From the Director of Admissions: Innovation in Management Education

The Yale School of Management has a history of innovation in graduate management education.  Some recent examples include the integrated curriculum, two-year Leadership Development Program, and Global Network for Advanced Management. Each of these developments has helped the school more fully realize its mission to educate leaders for business and society and has helped our students maximize their learning and development while at Yale. Nothing has more tangibly embodied the spirit of innovation and progress at the school, though, than Edward P. Evans Hall, our beautiful, new, Norman Foster-designed campus. We made the move to Evans Hall just before winter break and held the  Business + Society conference to mark the official opening a little more than a month ago.

In our short time in the building, its power to elevate everything we do has become evident. The glass façade has become a metaphorical representation of how closely the school is engaged with the Yale University campus that surrounds it (you can see several Yale landmarks from Evans Hall). The use of glass and open spaces within the building strengthens the sense of community—a hallmark of the Yale SOM program since its founding—with views of students and faculty moving between classrooms, stopping to talk for a few minutes, or working on their latest assignments. In addition, the building has enabled the school to deploy the integrated curriculum more effectively through the use of advanced classroom technologies and experimental classroom design. With several classroom layouts to choose from, faculty can adjust the pedagogical approach of each class to suit the nature of the material being taught. For instance, some classrooms have multiple lecterns to facilitate team teaching, while others have movable tables for group-based exercises. Building multimedia technology into the classroom heightens the ability to teach using our “raw case” method, which relies heavily on primary source materials that are often dynamic in nature. It also allows us to bring more of the world into our classrooms. During the Business + Society conference, for instance, discussions drew in students and faculty from Ireland and Spain through seamless videoconferencing.

In summary, Evans Hall is both the latest example of the many positive innovations happening at SOM and a means for heightening the effectiveness of many of these innovations. We invite you to come to campus to experience the transformative nature of Evans Hall for yourself.