Curriculum

BUS ADM X419.7 (1 unit)

This course is a combination of class time, one-on-one coaching sessions and company site visits. Class time focuses on three aspects of your learning: excelling as a Haas student; identifying your professional path forward; and enhancing your personal and professional development. One-on-one coaching provides highly individualized support to discuss your own topics of interest, ranging from applying to graduate school, to clarifying how to bring together your strengths and interests to launch or enhance your career.

Faculty: Jennifer Davis

MBA XB292T (3 units)

Focus on 35 topics that cover many of the principal elements of how business is affected by climate change, and how changing business practices can improve (or worsen) the climate outlook.

Faculty: Andrew Isaacs, M.S. & Omar Romero-Hernandez

MBA XB295A (3 units)

Learn how to lead an entrepreneurial venture, focusing on businesses that start small by design, and with hard work and good luck can be expected to develop into complex enterprises. Study the entrepreneurial journey, starting from initial ideation all the way M&A and IPO. The driving force behind startup ventures are entrepreneurs, those individuals who have the courage, insight, knowledge, intensity and luck to attempt to achieve great business results without resources remotely sufficient for the job—or so it seems at first. A key vehicle for the entrepreneur's effort is the basic tenets of a sound business: customer demand, attractive unit economics, large enough market opportunity, and the ability to attract talent and investors. This class will focus on all of these areas and more.

Faculty: Arman Zand

UGBA XB100 (2 units)

To help meet the challenges that you will inevitably encounter on the job, this Business Communications class will introduce key principles, strategies and standard American business conventions for communicating in a business environment. By concentrating on audiences, purposes, forms and formats of professional communication, you will examine and practice a range of techniques to write and deliver effective, appropriate written and oral messages. Focus on real-world applications of effective communication so that you will feel confident communicating in any business environment.

Faculty: Janet Brady

BUS ADM X419.7 (1 unit)

This course is a combination of class time, one-on-one coaching sessions and company site visits. Class time focuses on three aspects of your learning: excelling as a Haas student; identifying your professional path forward; and enhancing your personal and professional development. One-on-one coaching provides highly individualized support to discuss your own topics of interest, ranging from applying to graduate school, to clarifying how to bring together your strengths and interests to launch or enhance your career.

Faculty: Jennifer Davis

MBA XB292T (3 units)

Focus on 35 topics that cover many of the principal elements of how business is affected by climate change, and how changing business practices can improve (or worsen) the climate outlook.

Faculty: Andrew Isaacs, M.S. & Omar Romero-Hernandez

MBA XB290T (3 units)

Go through the steps of product management: Start with problem discovery, then take the best concepts from product idea to customer needs-finding and analysis, plan a product via a concrete roadmap and define the product requirements. Through these steps, you will learn a variety of strategic frameworks and tactical methodologies that help product managers advance the development of their products or services every day. You will also have the opportunity to learn about the product development process in the context of cross-functional team management and stakeholder management.

The course is introductory in nature, aimed at those who have not experienced a full product-development cycle in the past, or those who have had some experience in product management and want to add context and tools to supplement their on-the-job learning. This course also aims to facilitate the formation of small teams for the development of their product or service ideas.

Faculty: Vince Law

MBA XB295A (3 units)

Learn how to lead an entrepreneurial venture, focusing on businesses that start small by design, and with hard work and good luck can be expected to develop into complex enterprises. Study the entrepreneurial journey, starting from initial ideation all the way M&A and IPO. The driving force behind startup ventures are entrepreneurs, those individuals who have the courage, insight, knowledge, intensity and luck to attempt to achieve great business results without resources remotely sufficient for the job—or so it seems at first. A key vehicle for the entrepreneur's effort is the basic tenets of a sound business: customer demand, attractive unit economics, large enough market opportunity, and the ability to attract talent and investors. This class will focus on all of these areas and more.

Faculty: Arman Zand

MBA XB269 (3 units)

Learn proven concepts, techniques and frameworks to assess and formulate pricing strategies. Develop the economics and behavioral foundations of pricing. Then, discuss several innovative pricing concepts including price customization, nonlinear pricing, price matching and product line pricing. Finally, you will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of several Internet-based, buyer-determined pricing models.

Faculty: Wasim Azhar

BUS ADM X419.7 (1 unit)

This course is a combination of class time, one-on-one coaching sessions and company site visits. Class time focuses on three aspects of your learning: excelling as a Haas student; identifying your professional path forward; and enhancing your personal and professional development. One-on-one coaching provides highly individualized support to discuss your own topics of interest, ranging from applying to graduate school, to clarifying how to bring together your strengths and interests to launch or enhance your career.

Faculty: Jennifer Davis

UGBA XB177 (3 units)

Artificial intelligence and the autonomous systems that embed it have become the brains of the modern data economy. They have started to reshape human values, trust and power around the world. Whether in medicine, money or love, technologies powered by forms of artificial intelligence are playing an increasingly prominent role in our lives. New AI technologies can help drive cars, treat damaged brains and nudge workers to be more productive, but they also can threaten, manipulate and alienate us from others. They can pit nation against nation, but they also can help the global community tackle some of its greatest challenges from food crises to global climate change. As we cede more decisions to thinking machines, we face new questions about staying safe, keeping a job and having a say over the direction of our lives. How AI evolves and what role it takes in our lives for better or worse, might depend on our race, gender, age, behavior, cognitive capacity or nationality. This presents manifold ethical and cross-cultural dilemmas. Students—as critical change makers—will learn about these issues and the principles of responsible design and governance structures to mitigate them and turn them into opportunities for enrichment of society.

