Student Perspectives:

Christopher Fong

“There’s so much opportunity on these two campuses. On the Berkeley side, I’ve been able to take advantage of venture capital activities through the Lester Center, as a Haas Venture Fellow. On the Columbia side, I recently participated in and, with my team, won the regional finals of a Venture Capital Investment Competition. There are also so many great speakers, whether at the Business School, elsewhere on the campuses, or through alumni events.”

Christopher Fong MBA 2011
Account Executive, Google Inc.

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The Berkeley Advantage

Haas School of Business

The Haas School has symbolized the pioneering spirit of the San Francisco Bay Area since 1898. Connected to high-tech firms in nearby Silicon Valley, Haas has developed a broad curriculum that reflects the Bay Area’s entrepreneurial drive and openness to new ideas. And our faculty members, including two Nobel Prize winners, are well known for creating new knowledge and influencing the way companies do business.

Through the school’s reputation, vigorous programming, faculty connections, and student enterprise, leaders such as Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, General Manager of IDEO Tom Kelley, and the Former Argentine Minister of the Economy Martin Lousteau have visited campus to engage with BCEMBA students.

A Different Business Leader

The only public business school consistently ranked among the nation’s top ten, and the only business school with two Nobel Prize winners in the last 15 years, Haas offers a different kind of business education that produces a different kind of business leader. Identified in the School’s latest strategic plan, there are four key values that run through all of the Berkeley MBA programs:

Question the status quo We lead through new ideas and speak our minds, even when it challenges convention.

Confidence without attitude We make decisions based on evidence and lead through trust and collaboration.

Students always We are a community that values lifelong learning.

Beyond yourself We shape our world by leading ethically and responsibly, acting in the common good.

These resonate deeply with Sara Pollack, MBA 2012, a YouTube executive and former Hollywood producer, who has taken a nontraditional path to business school. “It was great to hear Dean Lyons outline Haas’s philosophy, which is exactly the kind of philosophy I believe in—intellectualism that has nothing to do with greed or domination but rather lifelong learning. ‘Confidence without attitude’ is something I really responded to.”

University of California, Berkeley

The Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA program draws on the incredible breadth and depth of the University of California at Berkeley, whose graduate programs are consistently ranked among the best in the world, and whose undergraduate programs are among the most selective. The proof is in the university’s distinguished record of Nobel-level scholarship, constant innovation, a concern for the betterment of our world, and consistently high rankings of its schools and departments—the Haas School among them.

Since its founding in 1868, UC Berkeley has grown with the rapidly expanding population of California and has responded to the educational needs of the developing state. By the 1930s, research at UC Berkeley burgeoned in nuclear physics, chemistry, and biology, leading to the development of the first cyclotron, the isolation of the human polio virus, and the discovery of all the artificial elements heavier than uranium, including Berkelium and Californium. Twenty-one members of the UC Berkeley faculty have been awarded Nobel prizes for these and subsequent achievements in science, literature, and economics. Today, according to the National Research Council, UC Berkeley ranks first nationally in the number of graduate programs in the top 10 in their fields. (In fact, 97% of the university’s programs made the top 10 list.)

The Bay Area is home to an innovation ecosystem that is unequaled anywhere in the world. With its venture capital firms, established technology companies, and thriving biotech and digital media industries, the Bay Area marks one of the nation’s most unique business centers where a diverse range of industries converge. Many of the most dynamic names in business, from Visa to Apple, call the region home. The San Francisco Bay Area is also perennially designated the world’s most popular tourist destination—and for good reason. There is the area’s stunning natural beauty, its seductively benign weather, and its atmosphere charged with a worldly sophistication and a distinctive openness to new ways of thinking.

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