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FROM Ivey MBA Admissions Blog: A Calm Mind is Needed Amid the MBA Tornado |
Graham Matthews of Toronto is an MBA student at Ivey with a focus on marketing and entrepreneurship. In his first entry for The Globe and Mail‘s MBA Diary, Matthews discusses the importance of self-awareness and taking the time to reflect throughout the MBA experience. This entry was originally featured in The Globe and Mail. It’s easy to lose yourself in an MBA. Before coming to business school I would say that self-awareness was a personal strength of mine. That’s not to say that I always made great decisions, but I usually felt a sense of clarity about myself, even with the uncertainty of leaving a job I loved to return to school at 30. The MBA experience has certainly shaken that foundation. The makeup of an MBA classroom is instantly disruptive to one’s own world view. From Day 1, I was surrounded by people with incredibly diverse backgrounds, not just culturally but professionally and personally. Within the first week, Ivey’s career management team paved a path for the year ahead: developing our personal narratives, coffee chats, interview practice – all toward landing us a job we’d each be happy with. Then course content ramped up quickly with a steady flow of new concepts, readings, case discussions, competitions, and group work. Conversations with 150 new friends outside the classroom dug into past experiences, future ambitions, questions, and confusions. Imagine standing in the middle of a tornado. All you can do is try to keep your feet on the ground, but no matter what you do you end up twisted around. So what would you do? Do you focus on “the plan?” Do you revert to the familiar? Do you become the tornado? In all cases, being mindful of yourself and your priorities is most important. One risk of going through an MBA experience, particularly an intense one-year program like Ivey’s, is that you begin to take on the identity of those around you. Long-term career ambitions, job applications, salary expectations, how you talk about your background, how you spend your free time, which MBA course work to do (and not to do) and so on, all become priorities. My advice to anyone – business student or not – is to take time to reflect. What are your personal priorities? What are the components of a life that will make you happy? What are the sacrifices you’re willing to make, what are you not willing to give up? And then what does that mean for you as an MBA student or as a professional or as an individual? Of course we can’t control everything, even in our own brains, but we do have some autonomy and there’s power in that. It’s also important to stretch yourself and jump into the tornado. In many ways that’s what this MBA thing is all about. Every week I’m here at Ivey I evolve a little bit, some weeks I evolve a lot. Some of these personal shifts are temporary, some will stay with me longer term. So I just try to take a moment every once in a while to be reflective about where I am. By being mindful of our own identity and priorities we unlock a level of vulnerability. We can talk about our weaknesses as well as our strengths. We can describe what’s important to us in a corporate culture because we know what’s important to us. I would like to think that hiring managers pick up on this. If you’re a fit for their business, they will believe it because it’s coming from an honest place. If they don’t think you’re a fit, that’s fine. I’d rather we both know that now than in six months. This is hard to do, in large part because we don’t have complete control of our brains and they are complex. I have found myself seriously considering roles that I almost certainly would not be happy with and was unable to explain how I got there. It’s a tornado, after all, and sometimes I don’t realize how much I’ve been twisted around. |
FROM Ivey MBA Admissions Blog: 4 Important Tips on How To Approach Video Essay Questions |
The Ivey MBA Admissions team has implemented video essay questions as part of the application process. In this video blog, Recruiting Manager Julia Michienzi discusses why video questions were added and how best to approach them. The four key tips she discusses are: 1) Dress appropriately — look professional. 2) Check your surroundings and make sure you have a quiet space prepared. 3) Do the practice questions — these will help you to get comfortable in front of the camera and give you a sense of the kinds of questions we’re going to ask. 4) Don’t overthink it! Nerves are normal. |
FROM Ivey MBA Admissions Blog: The Hult Prize Journey by Fahad Tariq |
This article, written by Fahad Tariq, MBA 2016, was originally printed in The Globe and Mail on Friday, April 22, 2016. One of the judges made her way to the podium to announce the next finalist. The tension was palpable among the 200 students who had travelled from all over the world to compete in the Hult Prize’s regional round of competition in England’s capital. The Hult Prize is the world’s largest social enterprise competition that provides $1-million in seed funding to the group of students with the best solution to a defined social problem. The students from more than 60 schools who had gathered in London had put in hundreds of hours to develop a compelling six-minute pitch to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems: low income. Specifically, this year’s challenge was to double the income of 10 million people living in crowded urban spaces by 2022. One of the speakers aptly referred to this as a “big hairy audacious goal,” a term coined by business consultant James Collins. But who better to address this hairy problem than a group of young, self-assured students from universities around the world with a resolve to make the world a better place? Back to the judge. Four finalists had already been announced, with two open spots remaining, and she was about to announce one of them. Our team hoped our name would be called next. We were confident in our business model and were ready to represent our school, and Canada, on the global stage. “This team impressed us with their knowledge of the topic, and with their partners on the ground. Quite frankly, they made human waste sexy. The next finalist is the Ivey Business School,” the judge said, with a certain panache. We were ecstatic. Our team of four made our way to the stage in the dimly lit Museum of London, ready to pitch our bold idea: improving income potential through better sanitation, by turning human waste into energy. It’s a crappy (pun intended) topic, but one that needs to be explored because it could very well be the future of renewable energy. It was fitting that the final presentations were in the Museum of London, a space filled with ancient examples of innovative solutions, from prehistoric axes to medieval ships. As we began presenting, my mind flashed back to the countless days and nights we spent working on a solution to this problem. For us, this was more than just a competition. It was a unique opportunity to apply everything we had learned in business school to tackle a social problem that we were passionate about. We applied what we learned in our strategy class to develop a distinct value proposition, what we learned in our leadership class to work effectively as a team, what we learned in our marketing class to promote cultural adoption of our solution, and so on. We live in a world where sadly there is no shortage of problems to solve. It was inspiring to look out into the audience and see students ready to address these problems in a sustainable way. Optimism is certainly their greatest strength. Each member of our team presented part of the pitch, just as we had rehearsed many times. Our extensive research paid off during the Q&A session when we were able to thoughtfully answer the judges’ tough questions. In the end, we weren’t selected as the winner to advance to the Hult’s final round, but the positive feedback we received from the judges and other students was tremendously encouraging. The experience of travelling to London, of presenting our idea to some of the top minds in social enterprise, and of coming together as a team has been immensely rewarding. It is, and will remain, one of my most memorable experiences in business school. |
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