Executive MBA

For SMR, students are assigned your project in late November and make the first contact with you shortly after. You will meet in person with your student team at the formal program launch event to be held the first weekend in January at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center on campus in Los Angeles. Your final project deliverable will be presented to you in person by your student team in a formal executive meeting setting at UCLA Anderson in Los Angeles on the first weekend in June. 

For the UCLA-NUS program, students will begin the project in mid-February, and the project will end in mid-August.

Students form teams during the spring of their first year. We encourage students to build well-rounded teams with varied backgrounds and areas of expertise. Teams comprise five Executive MBA students.

All of the project descriptions (submitted by the company) are shared with the students once companies are selected. Teams then indicate their top choices from the list and submit “pitch paragraphs” for their top five choices. The Field Study directors carefully review the teams’ preferences, skill sets, and backgrounds to determine the best team for each project.

UCLA Anderson conducts a wide range of research. Field Study teams practice the application of state-of-the-art management frameworks and analysis techniques and have access to the school’s extensive resources, including its network of professionals and comprehensive business and industry database resources. 

The program fee paid by each client provides the team’s budget for their research expenses (conferences, travel, focus group incentives, survey responses).

The team’s research and travel budget are built into the participation fee paid by the client. The budget amount depends on the fee category/size of the company and the scope of the project. Any additional funding beyond the designated amount (see Our Rates) will be covered by the client.

Our projects vary each year and are focused on a wide variety of industries and functional areas. From food and beverage to healthcare to real estate, our roster of clients and project industries changes each year.

If you have a connection to our students or have worked with them in an internship capacity, please let us know. The teams are ultimately responsible for selecting the projects they are interested in, but we can accommodate team requests if there is mutual interest.

Once the teams select their projects, our faculty advisors review the project descriptions and indicate the projects they feel most suited to advising, based on their background and expertise. The roster of dedicated Field Study faculty advisors is determined by the administration, but students often collaborate with many UCLA Anderson faculty over the course of their projects.