You shall not pass! Fail! No pass! Failure!
I was part of Harvard Business School’s HBX June 2016 CORe program (June 7, 2016 – August 18, 2016) and the grades were just released and I did not pass.
“Credential of Readiness (CORe) is a primer on the fundamentals of business. It is designed to introduce you to the language of business. It assumes no prior familiarity with business concepts, though it does presume a strong motivation to engage and learn. CORe is comprised of three courses – Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting – which must be taken together. CORe is designed for college undergraduates, recent college graduates, and graduate students in non-business fields who want to prepare themselves for a business career or for a graduate business school” (http://hbx.hbs.edu/enroll/faqs#faq-about-core).
There was always that glimmer of hope that I would pass, but sadly that did not happen. It was hard, especially for someone with a extremely limited business background. The platform that they used was awesome and I liked the case studies approach, but there were things that I think did not work. HBX’s homepage said “CORe can be appropriate for virtually all majors and is designed to instruct participants in the fundamentals of business. Past participants came from the humanities, sciences, liberal arts, and other disciplines” (http://hbx.hbs.edu/enroll/faqs#faq-coremajor) and I don’t believe that. Many things discussed in all three units had an underlining assumption that you had prior business knowledge in those three different areas and so things were not explained or covered. As a MOOCs class, this was a positive experience, I did learn some new things, but I would recommend taking it when you have nothing else to do and certainly not when you are working full time, teaching part-time, participating in a few other MOOCs, and trying to work on your PhD dissertation like I was.
