Eli Engelman, member of the\u00a0Columbia Business School<\/a>\u00a0Class of 2021, shares his experience applying to and matriculating at Columbia\u2019s MBA program, including how his experience has been shaped by COVID-19.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Are you wondering if an MBA moved online is a valuable experience? Or are you less worried about how your education will be delivered and more worried about getting into an elite MBA program when you didn\u2019t necessarily attend a college with an Ivy League pedigree?\u00a0Our guest today<\/a>\u00a0will address both those topics.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Eli Engelman grew up outside of New York city and decided after a stint in the Israeli army to attend the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, where he earned a BA in finance and minored in philosophy and computer applications and business. After interning at Bank Leumi, he joined the bank full time in 2016 and worked there until he joined\u00a0Columbia Business School\u2019s Class of 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n I grew up in Monsey, New York, which is about 45 minutes north of the city. I attended a local high school and upon graduating, I decided that I wanted a little bit of an interesting experience in life. And so I moved to Israel to study abroad and join the Israeli Defense Force. And after three years in Israel, I decided to return to New York, this time Manhattan. I wanted to position myself at the center of business and to pursue a degree at Baruch College. Like you said, I majored in finance and minored in computer information systems and philosophy. And I had a wonderful internship at Bank Leumi, which is Israel\u2019s largest investments bank, and I decided to join them full-time. I loved the idea of being at the intersection of business, as well as that international experience that being at an Israeli bank afforded me. And at Leumi, I was a member of both the portfolio strategy and alternative investment teams. For fun, I love to read, I love to snowboard, hike and travel, and discovering different cuisines is a favorite pastime of mine.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n There are three primary reasons. I think there are actually many more, but the three that spring to mind are the fact that at Leumi, I got a really broad experience and I thought it was very important that starting out, I would focus more on the breadth than the depth of my experience, just to see what I would like. And I worked on public markets and private markets, and the private markets were really interesting to me. I hoped an MBA would allow me to leverage what I learned at Leumi and provide me a platform to focus my skill on that particular discipline.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The second was that I wanted to just surround myself with ambitious, hardworking peers who I could learn so much from, and that\u2019s really come to fruition in a profound way.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n And the third and perhaps most important, and one that you\u2019re less likely to hear in general, is that life is short and I wanted to diversify my experience as much as I possibly could. I wanted to live as interesting a life as I could, and I thought an MBA would be a great way to take a two year break from \u201creal life\u201d and explore and see what\u2019s interesting to me and hear different perspectives, and that was very enticing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n What was the most challenging thing to me on my application was also the thing I thought would be the least challenging, which was\u00a0my resume<\/a>. I originally assumed that my resume\u2019s purpose is to highlight responsibilities, essentially to showcase the faith that Leumi or the companies I worked for in my internships had in me. But\u00a0Natalie from Accepted<\/a>, who was absolutely instrumental in getting me into the various programs that I did and helping me along my MBA search journey, quickly checked me on this and explained to me that the real value of a resume is as a marketing tool and a medium to tell my story. I then had to extricate my successes from my responsibilities, really highlighting the successes as opposed to the responsibilities.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n That was actually challenging because I had the words on the paper. I had the resume. I thought it was good to go. Instead of building it from scratch, which might\u2019ve been easier, if I had that focus on success, I had to revamp it. And once I began to think about the resume as a narrative with a beginning, a middle and end, and I started to think about how one instance of success led to another, I put that on paper, completely revamped my resume, and that helped tremendously. I saw a difference in the interviewers that I had in admissions. People would look at it, and they\u2019d look up at me as though they learned something; there was something there that they can talk about. So that was really excellent and a challenge, which I\u2019m very happy to have had Natalie\u2019s help to overcome.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nA CBS student reflects on his b-school experience so far [Show notes]<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and where you grew up? What do you like to do for fun? [1:52]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Your undergraduate degree is in business. You have four and a half solid years of experience at an international bank. Why did you decide you wanted or needed an MBA? [3:11]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Do you remember anything particularly challenging about the MBA application process for you? [4:53]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n