University of Washington Foster MBA Program: A Comprehensive Overview
The University of Washington's Foster School of Business, located in Seattle, stands as one of the nation's premier business schools. As an integral part of a Top 10 global research university, Foster distinguishes itself by integrating academic rigor with practical experience, career coaching, mentorship opportunities, and a robust worldwide alumni network. The Foster MBA program is designed to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and network necessary to excel in today's dynamic global business environment.
Core Pillars of the Foster MBA
The Foster MBA curriculum emphasizes strategic thinking, leadership development, and a global business perspective. These elements are woven throughout the core coursework, ensuring that graduates are well-prepared to tackle complex business challenges.
Strategic Thinking and Global Business
The Foster MBA Program dedicates significant attention to strategy and global business within its core curriculum. This emphasis is evident in components covering competitive strategy, global strategic management, and macroeconomics. Furthermore, the program integrates these concepts indirectly through the selection of relevant case studies and projects.
Leadership Development
Leadership skill development is a cornerstone of the Foster MBA program. Students learn to foster individual and group effectiveness through integrative leadership modeling and building effective teams. The curriculum emphasizes adherence to work rules, establishing shared commitment to a compelling purpose, and building interpersonal trust. Professor Leroy teaches MBA leadership courses, drawing from her industry experience, leadership expertise, and extensive research in organizational management.
Experiential Learning
The MBA curriculum is designed to facilitate knowledge and skill development through interactions with award-winning faculty, industry leaders integrated into the classroom, and collaborative learning among students in team-driven assignments. Students refine their expertise in small classroom environments and apply their skills through diverse experiential learning opportunities both in Seattle and internationally. These opportunities include:
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- Applied Strategy Projects: Hands-on experience applying MBA concepts and tools to address real-world business challenges.
- Internships: Practical experience in various industries and functions.
- International Opportunities: Global tours and projects that expose students to international business practices and cultures.
- Specialty Programs: Focused programs that allow students to delve deeper into specific areas of interest.
- Courses: A wide range of elective courses that allow students to customize their learning experience.
Curriculum Structure
The University of Washington operates on the quarter system, providing students with flexibility in customizing their academic experience through a variety of elective courses. Classes are generally held Monday through Thursday, encompassing a 10-to-12-hour day that includes class time and group work on campus. Fridays offer students the flexibility to pursue learning and career goals in a way that best suits their needs. Academically, while there are occasional classes or degree-required sessions, most mornings offer optional review sessions with faculty.
Program Requirements
The Full-time MBA program spans 20 months, during which students complete integrated core coursework in their first year and select from a diverse array of electives in their second year. The program requirements include:
- 48 required Core credits (5 Core classes)
- 40 elective credits
- 7 additional required degree activities:
- Foster Professional Development sequence
- Summer internship/project (or equivalent)
- MBA core case competition
- 2 international perspective activities*
- 2 practical experience activities*
*Experiential Learning and international activities may include courses and projects with actual businesses.
Year One Curriculum
The first year of the MBA program provides an integrated core of fundamental business concepts, skills, and tools. A team of faculty members collaborates to develop and deliver modules of varying lengths, providing a solid foundation in accounting, finance, marketing, operations management, and strategy, as well as an understanding of how these areas interrelate.
Autumn Quarter
- Financial Reporting and Analysis: Covers financial statement accounting concepts and methods, institutional and regulatory influences, and measurement and reporting issues.
- Managerial Finance: Explores investments, diversification, portfolio theory, capital budgeting, and capital structure.
- Leadership Development: Focuses on leadership skill development, fostering individual and group effectiveness, integrative leadership modeling, and building effective teams.
- Integrative leadership modeling
- Building Effective Teams
- Marketing Strategy: Covers market definition, customer analysis, competitive analysis, and marketing planning.
- Micro-Economics of Competition and Strategy: Analyzes competitive dynamics, economics of competition, and strategy analysis for various competitive circumstances.
Winter Quarter
- Applied Strategy: Business Consulting Project: Focuses on defining project scope, customer relations, project management, and presentation skills. Professor Pathak teaches MBA Business consulting courses, building on his own entrepreneurial experiences, his expertise in AI and digital transformation, and his extensive research in supply chain.
