Student Stories

This course had an amazing instructor, amazing examples, and an amazing user interface that made it easy for me to grasp the material and learn simultaneously with others around the world.

Allie O'Hanley

Founder and Director of Rxhibition, a new nonprofit organization that curates, designs, and installs art exhibitions in chemotherapy treatment areas

I expected CORe to be much more of an overview. I never was expecting the depth that it truly delivered. I received a strong foundation to be confident enough to build my own startup.

Michael Colletti

Working for a cutting-edge SaaS startup in Boston, MA

My goals also include applying the knowledge learned in this program to my professional life, really soaking it in, and learning from the experiences and perspectives of my peers in the course.

I found the overall CORe experience to be…eye-opening. Each of the courses took deep dives into companies of all shapes and sizes to exemplify how core business concepts are applied…CORe took the idea of learning business principles to the next level

Natacha

Natacha explains how CORe is helping her advance her career in finance.

Danielle Dutervil Mubarak

A lawyer in NYC using her CORe knowledge to better serve her clients.

What really impressed me were my classmates - people from all over the world and from all backgrounds that were invested in helping each other.

Sheneka Balogun

Meet Sheneka, a CORe participant who took the program in order to advance her career and to begin an Ed.D. in Entrepreneurial Leadership.

Kyle Rosenmeyer

Boise State University Graduate, Engineer, and Photographer

For me, that connection from textbook to reality made the courses memorable, enjoyable, and interesting. Case studies were absolutely my favorite part of the program.

A few weeks into the course, accounting terminology came alive as I realized why accounting is the language of business. I can now talk confidently with clients and understand the business aspect of their problems.

The platform was engaging, innovative, and allowed me to interact with the material in a way I never expected from an online course.

My job is project-based, and I'm currently leading the operational functions of a system-wide IT implementation, a project that affects the daily work of a few thousand employees. Knowing how to read financial statements or look at data sets and understand them has helped me make major decisions on future state reporting.

Liz Taylor

An advertising account director in NYC applying CORe to better serve her clients

I honestly use something from CORe nearly every day. In general, I have a much better appreciation for my client's business.

Richard Pitts

Richard is a California-based Chief Medical Officer who is improving healthcare with CORe

I use my CORe training every day. Whether at work on in my private life, CORe was a paradigm-shifting event for me.

…beyond mastering the basics of economics, analytics, and financial accounting, you learn Excel. For a philosophy major like me, to be able to put that on a resume…invaluable.

Sichao Ni

Commercial Attaché, U.S. Embassy Singapore

HBS Online doesn't teach you knowledge or prescribe to any cookie-cutter solutions to problems. Rather, it teaches you how to think about business problems and arrive at a solution yourself.

I felt the course covered a good overall scope and understanding of healthcare economics and would be beneficial for anyone seeking or needing a greater understanding of the stakeholders and forces at work in the healthcare sector. This applies for those new to healthcare as well as those who have worked in the industry for long periods of time.

Raj Desai

Tech entrepreneur developing mass-scale wifi solutions in India

It's like you're looking through the world with a completely different perspective altogether, yet it's so obvious. The dots were always there, and CORe made me realize the connections.

Amita Metkari

Mechanical Engineer looking to pursue an MBA

The program offers a perfect blend of three fundamental courses.

Anindita Ravikumar

Working for a consulting firm to help design business models that serve low-income populations

Another aspect of CORe that greatly added to my learning was the diverse cohort I was able to interact with - the stories and instances from their lives added more color to each topic we learned.

Elizabeth Malkin

Working at a tech startup in Cambridge, MA

I spent much of my college career fervently annotating novels and loved every minute of it but knew that my focus post college was going to be business.

I was able to use Business Analytics when a project on truck optimization for my site came up while I was enrolled in the course. I was able to apply the statistical concepts that I learned during the course to create an optimizer tool for truck usage and scheduling at the mine. This tool resulted in significant cost savings, which was highly valued by the site management team.

[With Business Analytics], I discovered a new-found love of data analytics. I was fascinated to learn about ways we can use data to systematically seek an answer to a specific business question or predict the outcome of a scenario given past behavior. This new interest has motivated me to pursue a career in data science (a field that combines statistics, analytics, and business knowledge), which I have begun to work toward since I finished [the course].

Anastassia Nefedova

Working on a cloud-based product expansion in Central and Eastern Europe for Microsoft and based in Munich, Germany

My MBA was great, however, in five weeks we did not cover nearly as much content as with CORe, so this was a quintessential supplement.

As an entrepreneur, mentor and educator, I can safely say that Harvard Business School Online has shown me the future of education. It is worth every penny and is definitely something I'd recommend to anyone looking to enrich their business education.

Bethany Larsen

An aspiring MBA student planning for a career in social entrepreneurship

Those skills are all very useful, but I think my biggest takeaway from CORe is a new perspective on complex business challenges. This lens has given me a more balanced perspective on sensitive topics like LIFO reserves, minimum wage, and drug pricing that will make me a more informed citizen and wiser leader.

