Class meets weekly on Tuesdays as a section.

Class meets weekly on Wednesday nights to enable unique interactions with HBS alumni and other guests. Usually these sessions are from 5:30-7:30pm, but there will be two Wednesday sessions that will be longer – 5:30-8:30pm – to accommodate special opportunities. The exact dates will be announced before the semester begins.

Educational Objectives

Crafting Your Life: The First 10 Years Post MBA (LIFE) is fundamentally a course about you. It is about preparing and equipping you to better handle the choices, tradeoffs, and surprises that you will inevitably face after graduating from HBS. Throughout the course, you will define what a life well-lived means to you, and discover and implement tactics and practices to enable you to live consistently with what matters most to you. In addition, you will consider how to adapt along the way when life inevitably does not go according to plan.

A unique feature of the course is the emphasis on community – with your fellow students as well as alumni. You will have access to alumni and their lived experiences. There are a multitude of interactions with both alumni 10+ years out reflecting on their lives to date as well as the over 300 former students of the course (known as LIFERs) who continue to be involved and share their current experiences. Alumni and LIFERs interact with students as part of the class in more traditional ways as case protagonists, and panelists, but also as part of small group discussions and one-on-one conversations. These interactions are meant to help inform you about others’ experiences and what they learned from them – and in turn to help you think more deeply about what you want out of your life and how you want to best equip yourself for what lies ahead.

The course strives to help you think deeply and intentionally about the following questions:

1. Defining Your Compass
• What are my values? Who am I at my best?
• How has my past shaped me? What assumptions do I have about my life – which do I want to keep and which do I want to revise?
• What does it mean to me to live a good life? What is important to me, and how will I prioritize my time and energy towards what matters most?
2. Owning Your Actions
• How do I approach decisions and tradeoffs across different areas of my life?
• How do I use my time on a daily and weekly basis? How do I create and change habits that enable me to continue making progress towards the life that I want?
• How do I think about my choice of geography?
• How do I create structures for navigating life, with all of its twists and turns, with a life partner?
• How do I think about career/family choices? What does it mean to be part of a dual-career couple? Would I ever consider opting out of the work force?
3. Equipping Yourself for What You Cannot Control
• How do I take care of myself, and especially take care of my mental health? How do I build my capacity for resilience?
• How do I develop relationships that will sustain me – both at work and in life?
• How do I think about making a “difference” in the world? In what ways can I craft my life and my job in ways that will enable me to achieve my goals?

With this in mind, LIFE is not your typical HBS class. When you sign up for LIFE, you sign up for:

• A Laboratory. We think of life as a laboratory, and crafting your life as an ongoing discovery process of experimenting, learning, and adapting over time. Similarly, the LIFE course is not and never will be a finished product. The first version of the course was developed in close partnership with EC students and we continue the process of co-creation with students every year—and expect you to play an active role in shaping the course for future generations. By getting comfortable with trying new and different ways of learning, providing feedback, and sharing ideas to improve the course, you will also practice a “test-and-learn” mindset and develop skills that you can apply in your own life laboratory.
• A Community for Life-Long Learning. When you join LIFE, you are joining a broader community of students and alumni invested in learning with and supporting each other in the pursuit of a life well-lived. Throughout the course, we will build shared language, skills, and norms about what it means to craft your life, thereby enabling you to engage with one another deeply on personal topics that might otherwise be undiscussed in an academic or professional setting. LIFERs (graduates of the course) will interact with you throughout the semester, and in the final class they will welcome you into the LIFER community.
• Intergenerational Learning. HBS has a tremendously broad and diverse alumni network with a wide array of professional and personal experiences. LIFE is a platform to unlock the potential of the alumni network by facilitating intergenerational learning. Throughout the course, you will engage with alumni in a variety of ways, including: one-on-one interviews, panel discussions on specific topics, and two unique events—a reception featuring small group conversations between students and alumni and a celebration at the end of the semester where LIFERs will welcome you into the LIFER community.

