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02 Mar 2016, 09:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Dean Profiles: David Schmittlein, MIT Sloan School of Management |
 Business school deans are more than administrative figureheads. Their character and leadership often reflect an MBA program’s unique culture and sense of community. Periodically, we profile the dean of a top-ranking business school. Today, we focus on David Schmittlein from the MIT Sloan School of Management. David Schmittlein first came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2007 after almost 30 years at Wharton, where he served as the Ira A. Lipman Professor in the school’s marketing faculty. He is the first Sloan dean to be hired from outside the ranks of MIT’s faculty and staff, thus bringing with him a wealth of new ideas and energy. Upon joining MIT, Dean Schmittlein announced his top priorities in a press release: “to enhance MIT Sloan’s visibility and engagement with leaders of the business community, regionally and globally, especially among the school’s alumni. MIT Sloan should be a wonderful focal point for the professional lives and development of Sloan alumni and others in the broader MIT community who are engaged in business and innovation.” In addition to enhanced global visibility, a significant focus of Schmittlein’s deanship thus far, according to the school’s Web site, “has been education programs, develop enhanced educational opportunities for current students, and to develop and disseminate business knowledge that has impact and will stand the test of time.” In an interview with mbaMission, Senior Director of Admissions Rod Garcia remarked that one noticeable change since Schmittlein entered the position is that “the dean has placed a huge emphasis on concept-based action learning. We have Entrepreneurship Lab, our [Sustainable Business] Lab, our China Lab, our India Lab […], among others. The movement toward these labs has accelerated during the dean’s tenure as he has engaged with our alumni around the world.” For more information about MIT Sloan and 15 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. The post Dean Profiles: David Schmittlein, MIT Sloan School of Management appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
02 Mar 2016, 13:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Jessica O. Matthews Shares Her Journey from Harvard to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” |
 Jessica O. Matthews Today, many aspiring MBAs and MBA graduates want to join start-ups or launch such companies themselves. Is entrepreneurship as exciting as it seems? Is it really for you? mbaMission Founder Jeremy Shinewald has teamed up with Venture for America and CBS Interactive to launch Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast. Each week, Shinewald interviews another entrepreneur so you can hear the gritty stories of their ups and downs on the road to success. Jessica O. Matthews became an entrepreneur early in life when she invented the SOCCKET ball, an energy-generating soccer ball, at age 19. Since then, she has established a decorated entrepreneurial career, founding the renewable energy company Uncharted Play and co-founding one of the first private hydropower dams in Nigeria—all while being chosen for such lists as the Fortune “Most Promising Women Entrepreneurs” and the Forbes “30 Under 30.” Now, Matthews joins the Venture for America podcast to share how she accomplished all of this in her twenties, touching on these details and more:
The post Jessica O. Matthews Shares Her Journey from Harvard to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
03 Mar 2016, 09:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Beyond the MBA Classroom: A Family Affair at HBS |
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When you select an MBA program, you are not just choosing your learning environment but are also committing to becoming part of a community. Each Thursday, we offer a window into life “beyond the MBA classroom” at a top business school. Nearly 30% of Harvard Business School (HBS) students have registered partners, and approximately 15% have children. Partners can register with MBA Student and Academic Services for the MBA Partner Program and/or join the Partners’ Club, which helps significant others integrate into life at HBS, providing opportunities to meet socially, attend HBS-sponsored partner events, join HBS clubs, and enjoy campus services. HBS partners are provided with their own email accounts and identification cards and given access to the Partners’ Web site and Career Services. Crimson Parents Club is devoted to families with children, and it organizes activities such as play groups, seasonal parties, speaker series, and seminars on parenting. For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at HBS and 15 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. The post Beyond the MBA Classroom: A Family Affair at HBS appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
03 Mar 2016, 12:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Diamonds in the Rough: An MBA for Working Professionals at Villanova School of Business |
MBA applicants can get carried away with rankings. In this series, we profile amazing programs at business schools that are typically ranked outside the top 15. In 2013, the Villanova School of Business (VSB) received a $50M gift from alumnus James C. Davis, founder of Allegis Group, and his wife, Kim. The donation—part of a $600M capital campaign—was the largest in the school’s history and was reportedly “earmarked to improve academic and career advising, increase internship and study abroad opportunities, perform technology upgrades, and provide scholarships,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The VSB also planned to use a portion of the funds to “beef up its faculty roster to include more professors focused on teaching as opposed to research.” With a satellite campus in Center City, Philadelphia, VSB specializes in part-time programs for working professionals, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of a full-time curriculum without leaving their current job. In this vein, the school offers the choice of an accelerated, two-year Fast Track degree option, which meets twice a week, or the more customizable Flex Track degree option, which typically takes three years to complete and accommodates varying course loads. One advantage conferred by the accelerated option is the opportunity to partake in the school’s two-part consulting practicum project, which includes the “Social Enterprise Consulting Practicum” and the “Global Practicum” capstone courses—each lasting 14 weeks. In the former practicum, students work with local, nonprofit organizations to identify strategies in such areas as branding, funding, and membership retention. Alternatively, the latter practicum entails working with a multinational corporation to gain firsthand experience analyzing market issues. VSB also hosts a variety of elective international immersion courses through which students may travel abroad over winter break or during the summer semester. The post Diamonds in the Rough: An MBA for Working Professionals at Villanova School of Business appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
