Four of the new MBA students hold PhD degrees and 38 have earned master's degrees. The Business School has encouraged study groups for some time, but it has been assigning first-year students to them for only five years. For two days before orientation, Christina Einstein, the director of administration for the MBA Program, takes charge of dividing core course students into groups of six or seven. But they can be boiled down to two - academic and demographic. One benefit of mixing up students academically is to distribute the knowledge they bring to a core subject.
People form friendships in math camp and want to stick together.
Exposure to students from other cultures also gives them a foretaste of the business world. Collectively, the group members have three spouses and one child. Possessing three graduate degrees, including a PhD, they earned their undergraduate degrees in six different majors from institutions on three continents. One of them completed two weeks of circus school. Another majored in Marxist economics and never did learn supply and demand.