This post has been republished in its entirety from original source clearadmit.com.
Building on the success of its pilot last spring, Harvard Business School (HBS) recently announced plans to expand the applicant pool for Peek Weekend this June to welcome not only candidates from women’s colleges, but also college sophomores, juniors and seniors majoring in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields or who come from a family-owned business background.
“These groups can be underrepresented in business school applicant pools,” Dee Leopold, HBS managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid, said in a statement. “We want to do all we can to ensure that our admissions process reaches as many qualified students as possible and help them understand the many different options and opportunities a Harvard MBA can lead to in a graduate’s life.”
Peek Weekend debuted in 2015 as an all-female affair, with 124 promising young women drawn from 14 women’s colleges including Barnard, Wellesley, Mills and Mt. Holyoke. Response surprised organizers, who originally planned to target just a single school, Barnard, and draw around 40 or so participants, Leopold said. The purpose of the program was to offer current students from women’s colleges a “peek” into what the Harvard MBA program is like—in part to help drive greater female enrollment. (HBS this year welcomed 42 percent women as part of its incoming class, up from 38 percent in 2010 and 28 percent in 1995.)
In an interview with Clear Admit just after the all-women’s weekend, Leopold was thrilled with how successful it had been and intimated that the format could be expanded to include other groups of potential HBS applicants. Now, in just its second year, the school appears to be doing just that.
The 2016 Peek Weekend will again be open to applicants from women’s colleges, but it will also include two additional cohorts, one made up of STEM majors and another made up of students who come from a family-owned business background. Each cohort will have its own specific curriculum, but the entire group will come together as part of joint sessions for all Peek participants.
An Introduction to the HBS Case Method
Last year, a big part of the Peek Weekend focus was on introducing participants to HBS’s signature case method. Leopold was reluctant to talk about the event before it took place, unsure of how successful it would prove. “We just didn’t know,” she said. “Can we get the case method to really cook, really bubble in such a short time with people who haven’t done it?”
The pilot group of women dove right in, embracing the case method with ease. “I was blown away by how engaged and thoughtful they were,” said Frances X. Frei, HBS professor of service management and senior associate dean for faculty planning and recruiting, who taught a case on Tessei, a company that provides cleaning services for Japan’s bullet trains.
“I immediately fell in love with the case method—it was a huge part of the great experience I had there,” said Catherine Cousins, who was a rising senior at Mills College in California when she took part. “I just assumed, based on my economics background—that it would be really quant heavy. I was expecting numbers and statistics and Excel, but the case method was so much more than just how the numbers change,” she said.
Frei, together with Felix Oberholzer-Gee, faculty leader of Peek and the current chair of HBS’s MBA program, and Youngme Moon, a professor of business administration and the senior associate dean for strategy and innovation, led a series of four cases for last year’s participants selected precisely to help facilitate nuanced discussions of why and how companies succeeded or failed and what mistakes executives made.
Seeing just how readily the case method took hold, even despite time constraints and with an audience previously unfamiliar with it, already had Leopold thinking just a few days after 2015 Peek Weekend about the program’s potential for expansion. “If it works for them, it will work for other populations as well,” she said as part of an interview with Clear Admit late last June.
The 2016 Peek Weekend will take place on HBS’s Boston campus from Friday, June 10th, to Sunday, June 12th. Much like last year, 2016 Peek participants will learn from current HBS faculty members, who will use the case method to lead class discussions on management challenges and opportunities facing actual companies. In the evenings, participants will analyze cases in preparation for the next day’s classes, and each morning they will convene in small study groups to flesh out their ideas based on the readings before joining their larger cohort for group discussions. Sessions with current HBS students, alumni/ae and staff will round out the weekend’s activities.
How to Apply for 2016 Peek Weekend
To be eligible, applicants must be undergraduates in the Class of 2016, 2017 or 2018 and meet the criteria for one or more of the three cohorts (women’s college, STEM major or family business background).
To complete the application, which will be available online at the beginning of March, applicants will need to supply a resume, an undergraduate transcript and an essay on a topic yet to be announced. Materials will be due on or before April 21st and decisions will be released at noon on May 5th.
The cost of the weekend will be $500, the same as last year, which covers case materials, weekend accommodations in the school’s on-campus dormitories and all meals. (Participants are responsible for their own travel to and from Boston.)
There will be a limited number of need-based fellowships available through HBS, but applicants are also encouraged to inquire about additional funding that may be available from their own college or university. (Many Peek participants last year received such funding from their schools.)
We will notify Clear Admit readers once the application has gone live, but interested students can also sign up to receive updates by joining the Peek mailing list.