Concentrations

Accounting has been a mainstay in the MBA core curriculum since the school’s inception in 1949. While Financial and Managerial Accounting I and II are required core classes for MBA students, there are unique electives to choose from in building an Accounting concentration grounded in analytical decision-making, technology, strategy, and high ethical standards.

A concentration in Accounting is intended for those MBA students who want to have a role in evaluating, analyzing and communicating an organization’s performance. Students seeking a career in general management, investment banking, corporate finance, operations management or consulting should find the concentration very useful.

The AI in Business concentration provides avenues for MBA students to explore various topics in AI, from machine learning to the legal and ethical considerations of AI to use in business applications. AI is an area of significant interest and growth at CMU, and this course list is expected to be updated frequently, particularly as the Tepper School builds its foothold in business applications of AI.

The unprecedented speed with which technology transforms markets and economies has altered the way multinational organizations successfully compete. As the university that is synonymous with technology, Carnegie Mellon has been a key player in leading this trend.

Our students represent a new breed of leader, one who understands global issues and is able to appropriately take advantage of emerging trends and technologies via a deep understanding of the topic. Broadly encompassing an array of technical and managerial coursework as well as applied project experience, the Business Technologies concentration is aimed at preparing students for a career in solving business problems across different domains using data and technology.

Students are able to take advantage of a cross-campus academic experience through our MBA program as well as the School of Computer Science, the Software Engineering Institute, and the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. 

Concentrating in communications provides students with strategies for creating and implementing effective persuasive skills and behaviors to influence key stakeholders in multiple professional situations.

The concentration's strength lies within its approach to using real-world scenarios to explore communication styles and critical thinking needs for diverse management tasks. These include strategic planning, management consulting, negotiations, writing, executive actions, cross-team collaboration, change management, and corporate-wide communications. Acting for Business rounds out this diverse concentration.

The communication concentration features faculty whose research and practical experience focus on management issues facing today's leaders. These experienced faculty are ready to help students mature into strong communicators, no matter their prior experience upon beginning each course.

The Economics concentration provides students tools to become more effective and agile decision-makers in a variety of business areas, including finance, technology, consulting, and marketing.

The Tepper School created a revolution in management science decades ago, and this revolution was, in part, spurred by the school’s leadership in the economics arena. Nobel-winning research conducted at the Tepper School deepened the debate surrounding societal and economic issues and reshaped public policy and markets, and hence the environment in which businesses operate.

We continue this tradition by conducting cutting-edge research that explains how individuals and economies operate and how policy changes, global competition, and innovation affect individual and firm choices and economic outcomes. 

The Entrepreneurship concentration is designed to provide MBA students with the tools, experiences, and support necessary to facilitate development as a leader and innovator in your chosen field or industry.

In sync with Carnegie Mellon’s interdisciplinary strengths, students collaborate closely with faculty, researchers, and other students at our top-ranked programs including engineering, product development, computer science, robotics, and design.

Carnegie Mellon has one of the world’s most robust and valuable entrepreneurial ecosystems. Students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends represent some of history’s most successful entrepreneurs and this concentration takes full advantage of CMU’s reputation and resources via the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship.

More than 260 companies have been launched since 2008 and Carnegie Mellon entrepreneurs have raised over $1 billion in capital since 2011.

Our Finance program emphasizes the analytical and quantitative aspects of finance and accounting, offering students an opportunity to explore various methodologies and analyses.

Faculty include some of the most prominent members of the financial academic community with successes in several fields of research in finance and economics. Tepper MBA alumni are well-represented in senior financial positions at investment banks and Fortune 500 companies, corporate finance and treasury programs.

Healthcare analytics uses analytical tools to offer insights into a broad range of problems in healthcare, including hospital management, insurance policies, patient records, medicine, diagnoses, and treatment.

This concentration prepares students to apply their analytical skills to a wider range of problems in the healthcare domain. It draws from the healthcare analytics courses offered at the Tepper School as well as several courses related to healthcare policies and AI applications to healthcare from the Heinz College and the School of Computer Science.

Marketing is the process of creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers. A Marketing concentration provides MBA students with knowledge of how to support this process through pricing, promotions, distribution channels, and product design.

