A Better World is Our Business
Immediate Needs and Emerging Opportunities Fund
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MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
MIT SLOAN S CHO OL OF MANAGEMENT
Through the combined efforts of our faculty, staff, students, and alumni, MIT Sloan will continue to develop the principled, innovative leaders that the world needs—especially in times of crisis—as well as produce the ideas and management practices that aid those leaders in addressing the challenges posed by this global pandemic. As you deal with the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in your own life, we hope you will consider a gift to the Immediate Needs and Emerging Opportunities Fund, and help support the extraordinary efforts across MIT Sloan to achieve our mission in the midst of this crisis. This new fund is already helping to meet student and faculty needs related to this global pandemic, such as supporting students’ continued learning through expansive technology and online curricular enhancements, increasing activities to facilitate student summer internships and full-time employment, and supporting faculty who are working tirelessly to make a better world. The MIT Sloan Office of External Relations (OER) recently launched the MIT Sloan COVID-19 Response webpage. This page is updated regularly with news articles by and about MIT Sloan faculty and alumni working on COVID-19 solutions, collaborative response efforts, upcoming webinars, online events, and a host of other video recordings. Below and in the attached Appendix are examples of the innovative educational and research efforts that have launched in just a few short weeks.
Support our students MIT Sloan students and faculty have shown tremendous resiliency during this challenging period. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, students have adjusted quickly to a new online learning environment and, in many cases, new living situations. The Immediate Needs and Emerging Opportunities Fund is supporting this transition in a number of critical ways.
Incremental funding helps students navigate the MIT Sloan virtual campus as they migrate to remote learning in their new locations and across time zones. As an example of how dramatically technological needs have increased, the MIT Sloan community spent a collective 1.3 million minutes per day on the Zoom video-sharing platform during the first week of online
MIT Sloan has supported its students through establishing direct, regular communication, which comforts students at a time of uncertainty. I really appreciate the regular check-in calls, which allow me to share any struggles I’m having and receive guidance and support in addressing them!” Mohamed Hasan
MIT Sloan MBA 2021
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classes, as opposed to 35,000 minutes per day prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Technological support has been crucial in engaging the student community and sustaining learning through enhanced curriculum tools. In a short twoweek period, 150 faculty members worked rigorously to transition 270 course sections online. Additionally, 70 staff members from across MIT Sloan were redeployed to help students and faculty in this rapid transition. This transition continues as we prepare to virtually welcome new students to three of our master’s programs (Master of Finance, Sloan Fellows, and Leaders for Global Operations) that begin this summer and will continue online for the foreseeable future.
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MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Additional support aids students pursuing summer internships or employment, a significant priority for students at this time. The Office of External Relations (OER) and MIT Sloan’s Career Development Office (CDO) are collaborating to facilitate essential connections between students and alumni to assist in their
respective searches. Alumni can help by posting job and internship opportunities, volunteering to coach a student interested in their industry, hosting a virtual coffee chat, or serving as an ambassador for MIT Sloan candidates. Please contact mitsloanalumnirelations@ mit.edu if you are interested in joining these efforts.
What can we learn from this crisis to make the future of work, our economy, and our society more resilient, productive, fair, equitable, and inclusive?" Tom Kochan George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management Co-Director, MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research
In addition to curricular and professional changes, various offices are in the process of moving other student activities and traditions to virtual formats, ensuring that students will still have opportunities for collaborating, networking, socializing, and celebrating various milestones together throughout the remainder of their programs. Admissions outreach and alumni activities have also been moved online. MIT Sloan’s COVID-19 Faculty Research Beyond adapting their teaching from physical to online classrooms, dozens of MIT Sloan faculty—who were already hard at work solving the world’s greatest challenges—pivoted their research in a matter of days to study the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and address the rising economic, financial, organizational, and global health needs.
Gifts to the Immediate Needs and Emerging Opportunities Fund will enable our faculty and the initiatives they lead to respond nimbly and at scale. That said, many of the challenges being addressed by our faculty were not foreseen even a month or two ago, meaning that financial support to undertake these efforts is not readily available. Faculty members have undertaken projects aimed directly at mitigating the spread of this virus—ensuring sufficient health care facilities and materials are available where they are most needed, planning for the economic and policy actions required to restore our robust economy, and improving the use of social media in addressing the global pandemic. If there was ever a time that demonstrated the world’s high regard for MIT, that time is now.
How You Can Support This Important Work at a Time of Urgent Need The projects referenced above are only a subset of those being addressed by faculty across the school, all while delivering a worldclass management education via new online platforms. It is truly inspiring to see how the MIT Sloan community has responded in light of this urgent need. Through your support and the combined efforts of our faculty, staff, students, and alumni, we will continue to develop the principled innovative leaders the world needs—now more than ever. As the examples described above and in this online appendix vividly illustrate, a gift to MIT Sloan is, indeed, a gift to the world. Can we count on your support? Please visit giving.mit.edu/sloan
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MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
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Office of External Relations 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E60-200 Cambridge, MA 02139 giving.mit.edu/sloan
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