Immersion Learning at Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt's various immersion learning opportunities allow you to gain real-world experience and open doors by building relationships and expanding your network.
Vanderbilt's various immersion learning opportunities allow you to gain real-world experience and open doors by building relationships and expanding your network.
CAREER IMMERSIONS & TREKS
The Career Management Center offers opportunities for students to visit selected cities and meet with executives and alumni to get firsthand industry knowledge and learn about employment opportunities. Examples include:
Vanderbilt MBA students experience immersion experiences like Wall Street Week.
- Wall Street Week
- Charlotte Finance Trek
- Day in the Bay: San Francisco
- Day by the Lake: Chicago
- Cardinal Trek
- Consulting Trek
- Tech Trek
CAREER-FOCUSED
SHORT
COURSES
Brand Week
Brand Week is a three-day intensive immersion into the world of brand management for marketing students. Groups of students are given marketing problems and tasked with coming up with implementable solutions. Some companies that students have worked with are Brown-Forman, Papa John’s, GE, Mars Petcare, KFC, Graduate Hotel, Hattie B’s Hot Chicken, IMG, and others. Students have the opportunity to network and complete independent studies with participating organizations.
Healthcare Immersion
This innovative course immerses students into the real world of U.S. healthcare delivery through the perspectives of physicians, nurses, patients, scientists and administrators in actual healthcare settings. Experiences include watching actual surgeries being performed and visits to Vanderbilt’s LifeFlight critical care helicopter service, the Mass Spectrometry Research Center and community clinics. Learn more about the healthcare immersion experience through the perspective of our students.
International Seminar Courses
Each year, the Global Business Association offers a structured trip to a major international business center. On a recent trip, students spent a week in Japan learning about Japanese history, culture, and cuisine. They met with Vanderbilt MBA alumni living in Japan and explored Tokyo and Osaka. Read more about our MBA students’ experience in Japan.
CASE COMPETITIONS
Vanderbilt Business student teams consistently succeed in case competitions across the country, demonstrating excellence in leadership, teamwork, analysis, and problem-solving and outperforming some of the world’s best-known business schools. A recent team of MBAs in the Class of 2022 recently won first place in the PepsiCo Mobile App Challenge.
National MBA Human Capital Case Competition
Vanderbilt Business students manage this national case competition. Funded by GE and Deloitte Consulting, the competition pits teams from top graduate schools across the country against each other to address a real-world human capital issue and present solutions relevant in today’s fast-paced global economy. Teams will present their solutions to a team of esteemed corporate judges from GE and Deloitte Consulting.
STUDENT-MANAGED INVESTMENT FUNDS
Max Adler Student Investment Fund (MASIF)
This student-run long-only equity investment fund sponsors a student through his or her first year at Vanderbilt. This happens after the fund reaches a certain value, taking inflation and other costs into account. The goal of MASIF is to provide Vanderbilt MBA students with an opportunity to gain experience in investment management and research. Students learn to actively manage the fund, which now consists of four portfolios.
Vanderbilt MBA students traveled to Omaha for an intimate Q&A session with Warren Buffett.
TVA Investment Challenge Program
TVA’s Investment Challenge Program is a unique, innovative partnership between TVA and 24 universities in its service territory that provides a real-world learning experience in portfolio management. The challenge gives teams of students hands-on experience in managing TVA stock portfolios. Students actively manage TVA funds by designing long-term investment strategies, placing trades and providing performance reports to TVA—all under the guidance of a faculty member. Students learn how to manage real money and the associated requirements that come along with it and are held to similar guidelines as TVA’s professional money managers. Each year, seven Vanderbilt MBA students work together to manage upwards of $300,000.
STUDENT
CLUBS & ORGANIZATIONS
Student-led organizations provide outstanding opportunities for students to lead and learn outside of the classroom.
OTHER EVENTS & INITIATIVES
Hult@Vanderbilt
The Hult Prize Foundation is a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from the world’s universities. Named as one of the top five ideas changing the world by President Bill Clinton and TIME magazine, the annual competition for the Hult Prize aims to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas—startup enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people. Winners receive one million dollars in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business community.
Three Vanderbilt teams and seven MBA students advanced to the Hult regional finals.
Turner Family Center for Social Ventures: Project Pyramid
Project Pyramid is an interdisciplinary course open to all graduate students at Vanderbilt University. The course examines the causes and symptoms of poverty and varying methods of poverty alleviation. The course is designed to enable collaboration across different graduate disciplines and student perspectives on poverty and to prepare students for project work with domestic and international organizations.
Turner Family Center for Social Ventures: Social Venture Summit
This is a student-run conference hosted by Vanderbilt’s Turner Family Center for Social Ventures that features speakers working in social enterprise to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities faced by social ventures.
Vanderbilt Healthcare Improvement Group
The Vanderbilt Healthcare Improvement Group is an interprofessional community of Vanderbilt education, management, medicine and nursing students committed to advancing education and student participation in quality improvement in healthcare. In an interdisciplinary elective course managed jointly by students from Owen, the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine, students work in teams to tackle a quality improvement project at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Vanderbilt Business Healthcare Conference
The Vanderbilt Business Healthcare Conference brings national speakers with big ideas to Nashville to discuss policy, innovative care, economics and technology while recruiting top healthcare MBA students from across the country. This conference is led and managed by Vanderbilt MBA students.
START-UP OPPORTUNITIES
At Vanderbilt, would-be entrepreneurs will not only learn how to develop a business plan, but they’ll receive support and funding opportunities to help launch their own business.
The Center for Entrepreneurship's (C4E) mission is to grow a productive entrepreneurial ecosystem conducive to creating new and innovative businesses and helps connect investors and entrepreneurs. The center has become a respected training ground and source of support for serious student entrepreneurs. The C4E has spawned an active angel investor network, the Nashville Capital Network (NCN) focused on funding early-stage start-up ventures, a vital resource for the regional entrepreneurial business community. The C4E also sponsors the regional chapter of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (YEO), allowing Vanderbilt students to have easy access to a ready-made network of successful entrepreneurs.
At Vanderbilt we connect you with all kinds of resources, from networking with local entrepreneurs to organizations including the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, the Nashville Capital Network and Jumpstart Foundry. These organizations assist new entrepreneurs in securing funding for ventures.
Another resource is the Sohr Grant, established in 2011 by Jim and Leah Sohr. Thanks to this grant, $235,000 has been awarded to fund Owen student led business ideas and startups.