Welcome to the driver’s seat

The Daytime MBA program isn't designed for you—it's designed by you. Our highly customizable curriculum gives you the opportunity to try new things and learn from different perspectives. Here, you’ll have only 13 mandated core classes—and more flexibility to select from over 100 electives to pursue the topics of most interest to you. Since Fuqua doesn’t specialize in one skill or industry, you’ll be prepared to understand many different aspects of business that can help you take different career paths after graduation.

Been there? Done that?

Already have extensive experience in finance, statistics, or another core subject? By demonstrating prior mastery of core MBA course material, you may be granted an exemption from that course, so you can diversify into more advanced courses or electives from the beginning of your studies.

Course highlights

Explore a selection of the core courses and electives available to you.

Financial Accounting

Learn to construct and interpret corporate financial reports. By the end of the course, you should have a basic understanding of financial statements and the ability to use them for decision-making.

Managerial Accounting

Managerial Accounting emphasizes the use of accounting information for internal purposes. In this course, you’ll cover the design of management accounting systems for planning and controlling operations and for motivating personnel. You’ll integrate accounting with ideas from microeconomics, data analysis, decision analysis, finance, and operations management.

Probability and Statistics

Regardless of the setting, many management decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty. This course introduces a framework for thinking about problems involving uncertainty and, building on this framework, develops tools for interpreting data. The goal of the course is to sharpen your quantitative and analytical skills, and to provide a foundation in probability and statistics for a management career.

Decision Models

Successful management requires the ability to recognize a decision situation, understand its essential features, and make a choice. However, many such situations may be too difficult to grasp intuitively, or the stakes may be too high to learn by experience. In these cases, we may benefit from using decision models - simplified representations of these situations that allow you to consider the different possible scenarios (i.e., ask "what if") and learn more about the problem.

Managerial Economics

In this course, you’ll examine market behavior and focus on the actions and reactions of businesses and consumers in a variety of market environments. You’ll master basic tools of microeconomics: supply and demand analysis, firms’ production and pricing decisions, market equilibrium and market structure analysis, and the principles of strategic behavior.

Game Theory for Strategic Advantage

People rarely make decisions in a vacuum. The choices we make affect others, and their choices impact us. Such situations are known as “games,” and you will encounter them frequently in the business world. The goal of this course is to enhance your ability to think strategically in complex, interactive environments.

Energy, Markets, & Innovation

Explore how ongoing changes in energy supply, demand, and technology are affecting energy markets and the businesses that operate within them. The specific transformations that will be explored include shale gas and shale oil, renewable power generation, energy efficiency retrofits in buildings, and recent government environmental regulations/incentives.

Global Institutions & Environment

Learn how the same problem is solved, or at least addressed, by differing institutional arrangements around the world and the difficulties in applying that arrangement across jurisdictional boundaries.

Corporate Finance

This case-study-based course examines important issues in corporate finance from the perspective of managers who are responsible for making significant investment and financing decisions.

Global Finance Management

Gain an introduction to fundamental concepts in finance, and develop a set of tools for analyzing the investment and financing decisions of both individuals and firms. The topics in this course form the foundation for subsequent courses in corporate finance, corporate valuation, investments, and financial derivatives.

Impact Investing

Examine the developing marketplace of impact investing, or investing with the intent to generate environmental and social impacts in addition to financial returns. Case studies and guests will explore challenges and lessons in creating successful fund and deal structures that align various blended value objectives for both entrepreneurs and investors.

Health Care Markets

Health Care Markets uses tools from business and the social sciences to examine challenges faced by managers, patients, and policy makers in the health sector. The course aims for broad coverage of health care, including manufacturers and providers, but pays special attention to payers.

Health Policy & Management

Students travel to Washington, D.C., to visit federal institutions, advocacy groups, and non-governmental organizations that are critical to the development of health policy, technology, and the delivery of health care services.

Leadership Communication 1

Ground yourself in the foundations of effective management communication by learning to communicate clearly, strategically, persuasively, and collaboratively in professional settings.

Leadership Communication 2

Build on the foundations of Leadership Communications 1 to continue to enhance your communication skills, using industry analysis and company analysis team assignments from Foundations of Strategy.

Leadership, Ethics & Organizations

The course focuses on two broad sets of questions. First, what principles can you draw on to analyze and improve performance in organizations? Second, what can you contribute to your firm and why should others respect and listen to you?

Negotiations

Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more interdependent parties, and this course will help you to understand the theory and processes of negotiation as it is practiced in a variety of settings.

Marketing Management

Learn to assess marketing opportunities by analyzing customers, competitors, and your company (the 3 C's). Building on that knowledge, learn to design effective marketing programs via selecting appropriate strategies for pricing, promotion, place, and product (the 4 P's).

Marketing Strategy

Marketing Strategy offers frameworks and tools for managing a company with the customer’s perspective as your north star. Using case studies aimed at developing and managing market-based assets, you’ll learn to create value for customers — and capture value for your company.

Operations Strategy

The focus of this course is on the strategic aspects of operations management.
It is qualitative in nature, and based on case studies, class discussions, and lectures.

Value Chain Innovation in Business Processes

Learn why a firm's financial performance depends on successful value chain strategies, which can be leveraged to increase market share, reduce costs, and improve customer service.  You'll understand sources of innovation to enhance the smart management of value chain networks in an era of digital data availability and new information technologies.

Foundations of Strategy

Why are some firms more profitable than others? This course explores the sources of sustained profits in the face of competitive pressures. In doing so, it introduces concepts and skills necessary for managers, management consultants, and financial analysts to understand, craft, and support a firm's strategy.

Entrepreneurial Strategy

Do you hope to pursue start-up opportunities upon graduation, or at a later career stage? In this course, you’ll gain the information and tools you need to evaluate opportunities to starting a new firm. Topics include: how to choose markets for entry, when to enter, and what resources and capabilities it will take to provide a platform for future growth.

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Curriculum

Breaking Down First-Year Courses: Fall Term 1

Student in Ford Library

We're STEM Designated!

Our Daytime MBA program:

  • Deepens your expertise in the tools, frameworks, and models that address managerial problems
  • Prepares you to both lead and direct analysis
  • Helps you understand the tools and frameworks that should be used to inform and improve decisions

And NOW - the entire program (instead of the prior MSTeM track) carries the official STEM designation, giving international students whose jobs meet certain requirements 2 additional years to work in the United States

Fuqua students pitch their ideas in the Duke Start-Up Challenge.
Video

Ideas Become Reality in the Duke Start-Up Challenge

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Professor of Management

Sim Sitkin

Sim Sitkin
Sim is the founding faculty director of the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics (COLE) and director of the Center for Organizational Research.
Daytime MBA

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