The MiM Grande École Is Changing: An Update With Wilfried Sand, Academic Director of the Grande École / Master in Management Programme, ESSEC

The MiM Grande École is changing: an update with Wilfried Sand, Academic Director of the Grande École / Master in Management programme at ESSEC. 

EA: The MiM Grande École is changing. Why? 

Since it was founded, the School has never stopped evolving and reinventing itself to meet the training needs of tomorrow's managers and leaders. The MiM programme's student body is now far more diverse than it was fifteen or twenty years ago. International students are increasingly numerous and academic backgrounds increasingly varied. Alongside students admitted through the competitive entrance examination (admis sur concours, ASC) straight out of the classes préparatoires are those admitted on the basis of prior qualifications (admis sur titre, AST): engineers, lawyers and students with an initial degree obtained abroad. Each year, the Grande École programme welcomes around 450 students from the preparatory classes for a pre-Master year. In the second year (Master level) they are joined by roughly the same number of students with far more heterogeneous profiles. As a result, the cohort doubles in size between the first and second years. This raises the question of how to recreate a sense of belonging to a single cohort. In the first year, integration happens naturally, around a shared background. With this change to the MiM programme, the challenge is to bring about a second phase of integration at Master level. Without it, the admis sur titre, including international students, risk not feeling fully part of the School and its network. That is a loss for all graduates, who may then miss out on the international network, one of the School's great strengths. In my view, the diversity of academic backgrounds is essential. It prepares graduates for life in business. 

EA: In concrete terms, what are the changes?

 The first is a common start to the year. Until now, the AST joined the School in September, while the ASC entered the Master cycle in January, after a six-month internship. The result: ASC and AST students rarely crossed paths. Diversity remained parallel, with different courses taught in different languages. From now on, everyone returns at the end of September, at the same time. It is this shared time that will make it possible to build a cohort spirit. To achieve this, we have introduced "squads": groups of around forty students combining AST and ASC, kept stable over two terms. They work in pairs: each student takes their English-taught classes with their own squad, and for classes offered in French, two squads are combined. This tighter format is designed to allow students to get to know one another and to work together. The second change: the core courses (fondamentaux) have been moved to the very start of the Master. Previously, students were free to choose when to take them. However, we find that the specialised courses assume the core courses have already been taken: without that grounding, the lecturer faces a group that is too academically heterogeneous. This change will also give everyone the basics across every subject. One final adjustment, symbolic but telling: the end of the bidding system for the core courses. 

What changes are there for the pre-Master? 

The pre-Master has also been reorganised. Previously, the first semester relied on seminars rather than conventional classes: the idea was to explain to students what management is before giving them the tools. But the shift proved too abrupt for students coming straight out of the preparatory classes. They did not take to it, and certain elements, such as the "Solve" seminar in complex problem-solving, came too early in the programme. From next year, the School will keep one or two seminars at the start of the programme, but reintroduce conventional classes from the end of September. Another major change: the end of the six-month internship in M1, which was judged ill-suited. It is hard to land a good-quality internship after only one year, when students are competing with Master's students from other schools; the length matched neither the market nor the students' actual level of experience. The hands-on experience now comes in the middle of the academic year.

In the Master year, will there be changes to the core courses?

 The Master has nine core courses: finance, marketing, strategy, People and Organisation, Managing Information Technology in the Digital Age, law, Business Economics and Financial Accounting and Reporting. Their titles remain stable, but their content is constantly evolving. That is the strength of our teaching and research faculty. For example, the "Managing IT" course now bears no resemblance to its version of five years ago. Finance and economics offer more permanence in their foundations: in economics, we will always start with supply and demand, whatever the tools. But teaching methods themselves are constantly changing. 

What about subjects that seem increasingly important, such as geopolitics or artificial intelligence?

We have made a deliberate choice: we keep our nine core courses and then add specialised ones. That said, the various disciplines, such as geopolitics, run transversally through the other courses. Sustainability is built into finance in particular, through sustainable finance and non-financial reporting. We have also introduced a compulsory cross-disciplinary course in the third term entitled "Corporate Sustainability". Artificial intelligence is not the subject of a dedicated course: whatever we asserted would be obsolete within a year. For example, three or four years ago we would have recommended twenty-five hours of Python… today it is about grasping the concepts, even though we still offer electives for those who want to go further. As for the code itself, we will ask AI to write it. The frontier keeps shifting. AI, for its part, raises many challenges. The first: how do you assess students when they have access to these tools? This is precisely where the core courses come into their own: the point is to learn to think, to ask the right questions, to sift the answers. 

In your view, what are the main skills a student should have on leaving the Grande École programme?

A triptych. First, a capacity for synthesis and analysis. Second, a genuine thematic specialism: in finance, for example, or something more multidisciplinary within a Chair, which requires drawing on the fundamentals of several fields to address a real-world problem. Finally, soft skills, which matter more and more because they are about people: they are developed through group work, presentations, seminars and internships, but also through involvement in societies, sport or humanitarian work, which is very much part of School life.