Welcome to the working space for MIT Sloan Practicing Management
What is the Practicing Management approach to education? Students prepare, act, and reflect on their experience, learning what it means to work with and through others to get things done.
MIT students have always set out to change the world. With Practicing Management, MIT Sloan students start changing the world while they're here.
MIT is about learning by doing, and the hallmark of an MIT Sloan education is its pairing of state-of-the-art theory and tools with opportunities to put ideas into action.
With Practicing Management, we're taking this tradition a step further by enhancing students' experiences and interactions with real-world challenges. MIT Sloan students learn by doing via workshop-style seminars, coaching, and innovative new courses (15.990 - Practicing Management).
In a new, flexible seminar series open to all, students learn a variety of tools and approaches for developing their skills in getting things done. Personal and team coaching offers students feedback that is linked to both the academic and experiential sides of their education. And in new courses designed to build their own effectiveness, we help students to connect research and theory with their own actions in real-world projects and to use the classroom as a setting for learning from others and reflecting on experience.
h3. MIT Sloan MBAs take "Practicing Management" course to heart
h4. Launch effort to make MIT campus more "green"
As MBA programs seek ways to better link the classroom to the real world of business, a new MIT Sloan School of Management course has prompted some students to take the mission seriously. While some student teams headed off to New Zealand, China, and India, others worked closer to home, seeking ways to make their Cambridge campus more "green."
The students were enrolled in "Practicing Management," a new MIT Sloan course created to give students a chance to actually apply the analytic skills and tools they've learned in courses. As part of the class, students participated in actual projects "to turn ideas into action and accomplish something even as they hone their abilities to get things done," said MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Anjali Sastry, who taught the course.
"MIT has always been about the world of thinking and analyzing, as well as taking action, whether it's running an experiment or working at an internship or, in this case, doing a project," she said. "It's been exciting for me to see what students can learn by taking action."
The class centered on student groups, each of which designed and worked on a project that would reach at least one round of implementation. For Matt Weiss and his team, the project became known informally as "the MIT Green Fund," an effort to support, financially or otherwise, a range of efforts to make the campus more environmentally friendly.
"The course taught us to prepare, act and reflect, and in our group, we tried to take that model and apply it," said Weiss. "The more we got into considering different approaches, the more we realized all the little things you have to figure out before you have an actionable plan."
Their plan includes steps ranging from educational outreach - such as getting students to turn lights off- to raising capital for projects such as installing occupancy sensors in classrooms and retrofitting the campus with "green" light bulbs.
Even though Weiss is graduating this year and will go to work as a product marketing manager, he and another graduating member of his group plan to remain involved in the Green Fund as alumni.
"The idea of a Green Fund has been around MIT for years, but it has never come to fruition," said Weiss. "We want to build enough momentum that things will actually happen next year."
Join us! Ask us questions! Suggest ideas! ashley@mit.edu or sastry@mit.edu.
Short url for this site: https://confab.mit.edu/sloan/pm