How to Attract More Members to the International MBA Forum?

Another way to cut the cake is to have the "international forum" to be for people who want to converse in a language other than English. Or for people who want to talk about country-specific issues (i.e. Indians and visa issues, cost of living adjustments, etc.).

Not sure if this forum supports Chinese characters: 我會寫中文字。(if you can see the chinese characters, then it does I suppose).

The big segment that is missing from the "MBA discussion boards" are the east Asians - Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. For the Chinese, the only site out there really is "Chasedream.com" so there's always room for more. My guess is if you open it up for those segments, you'll see more traffic to this section.

Or have the international forums dedicated to issues that relate to "international" students (whether they are Americans in Europe, non-Americans in the US, etc.) -- work visa issues and the MBA, cost of living, careers, etc.

Just a thought.

bb I think there is a large target audience in primarily in India and China (but also in several other countries), that apply to international schools, that we should aim at. Other forums such as pagalguy seem to get a lot of traffic from them. A good amount could come to gmat club instead.

I've posted a more exhaustive ranking thread and am bracing myself for the abuse ....

For me, what separates the US MBA forum is not the number of participants, nor the number of school specific threads out there, but the quality of the information that is available only there. I still hang out there and without that forum and posts like "Rhyme's interview strategy", or kryzak's "Knowledge Vault" my MBA pursuit wouldn't have been the same. I continue to learn a lot. Now, we all know that these posts have nothing to do with US MBA programs, but are rather valuable resources for ANY MBA applicant.

So to increase traffic in this forum, we simply need to put "shortcuts" to these valued posts. Any future post that is generic needs to come across to this forum too.

As for me, I initially came to this forum when a current friend who is at Kellogg told me that it's a great GMAT specific site. Boy was she wrong, it's a great community for everything to do with MBA.

my £0.02

-buff


p.s cloning bsdlover??? are you sure this forum is big enough for more than 1?

I would recommend that you add Canadian MBA programs to this forum (in the forum header). In doing so, you will eliminate any uncertainty for members searching for information (albeit when already on the site) or from a search engine. Canadian programs are not "U.S." despite the close proximity of both countries.

that's the point I was trying to make in the other post (one on rankings). Basically at the moment this forum attracts people who are applying to schools that claim to be international schools. Schools that cater to a strong regional market don't have a presence here.

Perhaps this is the case because most people join the community for the GMAT and GMAT is only used by the "international" schools to level the playing field.

To attract regional candidates perhaps we need to champion these candidate at the start of the MBA application process (i.e get them interested in staying for something other than the GMAT).

The point about the US b-school application forum having more quality posts has been made but allow me to try to make the point more lucid.

Once you are done with the GMAT, I think there are two basic categories of questions you have in your mind.
1) What are the general strategies/tips for a b-school application?
2) What are the school specific strategy for School X, Y, and Z?

When you have a question in the former category, where do you go? To "The B-School Application" forum.
When you have a question in the latter category, where do you go? Depends on the school, but either the US or International forum.

Since the former makes up the majority of the questions (IMO at least), most people HAVE to read US b-school forum, whether they have any interest in the US schools or not. Take for example an applicant who is only really interested in applying to European schools. However, to read up on general advice and tips on b-school applications, this applicant starts reading the US b-school forum. Eventually, this person builds a bond with the regulars in that forum, and only checks the international forum every so often and only follows one or two threads. I think that's the situation that arises most of the time. And that's what happened to me as well.

I think I have a pretty clear idea of the hurdles facing this issue, but I'm not sure I have any good ideas. The only clear cut solution is really like you say clone bsd_lover, or find more quality posters that are dedicated to the International forum.

I do have a few ideas that aren't completely thought out yet, but I want to throw it out there so maybe it can start some brainstorming.

1) Allow cross-posting between the two forums, that way good threads are kept common between both forums. It will also allow easier and more interaction between the posters in both forums. I don't know if this is technically feasible, but it's an old trick from my newsgroup days.

2) Create a separate forum for general application advice, then have separate forums for regions. I see two issues with this. First, it's hard to enforce the rule that people HAVE to post general advice in one forum and discuss school specific issues in another. Second, it doesn't really improve traffic in the international forum, though it might boost a lot of traffic in the general advice forum.