Faculty: Olaf Groth

UGBA XB88 (2 units)

The goal of this course is to provide an understanding of how data and statistical analysis can improve managerial decision-making. We will explore statistical methods for gleaning insights from economic and social data, with an emphasis on approaches to identifying causal relationships. We will discuss how to design and analyze randomized experiments and introduce econometric methods for estimating causal effects in non-experimental data. The course draws on a variety of business and social science applications, including advertising, management, online marketplaces, labor markets and education.

Faculty: Kunal Cholera

EWMBA XB267 (2 units)

From self-driving cars to large language models and humanoid robots, and with the recent buzz around generative and agentic technologies, Artificial intelligence (AI) is here and changing the way we live, work and do business. The class is designed to introduce future managers to AI technology and its many business applications. Students will walk away with a foundational understanding of AI and its near and long-term applications; explore the myths and realities surrounding the technology; and delve into the legal, social and policy implications of AI.

Faculty: Matthew Stepka

BUS ADM X419.7 (1 unit)

This course is a combination of class time, one-on-one coaching sessions and company site visits. Class time focuses on three aspects of your learning: excelling as a Haas student; identifying your professional path forward; and enhancing your personal and professional development. One-on-one coaching provides highly individualized support to discuss your own topics of interest, ranging from applying to graduate school, to clarifying how to bring together your strengths and interests to launch or enhance your career.

Faculty: Jennifer Davis

MBA XB290T3 (2 units)

Ever wondered why some services get traction, but not to scale? Why it is developers will invest in one platform, but not another? Why it is that some network businesses can create a moat, and otherwise never quite get there?

Network effects—acquiring and retaining customers, solving chicken and egg problems—will be a consistent theme throughout the course. We will look at attackers (disrupters) and also market incumbents. We will look at the cadence of innovation cycles in the networked economy—recurring cycles, like Moore's Law—and one-time shifts like from PC to mobile, or on-premise to cloud. Interested in working in tech, services (consulting or banking) or starting a networked economy? This is the place. We will cover digital services, network operators, semiconductors, OS platforms, response to disruption and more.

Faculty: Jon Metzler, Ph.D.

MBA 290T (2 units)

In this course, students will study the changing dynamics of workplaces due to artificial intelligence and how those dynamics are impacting professional relationships, culture and the work itself. Leaders aspire to make good decisions on behalf of their teams, customers and society, and we'll look at what it means to become a wise leader. Additionally, we'll discuss research-based insights about how people find meaning in their work. Principle areas of focus include: what is wisdom and how does one cultivate it, do we have agency over how we understand the meaning of our work, and how do we create workplaces that enable teams to flourish. Does our understanding of how to address these topics change in light of widely-accessible AI? How, specifically, are workflows and culture changing with AI?

Our coursework includes a collaborative project, with teams acting as consultants to improve a particular management-related workflow, integrating AI and human-centered design. Availing themselves of AI tools and their own primary research, teams will make recommendations, as consultants would, to intentionally and strategically improve workplace dynamics and culture. Through study, guest speakers, discussion and research, students will understand how to create workplaces in which teams flourish.

Faculty: Elizabeth Kovats

UGBA XB147 (2 units)

The course examines the supply of goods and services, positioning marketing as the management of demand and operations as the management of supply. Operations managers must effectively allocate and optimize resources—including capital, labor, natural resources, technology and information—to navigate increasingly complex, multinational environments. In today's competitive landscape, businesses face relentless pressure to deliver "more, better and faster," making customer service, quality and technology integration critical factors for success.

This course equips students with both strategic insights and analytical tools for effective decision-making. A practical, hands-on approach will be emphasized, focusing on process optimization; logistics; supply chain integration; and descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Course materials will include case studies, real-world business scenarios, interactive exercises and expert guest lectures. Additionally, students will explore how information systems and emerging technologies such as blockchain and AI shape modern operations and supply chains.

Faculty: Omar Romero-Hernandez

MBA XB252 (3 units)

The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiation as practiced in a variety of settings. It is designed to be relevant to the broad spectrum of negotiation problems faced by managers and professionals. By focusing on the behavior of individuals, groups and organizations in the context of competitive situations, the course will allow students the opportunity to develop negotiation skills experientially in useful analytical frameworks (e.g., simulations, cases).

Faculty: Timothy Dayanot

MBA XB254 (2 units)

This course is about the art and science of influence in organizations. Many people are ambivalent, if not disdainful, of those who seek to wield power and influence at work. But organizations are fundamentally political entities, and power and influence are key mechanisms by which things get done. For those considering careers in management, it is important to be able to diagnose organizational politics in order to form and implement new strategies. The other side of the coin is that managers are usually on the receiving end of these processes as well. An astute manager knows how to anticipate moves that others will make, how to block or avoid them when they have consequences that are undesirable, and how to help these moves succeed when their consequences are beneficial. After taking this course, you will be able to: (1) diagnose the distribution of power in organizations, (2) identify strategies for building sources of power, (3) develop techniques for influencing others, and (4) understand the role of power in building cooperation and leading change in an organization. These skills will be invaluable to you throughout your career.

Faculty: Rebecca Portnoy

Some UGBA concurrent enrollment courses may be exclusively available to BHGAP students. The UC Berkeley Haas website lists concurrent courses that are available for the current semester as a reference guide for your planning. The availability of these courses is not guaranteed for future terms.

The list of UGBA courses for concurrent enrollment is updated just before the start of each semester.

Certain graduate-level courses (numbered 200–399) from specific departments are not open to visiting or concurrent enrollment students. These include classes from:

• School of Law
• Haas School of Business (M.B.A., XMBA/Ph.D. programs)
• Physics Department
• Graduate Department of Economics

While other graduate-level courses are technically open, it can be difficult to get in without being a matriculated UC Berkeley graduate student. All available graduate-level courses require prior approval from the professor before you can enroll.