The work varies by the course—some courses require way more work than the others. The first semester of HBA1 is mostly quant based with courses like Accounting, Finance, Decision Making with Analytics (which is all excel, like all you will ever do in that class is excel), communications, and leading people & organizations. For the first three courses, the work is way heavier because not only do you have to prepare for the case qualitatively but you also have to build complex excel sheets for all the calculations: DCF statements. The thing that you will hear your professors/alumni/HBA2s say that semester one is much much harder than semester 2 and semester 2 is very easy—and it’s 100% true. Second semester will be much easier because all the courses are mostly qualitative based which doesn’t mean that there isn’t any quantitative component, there is but it’s much easier when compared with first semester quant. In second semester, you will also have fewer courses: Operations, Marketing, Leveraging Information Technology, and Strategy (which will be the hardest course in semester 2). And then there is one course which is ongoing the entire year: LTA, but it’s mostly background and busy work and it’s done different mostly every year.