3) Screw it, create something like a GC10 (M7 + Insead, IMD, and LBS; three schools that belong up there with the very best IMO) to expose more people to the great opportunities that lie outside of the US shores. I don't quite know what this accomplishes (heh), but I just like the sound of it.

4) Create a database/knowledge vault for International/European b-school applicants. International b-schools are quite different from US b-schools, and the type of candidate they are looking for are also different. I don't think there are enough information highlighting these differences, and emphasizing the difference in experience. The hardest problem with this point though is that I have no idea how to resolve this issue.

OK, no prob. How does this work - I post it as a new topic and then someone sets it to 'sticky'?

On a side note, I did research IMD, but I'd rather let someone else handle that masterpage. Like, someone who has at least managed to get an interview invite

Hi nerdboy thanks for offering (I was hoping you would ).

The structure will look like :

Master thread --> School Home thread -->Other useful school specific threads.

I have created the master thread here : ranks-and-clusterings-of-various-international-b-schools-78320.html#p589230

The master thread will become an announcement / sticky soon. Currently I have linked to Hjort's school pages on the master thread . For insead, the school home thread is here : insead-13421.html. But this thread is very outdated. Also this information doesn't contain links to other useful threads (such as the 2010 applicants thread). So, the approach would be to create a new school home thread with links to useful threads. This is where I was hoping you and other INSEAD folks come in to contribute. So, basically just create a new topic specific to INSEAD and let me know and I'll update the master thread accordingly. I will create a similar one for LBS.

Beautiful post.

BSD - I made a little edit of your post rankings post. Not sure if you like it, but I tried to include the best of both worlds.

Yep, banning buffdady is the easy way. The other way involves me digging for pictures of Fontainebleau/ Singapore and spending hours of writing and editing... the horror

I've updated the root thread : ranks-and-clusterings-of-various-international-b-schools-78320.html with lots of new links (a bit of data mining with some old interesting threads added in). I've also tried to clean out the page with good looking URLs. I'd love some feedback.

Should I make that thread an announcement (since we expect all new folks to read that thread about international schools first). I've also removed some existing stickies which had not been updated for a long long time and included those links in the master page instead.

I thought about similar idea – perhaps, we could arrange a series of ‘gmatclub’s exlusive interviews’ with adcom members of various schools. Having a permanent thread theoretically is better – but, realistically, I don’t think that adcoms would monitor it regularly.

Now, we need to find those ‘friendly adcoms’ …

BB, I have a suggestion.
We need to collect information on the Best B'schools, with the information including - School Name, Specialization, Average GMAT score, Network of alumini's, Approximate fee/expenses per year... Present them in a word sheet format and publish in our site, with some covering topic name, say 'Top 10 Business schools in USA' and like wise.

The advantage is this will be in the hitlist in Google. Most of the people start their B-school searches in Google and their mindset will be to hit the top-10 schools.

This will invite quite a lot of people. Hope this helps.

How about a chat session (similar to clearadmit chat sessions ?). Then we post the QnA transcript on the forums. They seem to be happy doing those ? OR we can start a questions thread and once we reach say 30 good questions list we send it to the ad-com to answer at their own leisure ?

Here's a way to come up with a good question list.

Start a post telling people that you will be interviewing the AdCom from so-and-so school, and ask interested posters to post questions they would like answered. Then a small group of moderators will sift through the list and select the best 10 to 20 questions and submit it to the AdCom via e-mail. The AdCom's reply will then be posted for all to see.

This a format Slashdot often use for its interview.

Alex and Raabend, thank you very much for your thoughts.
Agree with both of you about the reasons the International forum is lagging behind the US one.

However, I think we can improve from where we are today. In my mind there are 2 things we can tweak:
- Number of people visiting
- Percentage of those visitors that return

We can improve one of these numbers. Either one will help. Any ideas are welcome.

I feel one of the biggest drawbacks of the International forum is lack of information about the schools.

One of the things that can be done is have a write up of the Non-US schools split into the UE, E, NE, TE etc just like we have on the US side.

Also, maybe the our International members can suggest good admission consultants who can provide answers to questions about the local programs.