- Statistics for Business Decisions: Covers statistical summaries of data, forecasting models, assessment of uncertainty, inference and predictions, and methods of quality improvement.
- Leading Teams and Organizations: Explores effective groups, organization theory, leadership in organizations, human resource management, delegation and empowerment, and implementing change.
- Competitive & Corporate Strategy: Focuses on analyzing value creation, strategic thinking and planning, strategy implementation, and structure analysis of industries.
Spring Quarter
- Information for Decision Making and Performance Evaluation: Covers relevant costs for decision-making, management accounting systems, and budgeting and performance evaluation.
- Operations and Supply Chain Management: Explores productivity and competitiveness, capacity planning, just-in-time production systems, and inventory management.
- Decision Support Models: Covers quantitative modeling, linear programming, decision theory, and simulation.
Year Two Curriculum
During the second year, students can customize the program to focus on their personal career objectives, without being bound to a single career track. Electives allow students to develop greater expertise in the areas directly related to their post-MBA degree career, while increasing their capacity to take on cross-functional assignments. In addition to elective coursework, students complete final core classes in ethics and macroeconomics.
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Autumn Quarter
- Ethical Leadership & Decision Making: Covers ethical aspects of conducting business, ethical decision-making, stakeholder management, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and corporate governance.
Winter Quarter
- Analysis of Global Economic Conditions: Explores the interaction of goods, labor, and asset markets, international trade, growth of output, inflation, unemployment, interest and exchange rates, and monetary and fiscal policies.
Electives
The Foster School of Business offers a wide array of electives that allow students to tailor their MBA experience to their specific interests and career goals. These electives span various disciplines, including:
Accounting
- Financial Statement Analysis: Examines financial reporting from a userâs perspective, using tools to break apart financial reports into meaningful units for analysis, forecast financial statements, and value a firm. Understand how GAAP rules and managerial incentives affect the quality and interpretation of financial statements.
- Examining Corporate Fraud: Addresses concepts in fraud such as prevention and response techniques. Understand the varying types of fraud schemes, identify fraud prevention techniques, and manage the response necessary when a fraud occurs.
Business Administration
- Strategic Management Practicum: Provides hands-on experience applying concepts and tools from the MBA curriculum to address real-world business challenges, expanding industry experience, growing leadership capabilities, and networking with business professionals and experts.
Business Communications
- Finding Your Voice: Identify core values and use them to develop a leadership message. Then apply techniques to formulate and convey a leadership message in a business presentation.
- TED Talks: Identify ideas that could intrigue and change the world. Then apply techniques of âTEDâ speaking to formulate and convey those ideas in a TED Talk.
- Women at the Top: Guest lectures by women business leaders, discussion on how and when to exert influence for change, developing authentic leadership, understanding how to lead a full life.
Business Economics
- Competing in the Global Economy: From the internationalization process to the operation of complex global operations. Learn to implement plans, mitigate risks, and solve problems â all in a global setting.
- Foster Research Partners: Partnered with Gates Foundation, hands-on experience with research and data analysis in a real-world setting.
- Applied Global Macroeconomics: Examine the key global macroeconomic concepts and theories. Understand how competitors, suppliers, and customers are changing and how the global economy impacts business outcomes and policies.
Entrepreneurship
- Foundations of Entrepreneurship: Develop understanding of the complexity of issues in startups, gain insight into how entrepreneurs create new enterprises.
- Entrepreneurial Strategy: Ideas and strategies around turning product or service ideas into self-sustaining businesses, alternative solutions to problems, analyzing trade-offs within complex choices.
- Innovation Strategy: Effective strategies and frameworks for new and emerging industries, develop innovation strategies, articulate and defend views using persuasion and analytics.
- Software Entrepreneurship: Develop understanding of complex issues surrounding technology businesses, gain insight into how entrepreneurs conceive, adapt, and execute strategies.
- Business Plan Practicum: How to start a business, what makes start-ups successful, applying real-world concepts to business formation and optional participation in the Dempsey Startup Competition.
- Technology Commercialization: Work with UW scientists and engineers, develop a business model around a technology from UW, analyze it, formalize it and develop a funding proposal.
- Venture Capital Investment Practicum: An overview of the venture capital world. Understand the necessary tools to evaluate early-stage investment opportunities.
