The first half of the program is dedicated to the Haas core curriculum, which provides a strong grounding in key business fundamentals. At the same time, you’ll develop essential collaboration and leadership skills—a cornerstone of the Haas experience.
To support this, each incoming class is divided into six cohorts—Blue, Gold, Oski, Axe, Lux, and Nexus—each with about 65 students. You’ll complete your first-year core courses with your cohort, building meaningful relationships that support your learning and extend far beyond the classroom.
Each semester is divided into A and B terms to fit your schedule:
- Evening classes run in two 10-week terms
- Weekend and Flex classes follow two 8-week terms
This structure allows you to balance academic rigor with your personal and professional commitments.
Below is a list of the 13 required core courses that form the foundation of your MBA experience.
First Year
- EWMBA201A Economics for Business Decision Making (Microeconomics) (2 units): Business success depends on the successful positioning of the firm and the management of its resources. The goal of this course is to think systematically about achieving competitive advantage through the management of the firm’s resources. Topics include analyzation of management decisions concerning real options, cost determination, pricing, and market entry and exit.
- EWMBA205 Leading People (2 units): Leadership is about coordinating the skills, talents and resources of individuals and groups in combinations that best realize the organization’s opportunities. A critical source of competitive advantage often comes from having the ability to effectively obtain, mobilize and manage an organization’s human assets. Innovative leadership requires managers to be able to diagnose problems, make effective decisions, influence and motivate others and drive organizational change. This course provides fundamental tools and frameworks from the behavioral and social sciences that will improve students ability to analyze organizational dynamics, innovate and lead effectively. The goal is to help students think about their leadership behaviors — and other people’s perceptions of their behaviors — and then leverage this awareness for improvement.
- EWMBA206 Marketing Management (2 units): This introductory course is designed to provide students with an understanding of the basic marketing management concepts. The course treats marketing from the perspective of strategic analysis and provides a framework for the decisions associated with the management of the marketing function in the modern organization focusing on marketing process, customer analysis, segmentation, targeting and positioning, competitive analysis, designing marketing strategy, tactical implementation and the analysis of marketing investments.
- EWMBA200S Data & Decisions (2 units): The objective of this core course is to provide an understanding of the role of data and statistical analysis in managerial decision-making. The focus is on the role of managers as both consumers and producers of information, illustrating how finding and/or developing the right data and applying appropriate statistical methods can help solve problems in business. Key concepts include interpretation of regression analysis, model formation and testing, and diagnostic checking.
- EWMBA201B Macroeconomics (2 units): Macroeconomics shapes business conditions, strategies and decisions. This course develops and applies models of the world’s economies to explain long-run trends and short-run fluctuations in key macroeconomic variables such as GDP, wage and profit rates, inflation, interest rates, employment and unemployment, budget deficits, exchange rates and trade balances. It explores how consumer and business practices affect and are, in turn, affected by current conditions, as well as by forecasts for the future. Students analyze how monetary, fiscal and international trade policies affect, and are affected by, macroeconomics. Special attention will be devoted to the current challenges of the global economic environment.
- EWMBA202 Financial Accounting (2 units): This course provides an introduction to the principles of financial accounting and helps students develop into informed users of financial statements. The theoretical material will be supplemented by demonstrating the effects and implications of the topics we studied in real-world settings. This is accomplished through study cases and analyses of financial statements of actual publicly-held corporations. Topics covered include the balance sheet and double entry accounting, the income statement, the cash flow statement, revenue recognition, receivables, inventories and cost of goods sold, introduction to financial statement analysis, fair value accounting, long lived assets and intangible assets, liabilities, marketable securities and investments and owners’ equity.
- EWMBA203 Introduction to Finance (2 units): This is an introductory course in finance. Students learn how to value assets and businesses given forecasts of future cash flows. The course also concentrates on the risk characteristics of different asset classes. The first part of the course focuses on stocks, bonds, interest rates and capital budgeting. The second part of the course deals with measuring and pricing risk. The third part of the course introduces students to valuation. This course will combine the theoretical underpinnings of finance with real-world examples, including several case discussions.
- EWMBA207 Ethics and Responsibility in Business (1 unit): This course is about what it takes to be an enlightened leader. It adds a unique perspective on leadership over and above the traditional focus on practical leadership. To lead effectively one must anticipate how others will respond to values-based arguments, how incentives and values-based approaches interact and how emotions shape attitudes and behavior. This course cuts through the vagueness in business ethics debates by providing a rigorous intellectual basis for the analysis of values. Cases and in-class exercises help students develop a pattern recognition ability to anticipate and evaluate moral risks.
- EWMBA200C Leadership Communication (1 unit)*: In this course, students explore the vital link between leadership and communication. Additionally, they increase their self-confidence when speaking, learn how to think fast and clearly under pressure, use the voice and body effectively and learn to be deep and brief with content. Students also develop techniques to deliver effective presentations and persuasive speeches, understand their strengths and weaknesses in communication, give, receive and apply constructive feedback and learn how to inspire, motivate and connect in a more authentic way.
*Flex students only. In person evening and weekend students will take this course in Fall A of their second year
Second Year
- EWMBA204 Operations (2 units): This course introduces students to concepts and techniques related to matching supply with demand in manufacturing and service operations. The goals are to make students conversant in the language of operations management, provide them with quantitative and qualitative tools to analyze basic operations issues and allow them to see the role of operations management in the overall strategy of the firm. The course covers topics in process and capacity analysis, inventory management, demand uncertainty, supply chain management, service operations and revenue management. In each module, students are introduced to tools for analyzing operations problems and methods of managing that aspect of operations. Students prepare cases for class discussion, analyze cases and problem sets and participate in simulations/exercises. The objective is to create as much interaction with operations issues as possible, allowing students to examine how they affect an organization’s overall performance.
- EWMBA200C Leadership Communication (1 unit)*: In this course, students explore the vital link between leadership and communication. Additionally, they increase their self-confidence when speaking, learn how to think fast and clearly under pressure, use the voice and body effectively and learn to be deep and brief with content. Students also develop techniques to deliver effective presentations and persuasive speeches, understand their strengths and weaknesses in communication, give, receive and apply constructive feedback and learn how to inspire, motivate and connect in a more authentic way.
*In person evening and weekend students only. Flex students take this course in Spring B of their first year.
- EWMBA209 Strategy (2 units): Capstone requirement. This class takes the perspective of the executive who is leading the business and responsible for developing its strategy. It enables students to analyze and design strategies to achieve competitive advantage. Game theory and real option theory are used as organizing frameworks. The course draws heavily on microeconomics and, to a lesser extent, other core courses. Students develop skills to diagnose the competitive position of a business, evaluate business strategies, anticipate rival’s actions and analyze business options.
- EWMBA205D Business Communications in Diverse Environment (1 unit): Required pre-session in December. Residency weekend in January. This class helps students navigate diverse settings more effectively to improve their ability to create, work within, and lead diverse teams and global organizations. It also develops critical thinking on topics such as identity, relationships across differences, bias, and equality of opportunity in organizations.
Some core classes are eligible to be waived. Check out our Waiver Guidelines.