MIT Sloan students can cross-register with Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, as well as with other MIT graduate schools.It is not uncommon to see MIT Sloan students take VCPE or strategy classes at HBS, policy or infrastructure finance classes at HKS, and engineering or entrepreneurship/innovation classes at other MIT graduate schools, and of course, students from these schools take classes at Sloan as well. Cross-registration is a great way for students to take advantage of the vast amount of resources that are available in Boston and for schools to leverage off of each other to provide more learning opportunities to us.
I am currently cross-registered with HBS to take a PE class. Cross-registration doesn't require a whole lot of work. I just had to take a form and get it signed by the professor's assistant at HBS and turn it into the HBS registrar. Whether you get the class or not depends on how popular it is. HBS students naturally get priority over us for their classes, but since there are multiple sections it is usually not too difficult to get in, unless it's Michael Porter's class or something. HBS has a different class schedule - whereas our classes are mostly M/W or T/Th, they're on something called the X-Y schedule where you take classes on M/T or Th/F and on alternate Wednesdays. The X schedule usually works better if you want to take Fridays off, and fall semester's usually better than spring semester just because our schedules are perfectly aligned in terms of all the holidays and SIP week. Up to 3 non-Sloan graduate-level courses count towards your degree, but it's not something to worry about because you will have plenty of extra credits by the time you graduate. In terms of transportation, I carpool with a fellow Sloanie who is also in the class, but Harvard is only two subway stations away from Sloan, so it's not a big deal if you don't have a car or can't find someone who has a car.
For me, cross-registration has been a great way for me to meet new people and to take good classes at other schools. I would definitely recommend taking advantage of this opportunity to take some classes outside of Sloan.
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