Part-time MBA | Core Curriculum & Orientation

The mandatory Langone LAB experience will include three key components:

• An orientation to the program. LAB begins officially on campus in NYC with an all-day orientation to the Langone Part-time MBA program. Plan on taking the day off from work as it will be a full working day at Stern. This will include sessions on academics, student life, and much more - as well as networking sessions with classmates. 
• The 1.5 credit core course in Strategic Communication. You will have class in-person during the three day LAB program. There will also be required asynchronous classwork pre- and post-Langone LAB. Details and dates will be shared when available.
• Social/networking activities and events.

Spring 2025 Langone LAB

The required LAB experience will span three full days in NYC:

• Friday, January 24
• Saturday, January 25
• Sunday, January 26

For the portions of LAB conducted in-person in New York City, students are responsible for any transportation and/or accommodation needed to attend Langone LAB.

The core curriculum is designed to give a broad-based exposure to all key areas of business. Some classes may be waived and replaced if certain criteria are met in advance (e.g., prior degrees, proficiency exam, CPA, etc.).

Students typically complete their first core courses with their Blocks, assigned at Langone LAB. 

Strategic Communication

Course Description: This course supports your success as an effective communicator, innovator and business leader in an age that demands immediacy, authenticity, and transparency. Translating your ideas into successful initiatives requires a communication discipline with the capacity to connect with multiple audiences from diverse cultural, intellectual and professional backgrounds. Strategic Communication (formerly Business Communication) introduces the basics of communication strategy and persuasion: audience analysis, communicator credibility, and message construction and delivery. Written and oral presentation assignments derive from cases that focus on communication strategy. Students receive significant feedback and coaching to improve presentation and writing effectiveness. Students will also examine aligning an organization's message with its business strategy and stakeholder expectations to achieve and maintain a strong reputation.

Collaboration, Conflict, and Negotiation

Course Description: Successful managers know how to collaborate with other people effectively and how to resolve conflicts constructively. The goal of this course is to teach students the fundamentals of managing collaboration and conflict in one-on-one and small group settings. Our objective is to enhance students' interpersonal skills at their jobs. Drawing from the latest findings in managerial psychology, we cover the fundamentals of effective negotiation, communication, and persuasion. Special topics include getting buy-in, coping with resistance, and building coalitions.

Financial Accounting & Reporting

Course Description: Accounting reports are an important means of communication with investors. This course focuses on the development analysis and use of these reports. It provides an understanding of what these reports contain what assumptions and concepts accountants use to prepare them and why they use those assumptions and concepts. The course uses simple examples to provide students with a clear understanding of accounting concepts. It stresses the ability to apply these concepts to real world cases which by their very nature are complex and ambiguous. In addition to text oriented materials, the classes also include cases so that students can discuss applications of basic concepts actual financial reports and articles from newspapers. In addition to traditional introductory topics, other topics may include mergers and acquisitions purchase and pooling free cash flow and financial statement analysis.

Firms & Markets

Course Description: This course provides insight into how markets work. The first part of the course starts with the study of decision making by consumers and firms and concludes with a fundamental result in economics a set of conditions under which markets function efficiently. The second part of the course focuses on situations when for one reason or another markets don't work efficiently. The emphasis is on strategic behavior as modeled by game theory.

Foundations of Finance

Course Description: This is a quantitative course introducing the fundamental principles of asset valuation within the framework of modern portfolio theory. The key analytical concepts are present value option value risk-diversification and arbitrage. These tools are used to value stocks bonds options and other derivatives with applications to the structure of financial markets portfolio selection and risk management.

Leadership in Organizations

Course Description: Organizations of all types face significant challenges. These include the difficulty of coping with highly dynamic business environments, the complexity of managing global enterprises, how to shape a healthy corporate culture managing politics, and conflict between individuals and organizational units motivating a highly mobile and every changing workforce managing and harnessing intellectual capital and so on. Such challenges and how organizational leaders can deal with them are the subject of this course. The course has two major components. The first is "macro" in nature. It focuses on organizational level issues, such as how an organization should be designed to best achieve its goals and how culture and control affect organizational dynamics. The second part is more "micro" in nature. It focuses on employee-related challenges such as how to get things done in politically sensitive environments, evaluate and reward people, and manage teams. The macro component is concerned with overall organizational performance while the micro component is concerned with managing individual and group effectiveness. And leadership is the linking pin that connects these two. This course will introduce you to central theories and frameworks in management and organizational behavior and will help you to understand how to apply those theories and frameworks to understand and address organizational challenges and problems. An understanding of organizations and their management is important for anyone who plans to work within an organization as career success hinges on one's ability to accurately read and respond to the organizational context within which one operates. The course will also give you an opportunity to reflect on the skills that are required for being a better manager and leader.

