MBA Class Project Got a Bit Too Real

I have never been to business school, but I gather that a certain amount of the curriculum involves pretending to do business stuff. You get a class project that is like “come up with a good plan to develop this golf resort, build a financial model, create a PowerPoint deck and do a presentation in class describing and arguing for your vision.” Sometimes the project will be a purely invented hypothetical situation, but more often, for realism, it will be based on a real case, some real business situation that actually happened. To keep things relevant, the case might be from quite recent history. To be really relevant, and to make it a bit more challenging to find the answers, the case might be an ongoing situation: “Here is an actual golf resort that is actually in the early stages of being developed; what’s your plan to do it?”

And then you form a team with your classmates and pretend to develop the golf resort. And you come up with a plan and build a financial model. And maybe they are good, and you think “huh, this is a great opportunity; if we actually developed this golf resort, we could make a lot of money.” And then you finish the project and do the presentation and get an A- and consider a career in golf resort development. Perhaps when you graduate you even get a job at the company that developed the golf resort you pretended to develop.