Synchronized Swimming at the Yale School of Management

First, I want to apologize to those reading this post for information about the Yale School of Management Synchronized Swimming Club, because as of this writing no such club exists. Instead, this post is about the Integrated Curriculum. Besides the educational merit of the curriculum, the Integrated Curriculum also requires an impressive level of coordination between professors, or what I’ll call “synchronized swimming.” Examples of this synchronization include: - Usage of the same or similar datasets in multiple classes. - Professors appearing in multiple Organizational Perspectives. - Professors referring to material and professors in other classes My favorite example of this coordination is when one of my professors in Sourcing and Managing Funds (SMF) also served as a guest lecturer in Customer. The courses were taking place at the same time for different cohorts (groups of first-year students), so he started the lecture in SMF and handed the class off to the finance professor he co-teaches the course with. He then ran down the hall to give a guest accounting lecture in the Customer course for about thirty minutes, talking about adding value through analyzing the costs of serving customers. Finally, he returned to SMF to finish class. Of course, synchronized curriculum does not mean easy or light curriculum, as there can certainly be cannonballs of work. But Yale’s curriculum enables connections of important ideas that aren’t possible in less synchronized institutions.