Specializations

All students graduate with a MBA in General Management. In addition, you may elect as many as three nine-credit specializations from the list on the left. Or you may choose not to specialize in any area, but to complete the 60-credit MBA requirement by customizing your elective courses from the menu of more than 150 elective courses.

It is your choice. You may specialize in up to three areas, or create your own path of study geared to your specific interests and goals.

The specialization tabs on the left demonstrate which courses count towards each specialization. A course can only be counted once towards a specialization.  For example, if Investment Banking is counted towards a Corporate Finance specialization, it cannot also be counted towards a Banking specialization. To see which of the courses are currently being offered, please visit the Records and Registration website.

Note that students taking classes exclusively on weekends may specialize in Finance and Management only.

You can find a step-by-step guide on declaring your specializations and pointing your electives towards them here. If you are experiencing technical difficulties with declaring your specialization(s) or making changes to your My Academic Progress (MAP) page, we recommend using a different browser or incognito mode.

Specialization Courses

Each Specialization is overseen by a committee of faculty members. Once a year, each committee reviews and updates the elective courses that count toward each specialization. While there may be many courses that are of interest to students pursuing each specialization, only those courses that are sufficiently focused on the theory and methods central to the specialization count toward the specialization.

Between annual reviews, you may request to add a course to a specialization by sending a message to MBASpecRequest@stern.nyu.edu.

The message should include:

  • the course
  • the course syllabus
  • the specialization, and
  • the basis for requesting that the course count toward the specialization. 

The outcome of the request may be a decision that:

  • the course is of interest but not sufficiently focused, so it does not count, or 
  • the course is focused and does count, or 
  • the decision should be deferred to the annual review. 

Note: There are no approvals by exception--courses are not reviewed and decisions are not rendered based on individual student circumstances. A course will only be added to a Specialization if it is determined to be an important addition for all students within the MBA program.