bschoolaspirant9 wrote:
To all those dinged, keep in mind that for all its apparent prestige, Harvard Business School is not the best place in the world to spend 2 years of your life. Having interacted with alums and students from numerous schools, I can definitively say that the culture and environment at HBS is not at all friendly or collegial. In fact, it is the complete opposite. If you were to compare HBS' culture to that of places like Tuck, Kellogg, Fuqua, Darden etc, the difference is night and day. The Dean at HBS this week apologized for the sexism at HBS. Some of the things that the New York Times revealed in September last year about the school were truly shocking. Female students and even female profs being bullied, secret societies of wealthy, arrogant narcissists.
Read these NYTIMES articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/educa ... wanted=allhttps://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/educa ... d=all&_r=0Come on now...please don't tell me you're drawing any real conclusions from a few NYT hit pieces that obviously had an agenda. If you don't think every business school has a handful of super-wealthy students who take extravagant weekend trips, or that
any business environment that's traditionally male-dominated has occasional struggles with gender issues, then you're just plain naive.
For the NYT to make the claim that those wealthy few created a "Mean Girls"-type environment is laughably inaccurate. The main difference here is that HBS has a bulls-eye on its chest due to its name and status, but it's been very open about addressing the gender and cultural issues that have come up. Also, an HBS class is ~3x the size of a Darden/Tuck class, 2x the size of a Fuqua class, and 1.3x the size of a Kellogg class...you think raw numbers might have something to do with the "huge" number of HBS students who supposedly fit into one of these cliques?
Those articles do not describe my two-year HBS experience in any way. I can say with 100% certainty that met 10x more arrogant, selfish ***-holes at the Naval Academy and in the Marine Corps than I did at HBS. I think I can count on two fingers the number of HBS classmates whom I would purposely avoid if I saw them in a bar or airport today. When I started my application process in 2010 I didn't plan on applying to HBS because I bought into the stereotype about Ivy League MBAs being pretentious and arrogant--I was dead-set on attending a "nicer" school like Haas or Stanford or UCLA or Kellogg. It took about 5 minutes on the HBS campus during my interview visit to realize that those stereotypes were unfounded, and my two years there continued to convince me that I'd made the right choice.
Put bluntly, if all those stereotypes were true, then HBS would see its yield go in the tank due to admits declining their HBS offers to attend a "friendlier" school.