MBA World Tour

I am living in Shenzhen and the Official World MBA Tour was coming to HK yesterday, only 1h far from my home So I went there to meet the different schools, check out the schools, talk with students and people from the admissions...I got different feelings

Many schools showed up, however I was definitely very surprised to see that Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, MIT, NYU, Berkeley and even Kellog were not attending this MBA fair. I was a little disappointed, I think that HK is one of the "big" place in Asia, there should be plenty of applicants from here but maybe those schools think that now it's quite late to get some students but i think it was a mistake. Eventually many people came.

However, I had the opportunity to see IE, Insead, Wharton, Columbia, Darden, Kelley, Thunderbird, USC, Tuck and Yale (many others were there but it's too long to write all the list )

I think that if you have the chance to attend this kind of fair, you should take the opportunity. It has been a year since I've thought about doing a MBA so I've had time to collect a lot of data about all schools so I would say that I didn't "discover" anything special however I encourage people to talk with the alumni because that's the main interest, you will be able to get some information about the social life, the class profile, the feelings, the experiences and the advices from someone who was in the same position as you several years ago

My 50 cents on this fair and on the manin schools :

- Yale was not active enough, just giving brochure. There was only one people from the school so she should have talked a little more or tried to catch some students instead of waiting for them, however the answers she had given to me were precise and definitely honest. I appreciated the discussion.

- Wharton was ok, good presentation and nice attitude. Nothing special

- Tuck and Darden were just normal too, I was just listening the Q&A from other people but actually there were a lot of general questions (do you think your mba is good ? do you think it is difficult for me to get in ? terrible questions, so general, but Darden and uck asnwered all of them in a nice and correct way )

- There was a couple for IE, those 2 people were so nice, I think they definitely were the best ! Very nice, professional, they were able to explain you very precisely the strong points of the school, but also underline the importance of the great social life they were able to get in Madrid . I think they were just great and they found the perfect balance between work and life. I think for all of us it is very important to find a great school but also to be sure that we won't stay alone all the time in our rooms

- In the other hand there was a guy from Thunderbird, I have personally a great vision about this school but the guy was talking too much about the fun, the bar and the social that I was wondering if I would even study there

- Finall both my worst and my best experience came from Columbia. There were a woman from the Admissions Board and a fresh mba graduate (2005).

The woman was so rude, just telling people she was not going to reapeat the same thing to many people so everybody should be very careful listening to her (I was really mad at that time, how come they treat students like this...it's a shame, If i was a BW Ranking Guy, I would lower their rank only for this...), she gave only general infromation and was not friendly at all.
Of course at that time I ask her a (vicious, honest and bad) question : "don't you think that Columbia is shifting from a strong financial MBA profile to a profile based more on international business ? And don't you think that epople interested by Finance would rather go to Wharton now, and maybe that the one interested in International stuf would even go to Harvard ? (because if you can apply to Columbia, we can admit that you will certainly apply to other high elite schools too)
She became a little angry and I was definitely disappointed by her answer : "I don't think it's true at all".

that's all I got
Actually I don't know why I study Critical Reasonning for the GMAT when I see that people like this...no argument, no idea, nothing...only "that's not true". anyway, she definitely sank the Columbia boat during that MBA Fair

Fortunately for Columbia they also had one student that just had finished her MBA. She was so nice, talkative, friendly and she used many examples of her daily life to try to show us the strong points of Columbia. I must admit she was exactly the kind of people you would like to meet in your school : bright, fast, friendly, nice and funny.

Anyway, before dreaming I need to re-take my Gmat I should go back to my Verbal now Hope you've enjoyed the report.