Two important notes to consider, before signing up for LIFE:

1. LIFE involves a lot of work. LIFE students should be deeply invested in learning about themselves, in supporting others, and in partnering with Professor Perlow and the LIFE Team to innovate on the course and the broader LIFE initiative. Former students have commented on the intense workload!

2. The alumni vignettes that you will read/hear in LIFE are meant to share with you diverse examples of HBS alums who have made different choices, in different areas of their lives, for many different reasons, and have drawn many different life lessons from those choices. When you read/hear these materials, and when we discuss them in class, the goal is for you to learn from their experiences and think about what their experiences teach you about you. We’re not interested in judging them or assessing whether they are living a life well lived. It’s your job to figure out what it means for you to live a life well lived by engaging with these materials and conversations.

Course Structure and Requirements

LIFE has two sections of 40 students each. This class size is designed to foster deep connections through class discussion, small group conversations, and pair-and-shares.

Time

LIFE has a unique class structure designed to create the best possible learning environment for each topic and experience. Each section meets separately on Tuesdays during a regular X schedule block, and both sections will come together on Wednesday nights from 5:30-7:30 pm except on two Wednesday nights it will meet from 5:30-8:30pm (dates will be announced before the semester begins) to enable special opportunities. These evening sessions are classes, and you are required to attend all of them.

Assignments During Semester

Weekly Readings. Each week you will read cases and/or vignettes about alumni as you do in a traditional HBS class. However, the intent of these cases/vignettes is to help you understand what the person being described did, and for you to reflect on your own reactions and what you would do – not to judge what they did.

Weekly Exercises. Most weeks you will have exercises that accompany the readings to learn more about you, whether it’s looking back at your past, or tracking how you spend your time, or playing a life simulation to uncover the choices and tradeoffs you are inclined to make. The exercises will include LIFE Reflection & Activity workbook exercises and other online exercises.

Module Reflections. At the end of each of the three modules of the course you are asked to stop and reflect on what you have been learning about yourself. These reflections are required to be done on time, but are not graded, and rather are built in for you to pause and explore your insights. They will form the basis of your final paper so the more you invest during the semester the easier your task come the end of the term.

Interviews. Throughout the semester you are required to conduct 4 interviews. The first interview is with a former Crafting your Life student (LIFER) and the remaining 3 are with alumni five or more years out of HBS. You can choose your own alumni or use the LIFE Connect tool developed for this course to match you with alumni that are prepared to talk about the topics you are hoping to discuss. The LIFE Interview Guide and Notebook is where you will capture your preparation and interview notes before formally writing up your learnings as part of the final paper. You will submit your LIFE Interview Guide and Notebook as part of the final course submissions.

Final Paper

Your final paper is an opportunity to compile all that you have done throughout the semester. Essentially, you will be “writing” your final paper throughout the semester through the weekly exercises, module reflections, and alumni interview summaries. The purpose of the paper is to meaningfully reflect on all that you’ve learned about yourself, and to create something to which you can refer back throughout your life. The final paper integrates what you have learned, and you will also involve the creations of an artifact as a tangible companion piece to the paper to remind you in your daily life of what you have learned about yourself and wish to stay true to going forward.

Design Partners

LIFE is unique in that it is an EC course created by EC students, for EC students. The course originated in 2019 through a partnership between EC students and HBS alumni and continues to evolve (in both form and content) in collaboration with our students – who we consider to be our design partners. If you sign up for LIFE, you are not just electing to take a course—you are choosing to pick up the baton from those students who came before you, and continue the course development process with all the attendant joys of leaving a legacy that will be part of HBS students’ experience for years to come. Note, however, that this also requires the full awareness that some aspects of LIFE are in the process of being designed, in partnership with you. Your ongoing feedback and help will be part of the experience, and part of the learning that you (and we) take away from the course.

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