A strength of our program is the use of analytical methods from statistical modeling, data mining, machine learning, and operations to understand marketplaces and make marketing decisions. Our students’ ability to approach marketplace and consumer issues as part of a honed, analytical framework is rare — and valued — in today’s fast-paced technology industries.

Marketing courses include work in product marketing, market entry planning, marketing with social media, segmentation, communications management, sales forecasting, channel distribution, consumer behavior, customer-driven strategies and services, technology strategy, and marketing research.

Our graduates are highly sought after for positions at technology, consulting, healthcare/pharmaceutical, and consumer products companies. Most Tepper School MBAs pursuing marketing careers work in marketing strategy, product management, product marketing, brand management, or marketing analytics roles or enter leadership development programs with a marketing focus.

Operations Management is concerned with planning, organizing, and supervising the design, development, and delivery of products and services. It provides conceptual frameworks and analytical tools to optimize key decisions in designing and managing operational processes.

With a broad variety of electives available, students explore operations topics such as:

• Demand management and price optimization
• Supply chain management
• Risk analytics
• Operations strategy
• Sustainable operations
• Real options
• Service management
• Six sigma tools and techniques

The Operations Research concentration draws upon our history of excellence in the area of quantitative decision making. During the 1950s, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University pioneered a revolutionary new approach to business management known as management science.

Our practice of applying analytical, quantitative decision-making techniques to management has since been adopted by virtually every leading B-school in the U.S.

The study of Operations Research provides a powerful career advantage in which MBA students master frameworks for:

• Building descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive models
• Using tools from statistics
• Data mining
• Machine learning
• Mathematical optimization

Concentrating in organizational behavior provides students with foundational knowledge regarding how organizations, and the people within them, function.

The program’s strength lies within the areas of groups and teams, social networks, organizational learning, negotiation and conflict management, strategy, and ethics, and justice. The Organizational Behavior courses feature faculty who are spearheading innovative research on the nuanced management issues facing today’s organizations, particularly in the arenas of knowledge transfer and management, team dynamics, conflict and negotiation, and organizational strategy.

Within our trademark framework of analytics, this concentration will help you to learn how to solve complex “human” problems facing organizations. Students who concentrate in Organizational Behavior have the opportunity to develop highly valued skills including effective negotiation and conflict management, organizational assessment and design, and leading effective teams.

Strategy encompasses a range of functions within both the corporate and the entrepreneurial landscape. A popular concentration for Tepper School MBAs, strategy provides the underpinning for helping students develop the fundamental skillset for formulating and executing strategies for competitive business advantage.

The elective and core coursework provides exposure to companies’ operating environments (both within the firm and in the external competitive environment), approaches to sustaining competitive advantage, methods for generating value for customers and shareholders, and a framework for balancing the opportunities and risks associated with dynamic and uncertain changes in industry attractiveness and competitive position.

This concentration utilizes a range of analytical tools and the ability to take an integrative point of view within a framework of decision-making that focuses on multiple disciplines. Students will understand how to integrate functions such as finance, law, operations, marketing, etc., all within the context of strategy.

Tepper School MBA students will become comfortable integrating coursework from other areas/concentrations to use their analytical skills to perform in-depth analyses of industries and competitors, predict competitive behavior, and analyze how firms develop and sustain competitive advantage over time.

Topics among various concentrations include, but are not limited to, consulting and conflict resolution, managing intellectual capital and knowledge-intensive business, strategic corporate management, technology strategy, trade, and investment strategy.

Our MBA Sustainability concentration encompasses a wide range of topics including energy, natural resources, the environment, health and social well-being, engineering, and architecture.

The essence of sustainability is considering the impacts of actions today on outcomes in the future. As an outgrowth of the Tepper School Sustainability Initiative and in response to increasing demand for sustainability studies, the MBA Sustainability concentration offers students an opportunity to pursue scholarship, coursework, and careers in this ever-growing field.

Both the initiative and concentration draw from the existing sustainability expertise among faculty within the Tepper School and across the university and the university-wide focus on technology, quantitative and computational approaches, and energy topics.