The way Business Analytics blended numbers with the impact on business forecasting and improvement of business processes was simply amazing. The real-life cases from different spheres made the learning more insightful. The subject further helped affirm the power of data/numbers in analyzing and forecasting about a particular business initiative.

Thanks to Business Analytics, I learned to apply statistical analysis to real world problems. For instance, I am currently doing a research project using regression analysis to see if we can predict emergency department demand on any given day - important for staffing and resource allocation.

Nupur Kohli

A doctor and healthcare entrepreneur from the Netherlands

I have also applied what I learned in setting up my own health company, LeadInShape. CORe helped me in interpreting data, researching different markets, and how to do my finances. Also, when I have to make decisions in my work or in business, I think of what I have learned in CORe.

Julian Tan

Recently completed my PhD and starting work at The Boston Consulting Group in London

As a classically trained scientist with limited business experience, I believe CORe is a fantastic way to invest in myself and help bridge the gap between being the scientist I am right now and the consultant I need to be in September.

Chirag Gandhi

Risk Analyst at Credit Suisse

The best part of CORe was its case-based approach to learning and retaining business fundamentals. No chapter in the entire curriculum had raw theory...It helped in challenging conventional wisdom with strong and practical, real life examples.

Willemijn van Woerkom

Amsterdam native Willemijn discusses the inviting and addictive nature of the CORe online course platform and how the business skills she's learned in the program are applicable to people of all backgrounds.

Sohaib Ahmed

Chief Operating Officer for an exam preparation company using CORe to gain fundamental business skills.

I just wanted to understand the fundamentals of several business domains well enough to navigate and delegate, while still having the flexibility to run my business and do other things. CORe was the perfect fit in this regard.

Enrique Garcia-Rivera

Pursuing a PhD in Chemical Biology in Boston

By learning these essential business skills, I now feel more prepared to advance scientific discoveries; raising capital, leading a team, developing strategic partnerships with established pharmaceuticals, and other crucial activities are now even clearer to me because of CORe.

Through CORe, I have uncovered a love for analytics, made valuable connections with people in several countries, and gained a strong foundation that will serve me well in MBA or PhD studies, which I am considering for the future.

Christopher Munro

Operations Analyst who took CORe to further a career in business

CORe proved to be so rewarding. I went in with the mindset of something to set my resume apart from others and came out with a broad and detailed understanding of the fundamentals of business.

I could not be a bigger proponent for online learning following my CORe experience. The ability to pause, rewind, and repeat what your instructor has to say was very helpful in learning business concepts. The course increased my confidence in the world of business and helped me formalize my career path.

This is now my fourth HBS online course that I have taken. I love the format that lets me learn asynchronously when I have time in my busy schedule. The HBS courses do a wonderful job encouraging interaction with peer learners which amplifies the learning. The HBS courses foster this peer engagement much more effectively than I have found in other online courses that I have taken.

Learning about concepts through real-life cases was my favorite part of the program. The cases really helped transform abstract concepts into observable situations one could learn from.

Tadashi Abe

Special Forces Officer with a science background looking to pursue an MBA

In my opinion, the true value of CORe is the ability to interact and network with fellow CORe members.

Tiara Shafiq

Writer, performer, and producer engaging in entrepreneurial and directorial endeavors with business knowledge gained from CORe

I had been intimidated by a lot of the content - particularly Financial Accounting, since the whole idea of understanding financial documents made me panic - but to my surprise everything was presented in very accessible, grounded, easy-to-understand ways.

Gaurang Manjrekar

A technology consultant and founder of two European football blogs based in NYC

Another aspect which I loved and cannot emphasize enough is the fact that CORe does not feel like a virtual program.

I'm using regression analysis and other statistical concepts from Business Analytics to build predictive models, analyze trends, and conduct surveys and hypothesis testing. Business Analytics has helped me pursue a career in data analytics and land a job as a Business Intelligence Analyst at Ministry of Justice New Zealand. I'm leading a few modelling and reporting projects across the Ministry using the knowledge I gained from the course.

So much of the business world is about working with others to accomplish a common goal; knowing that your peers were rating your participation and reading your contributions was truly compelling.

The CORe program will help me to better understand the world around me…and to hit the ground running in any job after graduation.

CORe gave me a new lens through which I could look at the world. I applied what I learned right away at work and continue to apply it now in business school.

The excel I learned from Business Analytics has become useful as I started working as a data analyst for an economic research firm, BMI Research. The techniques I learned make it easier to comprehend the more complex functions. In addition, the integrated learning I took from the case studies allows me to apply “total analysis” in my everyday work and assessments, which is in fact the core business of my company.

Kali Pfaff

Healthcare business operations professional and current MBA student

While I originally enrolled in CORe to determine if I wanted to pursue an MBA, I ended up using the knowledge I gained from CORe to interview for and land my current job.

…fun, exciting, and powerful. I believe I learned a lot through this course that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere with my liberal arts education.

I found the content [in Economics for Managers] incredibly eye-opening to how the world worked around me, as well as helping to understand several foreign and long-forgotten concepts about how businesses and economies function.

I believe that CORe helped prove to prospective employers, as well as myself, that I understand the fundamentals of business.