Stanford University is a prestigious private research university in California, currently overtaking its Ivy League rivals in the selectivity stakes. Its Graduate School of Business (GSB), founded in 1925, is the US’s toughest to get into, with only a 7.1% acceptance rate.

Stanford GSB’s distinguished faculty includes three Nobel Prize winners, two John Bates Clark Award winners and 15 members of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. The campus is in the town of Stanford, outside Palo Alto, between San Jose and San Francisco – the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. Along with the main university, Stanford GSB maintains very close links with firms in the Silicon Valley region.

Stanford GSB offers a two-year, full-time MBA, as well as a large range of dual-degree MBA programs. These include MBA/JD, MBA/MA International Studies, MBA/MD, MBA/Master of Public Policy (MPP), MBA/MS Computer Science, and an MBA/MSE Electrical Engineering.

During the first year of the two-year MBA program, students follow a core general management curriculum, including: ethics in management, financial accounting, leadership labs, managerial skills labs, managing groups and teams, optimization and simulation modeling, organizational behavior, strategic leadership, corporate finance, data analysis and decision-making, finance, human resource management, information management, macroeconomics, managerial accounting, marketing, microeconomics, operations, and strategy beyond markets.

Second-year students have the option to customize their program with courses at other Stanford schools, electives, seminars, or a joint or dual degree. Electives include courses within accounting, entrepreneurship, finance, general management, managerial economics, marketing, political economics and strategic management.

Participating in a Global Experience program is a required component of the Stanford MBA. They’re offered in a variety of forms. These include the Global Management Immersion Experience (GMIX), which involves spending four weeks abroad in the summer working on sponsor-led projects in a range of industries (e.g. consumer products to media to international development), and can be personalized to fit specific interests. There are also faculty-led global seminars abroad that focus on key subjects in relevant locations – for example, exploring economic mobility in Brazil.

Additional Global Experience options include: small-group (20-30 students plus faculty) global study trips that critically examine challenging issues; self-directed experiences (e.g. via an internship abroad or independent study course supervised by Stanford faculty); and the Stanford-Tsinghua Exchange Program (STEP) – a program where students collaborate on a project alongside their counterparts from China’s Tsinghua University.