The placement of the MRE degree within Harvard’s Design School and its Department of Urban Planning and Design reflects the reality that real estate is a physical object designed by many forces and hands. MRE students benefit from being part of one of the largest design schools in the world, with close to 200 faculty members and 900 graduate students. Its departments of urban planning and design, architecture, and landscape architecture are remarkable, world-renowned places of innovation and exploration about the built environment. The Department of Urban Planning and Design is particularly well-suited to host the MRE degree program. It has Harvard’s only endowed chair in real estate, the Michael D. Spear Professor in Real Estate Development, along with the Plimpton Chair in planning and urban economics. Leading scholars and practitioners teach courses about real estate and related subjects such as land use and environmental law, urban design and planning, housing, transportation, international development, healthy cities, new towns, and urban history, among many other subjects.

Harvard is more than the GSD. There are 12 additional graduate and professional schools, along with the College, that together weave a rich tapestry of relevant courses and resources. Like all Harvard students, MRE students enjoy cross-registration privileges that enable them to take eligible courses at the Harvard Business School, the Kennedy School, the Law School, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the College, and other Harvard graduate schools. Students may also cross-register in eligible classes at MIT and Tufts Fletcher School.

Curricular offerings are supplemented by research and public programs offered by several GSD centers. The Joint Center for Housing Studies , co-administered with the Kennedy School, issues the heavily anticipated annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report and enjoys long-standing relationships with some of the world’s largest housing providers. Working from its specially designed and constructed HouseZero building, the Center for Green Buildings and Cities produces cutting edge research on how existing buildings can dramatically reduce their energy footprints. Other Harvard centers and initiatives such as The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability , the Center for the Environment (part of the Salata Institute), the Taubman Center for State and Local Government , and the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative sponsor many public programs with relevance to real estate study and practice.

The MRE program enjoys visits from leading real estate practitioners from around the world who give presentations and meet privately with students over meals and other informal get-togethers. The “Guest Speakers” tab lists past participants. A student-run Harvard GSD Real Estate Club co-sponsors with its Harvard Business and Law School counterparts an annual spring real estate conference and organizes other activities. Additionally, the Harvard Alumni Real Estate Board and Harvard Real Estate Alumni Organization provide direct connections with Harvard real estate alumni. Many MRE faculty members are well-known practitioners who enjoy strong relationships with real estate professionals.

Three terms of full time-study composed of nine months in-residence from late August to the end of May, plus a two-month off-campus summer Practicum are required for the award of the degree. The third (summer) term of the program is completed off-site while matriculated.

The MRE program is designated as a STEM program. Accordingly, international students holding F-1 visas may be eligible for a 24-month Optional Practical Training (OPT) extension on top of their initial OPT of 12 months, for a total of 36 months, following graduation. Each F-1 student must petition United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to approve the 24-month STEM extension, and Harvard does not represent or warrant that USCIS will grant any individual petition.

MRE graduates are prepared to assume a wide variety of positions in private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and public entities engaged in real estate endeavors around the world. Typical employers include developers, asset managers, private equity firms, project and construction managers, community development corporations, family offices, affordable housing developers and managers, governments and quasi-public agencies, real estate advisory and consulting firms, and anchor institutions such as universities and medical institutions. Some MRE graduates choose to set off on their own entrepreneurial path. Others return to the organizations where they worked prior to matriculation, but with opportunities for promotion and new directions. After graduating, the range of employment categories is broad and has included: Acquisitions, Asset Management, Development, Planning and Design, Private Equity/Investment Banking, Real Estate Advisory, and Technology.

The Design Studies program consists of four semesters of coursework with no studios. Applicants select one of four domains of study—Ecologies, Narratives, Publics, and Mediums—and undertake a core set of courses, including research methods and related topical courses. Following that domain foundation, each student then forges an individualized trajectory, leveraging course offerings across the GSD, as well as other schools and departments at Harvard. During their fourth semester, Design Studies students from all four domains come together to focus on collaborative advanced research in the form of open projects, in which their expertise finds application on a current issue.

Distinct from research in the sciences or humanities, design pedagogy involves highly interactive ways of thinking and learning that directly engage the technical, material, spatial, ecological, political, economic, and planetary dimensions of cultural life. Design Studies at the GSD challenges conventional ways of learning. The program offers an unrivaled depth, breadth and diversity of educational experience in the service of a broad range of enhanced academic, professional, and personal trajectories. From our rapidly warming environment and its mass extinctions and disfiguring social inequities, to colossal media systems and their manipulations of ideological economies, the decade of 2020 is charging ahead with multiplying planetary crises requiring novel responses and fundamentally new horizons of inquiry. The Master in Design Studies program prepares students to lead us into this new world.

The design disciplines are critical to engaging the most urgent and complex conditions of our time, and the Master in Design Studies program at the GSD prepares students to rise to the challenge, with training that is at once foundational, multitudinous, and incisive. The Master in Design Studies degree is open to applicants who possess, at minimum, an undergraduate degree. The program invites applicants with previous education or experience in the design disciplines, as well as applicants from a wide range of educational backgrounds, professional fields, and life experiences. Please explore further information about the program’s four domains, Design Studies degree requirements, and related courses and faculty. And please join us for our Open House events to learn more about each of the domains and possible trajectories through them.