensified. Students who expected to enjoy marketing do. Others who once insisted they were “not marketers” often change their minds. More telling, Mitchell says, is what happens later.

“Now what I’m hearing is they want more of it,” he says, even as the course cycles back into the curriculum later on.

The rearrangement also allowed Goizueta to rethink academic pressure points. After an early stretch of six classes, the semester hits a midpoint transition. Economics and operations run as half-semester courses and then drop off, reducing the load from six courses to five just as recruiting accelerates.

“That now feels a little bit lighter,” Mitchell says, “right at the time recruiting picks up.”

Students say that alignment between academics and recruiting is tangible.

“The recruiting process exceeded every expectation,” says second-year Braden Skripak Gordon. “The career center, the professors, the students – everyone was invested.”

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