- Environmental Innovation Practicum: Part speaker series, part business concept creation. Learn about cleantech and other environmental solutions and how to be part of those solutions.
- Health Innovation Practicum: Overview of the challenges for early stage businesses in healthcare or life sciences. Gain an awareness of the system of regulation of health technologies, the process of development for health technologies, and the economics of healthcare.
- Entrepreneurial Marketing: Strategic and tactical elements of successful entrepreneurial marketing campaigns including customer segmentation, strategic positioning, new technologies, and brand-building.
- Entrepreneurial Finance: Assess financial performance, financial planning, identify external financing needs and business valuation. Analyze and evaluate venture capital agreements. Examine the structure of venture capital organizations.
- Angel Investing: Three quarter course provides real world, hands-on learning on angel investing and raising capital for early stage companies.
- Biomedical Entrepreneurship: Overview of the landscape of biomedical commercialization.
- Entrepreneurial Influence and the Pitch: Learn the role that verbal communication, influence, and persuasion play in entrepreneurship. Learn how to create an effective pitch and how to influence key stakeholders.
- Influencer Marketing: Profiting from Social Media: Gain practical experience conducting social media marketing campaigns and understanding what an influencer is. Analyzing effectiveness of social media marketing, negotiation strategies, building relationships, and methods for measuring and building influence with your brand.
- Intrapreneurship: Developing New Products within Organizations: Holistic and practical view of working in corporate innovation groups and what itâs like to work in the innovation process.
Finance
- The Power of Access: Impact Lending to Underserved Communities: Engage our MBA students in working with small BIPOC businesses to gain access to business loans. Teams of students will perform financial assessments, risk analyses, forecasts and create loan packages for these businesses to submit Commerce Bank for approval. In addition to helping businesses secure debt financing, MBA students will learn about how systemic bias can play into the gaps in access to capital.
- Problems in Business Finance: Examine the corporate financing and investment decisions and related issues in financial strategy. Learn about short-term financial management, capital structure, capital budgeting, and firm valuation, and corporate restructuring.
- Business Valuation and Investment Analysis: Understanding the methods and drivers of valuation, building financial projections, navigating data, and valuing assets and firms.
- Entrepreneurial Finance: Assess financial performance, financial planning, identify external financing needs and business valuation. Analyze and evaluate venture capital agreements. Examine the structure of venture capital organizations.
- Mergers and Acquisitions: Understanding the economics of M&A, synergies from both buyer and seller perspectives, what creates or destroys value, how deals are structured, what challenges exists in executing M&A, and recognizing critical components and structures of a business.
- Investments: Learn how to manage your own investments and those of a company as well as many of the basics of becoming a CFA. Build quantitative, communication, and critical thinking skills to succeed in the investment profession.
- Financial Futures & Options Markets: Comprehensive overview of the futures markets and options markets including the practice of analyzing pricing, reviewing empirical evidence, and understanding risk management by hedging.
- Alternative Investments: Hedge Funds & Private Equity: Understand the risks of varied hedge fund strategies, the structure of private equity funds, evaluating opportunities, differentiate venture capital environments, and evaluate risks that fit into a broad portfolio.
- Asian Capital Markets: Frameworks to understanding capital markets and financial systems in the largest and fastest growing continent in the last 40 years, engaging as an investor in cross-border investments, greenfield investments, and M&A.
- Data Analytics in Finance: Learn new technical data analytics skills in three key areas: finance, microeconomics, and macroeconomics, specifically looking at time-series models, causal experiments, and textual analysis.
- Game Theory & Other Topics in Microeconomics: Strategic thinking and analysis of complex environments where there is mutual dependence, techniques of game theory to defend and critique busines decisions as applied to pricing, negotiation, business strategy, and other topics.
- Behavioral Finance: Examine the behavior of investors.
Preparing for Year One
Starting in July, Foster MBA Career Management provides valuable career workshops and webinars. With guidance from an academic coach, students create a personal plan for achieving their goals through courses, experiential learning, and career development opportunities. In early September, the program begins with an academic and career orientation. Students then prepare for a rigorous curriculum through intensive Jump Start courses in statistics, finance, accounting and mathematics, and end the month with a three-day leadership development course.
