With Hands-On Learning, Turn Your Ambition into Action

At Babson, we focus on experiential learning because we know experience is the best teacher. Why wait until graduation to begin making an impact?

From your first to final years at Babson College, experiential learning stands at the forefront of your academic and professional pursuits. The hands-on learning experience and projects offered throughout the Babson undergraduate curriculum provide a well-rounded experiential education that's rooted in both business and the liberal arts and sciences, practical real-world experience, and team work. Babson’s approach to experience-based learning provides the foundational skills for your future career.

We designed our hands-on education to give you problem-solving skills and career insight you can take into any field. Through our experiential learning programs, you will analyze professional problems in real-time, evaluate market trends, and create value-added solutions.

Experiential learning starts day one. You and your classmates will use a hands-on learning style to build a business from the ground up in your first semester (we call that FME, more on that below). From there, your journey is your own.

Experiential education at Babson isn’t just classroom opportunities, either. Our students take a hands-on learning approach to raise their own seed funds, run their own investment programs, take on leadership roles in clubs and organizations, intern globally, and engage in volunteer work that boosts their communities. They do independent research, teach their own courses, and use their entrepreneurial leadership acumen and tactile learning style to tackle global problems.

Plus, regardless of what opportunities you pursue, you will have concrete examples of creativity and adaptability to discuss in interviews and utilize at internships and first jobs. Your experiential learning will only enhance your marketability, goals, and personal brand in the process!

It’s your hands-on education to take out into the world and make something of it. We make sure you’re prepared.

Learn Business by Doing Business

What is hands-on learning at Babson? It’s how we mix the theoretical with the practical. In Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship (FME), you work on a team with first-year students to turn an idea into an actual venture. That means everything: designing the packaging, ordering inventory, running your brand’s social accounts. Through this tactile learning style, you gain insight into what you might want to do professionally while building a list of experiences that prepare you for that career.

Your Babson experiential learning for the following three years can go anywhere from field trips to learn about the environment to partaking in the Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge to back to FME as a mentor. This four-year hands-on learning experience culminates in our advanced experiential courses. Maybe you want to try consulting? Or heard about how we let students manage a portion of the Babson endowment? Or want to help a company solve problems while learning about branding?  

Whatever you choose, you cap off your college hands-on learning experience by tackling real business challenges confidently.

A Hands-On Campus for a Hands-on World

A true experiential education means having a place to actually practice. In between classes, you will test your skills and knowledge in numerous other real-world situations which our centers, institutes, and campus partners help you facilitate. There are hubs and communities across campus designed to help you grow, create, and thrive as you explore experience-based learning.

It’s also home to many of our centers and institutes, where you can participate in fellowship and leadership opportunities, engage in special projects and programming, and take advantage of Babson’s vast network of business and entrepreneurial leaders.