A Brilliant School with some of the best professors and facilities

Experience during the program

I completed my MBA classes recently at HEC Paris in December 2015 and must say that it has been a wonderful experience.

Professors: The overall quality of teaching and the background of professors in the MBA program is impressive. Apart from highly acclaimed researchers, we were also taught by people working in top level positions in some of the largest firms in the investment banking, consulting, luxury and other industries.

Facilities: As far as I know, HEC has the largest campus among all the top business schools in Europe. It has a state of the art academic building which was designed by renowned architect David Chipperfield. Overall the building and the classrooms are very high-tech.
As HEC hosts the MBAT (informally coined as the MBA Olympics), a 3 day event where almost 1500 students from the best business schools in Europe (and sometimes the US) come to participate, it has top notch sports facilities too. We even have sports such as karting, rock climbing and rowing in the MBAT.
Also, the people in the MBA support staff are very helpful and efficient.
The hostel rooms/apartments are squeaky clean, comfortable and cozy. The canteen food is also pretty good although they could have some more variety in the cuisines that they offer.

Placement Cell: The career management cell at HEC still has some room for improvement. Even though HEC has a good placement overall, a significant number of the jobs are obtained through personal networking or through the alumni network. However, HEC has taken up some steps to iron out the placement process and things are improving at a steady pace every year. Overall, the job scenario after HEC MBA is good and gets better every year.

Program: The overall program is very well structured. It has been divided into two phases. The first phase is called the core phase where everyone has similar classes and coursework. The second phase is highly customizable and the students can design their course structure according to their priorities. The fact that HEC really stresses on real life case studies and puts the students in actual situations faced by real firms is one thing I really liked about the program.

Specialization: I specialized in Finance and found it to be a huge value addition to my earlier skill set. The specialization covers a lot of new concepts and the cases were super interesting.

MBA Colleagues: HEC has one of the best MBA cohorts in the world. The overall intake at HEC is super diverse and very closely knit. As the intake size is 200, all the students know each other almost inside out. We had people from more than 50 different countries in our intake and almost everyone had experience in a different kind of role. The class was highly competitive and I got to learn a lot from everyone.

Overall BSchool experience (5.0)
Schools contribution (4.0)
Classmates rating (5.0)

Strengths of the program:

Curriculum, Classes, Professors
Student body, diversity
Brand/Ranking
Facilities

Best fit at this program:

Consulting
Finance
Marketing
Investment Banking
Entrepreneurship

Can be improved:

Career opportunities provided by school