Interview with Shari Hubert, Associate Dean of Admissions at Duke Fuqua [Show Summary]

Shari Hubert, Associate Dean of Admissions at Duke Fuqua shares great information about major curriculum and programmatic changes the school is going through and why.

Learn about Duke Fuqua's unique location, curriculum and program offerings [Show Notes]

It gives me great pleasure to welcome back to AST Shari Hubert, Associate Dean of Admissions at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Shari earned her BA at Dartmouth and her MBA at Harvard. She worked at several elite companies, and in 2009 became Director of Recruitment for the Peace Corps. In 2012 she returned to the MBA world when she became the Associate Dean of MBA Admissions for Georgetown McDonough. She joined Duke Fuqua as Associate Dean of Admissions in October 2017.

Fuqua has announced a curriculum redesign with three main changes. What are they and how will they affect the class entering in 2020? [1:48]

We are always trying to look for ways to remain relevant, and with the landscape we find ourselves in it is a challenging environment for business right now. There are so many polarizing issues. After talking about the needs of our students, we settled on their need for a greater emphasis on how to develop as a leader who can rally others to move toward a common purpose. The idea of teamwork has always been a part of our culture, and more recently embodied by Team Fuqua, as has the focus on innovation, but we wanted to be very intentional about equipping students with the right skillsets to tackle this new business environment. The curriculum focuses around three themes that are tackled right at the beginning of the first year and then again at the end of first year. The themes are leadership and common purpose, entrepreneurship as a mindset, and technology in business. Right after orientation there is a three-week period with three courses – one is leadership ethics in organizations, the second is entrepreneurship for a lifetime, and the third is focused on technology and ethics. We believe an entrepreneurial mindset is important, regardless of whether or not a student decides to own their own business someday. An owner mentality is very beneficial for resilience and creativity. Business is very complex with the technology transformation over the last few decades. There is no shortage of data, but what is lacking is leadership around making informed decisions with that data. So for us the focus is on building leaders who will be ethical about how to use it.

At the end of the first year there is kind of a capstone course around mobilizing teams for common purpose and the need to have courageous conversations. We do this at the end of the first year as students have built relationships by then and are able to more boldly participate. There is such polarization in the workforce, which is a reflection of society – one can’t seem to disagree agreeably. We look for students who can understand and embrace diversity and difference and this new curriculum equips students with the ability to navigate that and ultimately have a positive impact on society.

How will Fuqua's Accelerated MBA program work and who is it for? [13:17]

The program is a one-year MBA for those with a Masters in Management (MMS) from Fuqua and/or MMS from another institution. These are individuals who have studied the core competencies ar...