MBA Core Case Competition
Present your best strategies to real industry leaders during one of the high points of your first-year experience as you compete in a required case competition that challenges you to convert learning into action. The end of your first Autumn Quarter culminates in a program-wide competition based on a âliveâ case of global importance. Teams present their best ideas to actual company executives, faculty, and alumni and are judged on the quality of their analysis and recommendations as well as presentation clarity and responsiveness to judges.
Career Support and Mentorship
Fosterâs Career Services office provides personalized coaching, job application and interview workshops, negotiation training, and business connections. Graduates secure roles at leading companies, supported by an active alumni network.
University of Washington Connection
As part of the University of Washington, Foster students access resources and connections across different departments and disciplines.
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Additional MBA Programs at UW Foster School of Business
The Foster School of Business offers a variety of MBA programs to cater to different needs and preferences:
- Part-Time MBA (Evening MBA): Designed for working professionals, this program offers flexibility and enriching learning experiences.
- Average undergraduate GPA: 3.34
- Tuition per credit (out-of-state): $1,206
- Size of graduating class: 121
- Yield: 76%
- Graduation rate: 83%
- Average work experience: 6.8 years
- One-year retention rate: 97%
- Acceptance rate: 84%
- Graduates have median annual salaries of $137,500 four months post-graduation.
- Online MBA (Hybrid MBA): This program offers a hybrid learning model with a blend of online and in-person components.
- Acceptance rate: 47%
- Graduation rate: 100%
- Size of graduating class: 83
- Tuition per credit (out-of-state): DNP
- Total program cost: $93,000
- Credits needed to graduate: 62
- Average undergraduate GPA: 3.4
- Average work experience: 7.7 years
- Alumni earn about $155,000 in median annual salary four months post-graduation.
- Traditional MBA: This program offers specializations in various areas, including:
- Sustainability: Focuses on ESG leadership.
- Acceptance rate: 42%
- Median base salary of new grads: $148,000
- Tuition per year (out-of-state): $57,831
- Median GMAT: 710
- International Business: Offers a global business certificate.
- Acceptance rate: 42%
- Median base salary of new grads: $148,000
- Tuition per year (out-of-state): $57,831
- Median GMAT: 710
- Sustainability: Focuses on ESG leadership.
- Full-Time MBA:
- Acceptance rate: 38%
- Median base salary of new grads: $145,000
- Average undergraduate GPA: 3.36
- Tuition per year (out-of-state): $58,428
Specialty Masterâs Programs
The Foster School of Business also offers several specialty masterâs programs:
- MS in Business Analytics (MSBA): Focuses on advanced analytics and decision-making, leading to roles in data science, consulting, and strategy.
- MS in Supply Chain Management (MSCM): Emphasizes logistics, operations, and sustainability, preparing graduates for supply chain and operations leadership.
- MS in Information Systems (MSIS): Covers AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and IT leadership. A STEM-designated program with extensive career pathways.
- MS in Entrepreneurship (MSENTRE): Part startup accelerator, part MBA. Training to found ventures, raise capital, work with investors, and launch companies that grow and thrive.
Admissions Essays
The Foster School of Business requires applicants to submit several essays as part of the application process. These essays provide an opportunity for applicants to showcase their experiences, goals, and values. The essay prompts include:
- Essay 1: Tell us your ideas about what lies ahead for you in your career. What are the gaps or deficiencies currently preventing you from pursuing these potential career paths? How do you plan to use your time in the Foster Full-time MBA Program to fill these gaps and advance your career?
- Essay 2: Resilience is one of the most important values of a successful Foster student. Tell us about what resilience means to you and share some of the ways that you have demonstrated resilience in overcoming personal or professional challenges. How do you anticipate showing resilience during your time as an MBA candidate?
- Essay 3: Please include this essay if you have additional information you believe would be helpful to the admissions committee in considering your application.
- Essay 4: At the Foster School of Business, we embrace diversity as one of the foundations of both successful business strategy and a world-class educational experience. We share the Universityâs dedication to promoting the understanding and appreciation of human differences, and the constructive expression of ideas. We welcome you to share some of the ways you have practiced inclusion, promoted equity, or supported the advancement of underrepresented groups.
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