Marketing

Course Description: This course provides an overall view of marketing in a customer driven firm focusing on essential marketing skills needed by successful managers in all business functions. Topics include how individual and organizational consumers make decisions, segment markets, estimate the economic value of customers to the firm, position the firm's offering, effective marketing research, new product development and pricing strategies, communicate with consumers, estimate advertising's effectiveness, and manage relationships with sales force and distribution partners. The course also studies how firms must coordinate these different elements of the marketing mix to insure that all marketing activities collectively forge a coherent strategy. The importance of combining qualitative and quantitative concepts in effective marketing analysis is also examined. The course uses a combination of lectures, class discussion, and case analysis. Marketing is a core course and assumes no prior knowledge of marketing. However, there are certain concepts from Firms & Markets that students should have mastered, including price elasticity of demand, price discrimination, marginal cost, marginal revenue, efficient scale for production capacity, diminishing returns, utility functions, and utility curves.

Operations Management

Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to operations viewed from the perspective of the general manager rather than from that of the operations specialist. The coverage is very selective the course concentrates on a small number of themes from the areas of operations management and information technology that have emerged as the central building blocks of world-class operations. It also presents a sample of key tools and techniques that have proven extremely useful. The topics covered are equally relevant to the manufacturing and service sectors.

Professional Responsibility

Course Description: This course is designed to inspire you with a positive vision of what business can be, a realistic vision of what it often is, and a roadmap for how to navigate through the hazards and opportunities you will face in your career. Specifically: 1) You will learn about the types of traps that lure business professionals into ethical lapses and criminal behaviors. 2) You will learn enough moral psychology to understand how well-intentioned professionals can get lured into such traps. 3) You will learn conceptual frameworks that help you to navigate ethical gray zones with more confidence and better results. 4) You will learn what characterizes companies with positive ethical values, and why you are better off working for them, or creating them. 5) You may, if you choose, commit yourself to a standard of professional conduct that will help to make your work more fulfilling and honorable.

Statistics & Data Analysis

Course Description: This course is designed to achieve an understanding of fundamental notions of data presentation and data analysis and to use statistical thinking in the context of business problems. The course deals with modern methods of data exploration designed to reveal unusual or problematic aspects of databases.

Strategy I

Course Description: This course provides students with the concepts and tools required to devise business strategies to gain competitive advantage at the product market level. It also shows how to apply the rules of competitive advantage to a range of economic markets in the United States and globally where the business environment is increasingly turbulent. The course explains how to formulate a business strategy, how to analyze competitive markets and how to define each firm's strategic situation. It focuses on how to create superior value for customers and capture enough value to create increasing profit for your firm. Students learn how successful firms develop superior resources products operations human competencies, organizational teams, procurement technology finances and business alliances to gain and sustain competitive advantage in a dynamic economic environment.

Strategy II

Course Description: In this course students learn how to develop skills needed to manage the multibusiness enterprise for the creation of corporate advantage. To create value through corporate strategy, managers must command a number of critical competencies. They must be able to create a vision that targets multiple businesses objectives including achieving sustainable corporate growth in profits. This course requires integrating skills at developing and deploying corporate resources and capabilities to apply analytical tools and perspectives to changing industries and multibusiness markets and to design organizational structures systems and process that achieve shortterm and longterm corporate strength and profit growth. Students learn how to manage the interpersonal dynamics of strategy decision making and how to communicate effectively their visions ands strategies to internal and external stakeholders of the corporation. A considerable part of corporate strategy today focuses on managing merger integration, Alliances, internal growth, and global networks, which involves increasing cooption and creating various combinations of both multiple business collaborations to expand new markets and also pursuing simultaneous competitive goals to ensure the survival and growth of the firm.

The Global Economy

Course Description: We use the tools of international macroeconomics to explore the economic environment facing firms operating around the globe. Central issues include the role of economic policy and institutions in the performance of firms and nations economic indicators and forecasting employment and unemployment interest rates.

 Please reach out to sternmba@stern.nyu.edu with any questions.