04 Mar 2016, 08:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Friday Factoid: Chicago Booth for Marketing? |
 You may be surprised to learn that Chicago Booth is making inroads into an area that its crosstown rival (Northwestern Kellogg) is known to dominate: marketing. Through the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing—named for the Chicago Booth alumnus who was formerly CEO of Gillette and Nabisco (and is now a partner at Centerview Partners)—Chicago Booth offers students roughly ten marketing electives. In particular, the school is growing its experiential opportunities in the marketing field, with students taking part in marketing management labs (semester-long consulting projects) at such companies as Abbott Laboratories, Bank of America, and Honeywell International. Further, professors in the department saw opportunities for increased practical involvement and created “hybrid” classes in “Marketing Research” and “New Product Development” that involve a lecture component but also allow students to work on shorter-term consulting projects. Students can also sign up to be paired with an alumni marketing mentor or can apply for Marketing Fellowships, which offer scholarships and a two-year mentoring relationship. Although Kellogg’s reputation for excellence in marketing is firmly intact, we have to assume that the folks in Evanston are occasionally glancing over their shoulder to see whether Chicago Booth is continuing to gain ground. For a thorough exploration of what Chicago Booth and other top business schools have to offer, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. The post Friday Factoid: Chicago Booth for Marketing? appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
04 Mar 2016, 12:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: mbaMission’s Exclusive Interview with Shark Tank Contestant Shaan Patel, Founder of Prep Expert |
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Shaan Patel is an entrepreneur and a recent contestant on ABC’s Shark Tank—and he is also an MBA student! Patel’s company Prep Expert (formerly 2400 Expert SAT Prep) was growing steadily when he decided to pursue a business degree at the Yale School of Management (SOM), which left him juggling entrepreneurship and his schoolwork. We asked him how he manages it all and how he persuaded Mark Cuban to jump on board as an investor! Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. You are currently a second-year MBA student at the SOM. Many MBAs launch businesses after graduation, but you managed to do so during your studies. How did your experience at the SOM prepare you for this endeavor?  Shark Tank, Episode 716 contestant Shaan Patel (Photo via ABC) The [SOM] has been transformative in helping me to expand my venture with its newfound on entrepreneurship. Perhaps the most impactful class I took was “Management of Software Development” taught by [the school’s] Director of Entrepreneurship Kyle Jensen. The class taught me the importance of Web development and design, which led me to use lean and agile methods to rapidly iterate our company’s Web site, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in increased revenue. I am very involved in the entrepreneurship community at Yale and am currently taking “Startup Practicum”—a course that allows founders to work on their start-ups in a structured course for school credit. You scored a perfect 2400 on your SATs. Was this the main inspiration for 2400 Expert SAT Prep, or did you have an earlier interest in the subject? Did your perfect score come as a surprise to you? I never planned to start an SAT prep company. I originally wanted to write an SAT prep book. When I was in high school, I only scored around average on my first practice SAT. I then spent hundreds of hours in the library raising my own score to a perfect 2400. This score changed my life—I was admitted into prestigious universities, won a quarter million dollars in scholarships, and even got to meet the president of the United States. When I was in college, I wanted to write an SAT prep book to teach other students how to prepare for the SAT the way that I did in high school. When I pitched my book proposal to over 100 literary agents and publishers, I was turned down by every single one. That’s when I decided to leverage the material I had written to start 2400 Expert. After my first class had an average SAT score improvement of 376 points, I had parents knocking down the door for more courses. Ironically, after McGraw-Hill, the world’s largest education publisher who had already rejected my book proposal, saw what I was doing with 2400 Expert, they offered me a book deal after all. It was interesting that I got what I originally wanted after I took a completely different path. You mentioned in an email that you went from living in a motel to attending business school. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yes, I grew up in my parents’ budget motel in Las Vegas. I attended urban public schools in the worst school district in the nation with a 40% dropout rate. However, I really believe it doesn’t matter where you go to school. Instead, it’s your effort that determines your success. I ended up attending an eight-year baccalaureate/MD program at the University of Southern California (USC). I started my business just prior to starting med school. As my company was growing while I was in medical school, I decided to go to business school to not only learn more about health care management, but also learn how to turn my company from a small business to a national test prep brand. So I took a leave of absence from medical school at USC to attend business school at Yale. I [will] finish my MBA in May and will return to USC in the fall to finish my last year of medical school. On a recent episode of Shark Tank, angel investor and billionaire Mark Cuban agreed to invest $250K in your company in exchange for a 20% equity stake. What was your strategy when approaching the Sharks? Were you surprised to see Cuban jump on board? I valued my company at $2M using net present value of discounted cash flows that I had learned in business school. Therefore, I asked for $250K in exchange for 10% equity. I did this because I knew that the Sharks typically negotiate entrepreneurs to a lower valuation, so I wanted to have a slightly higher valuation in my initial ask to leave some room for negotiation. I was surprised that Cuban gave me an offer because he initially seemed unimpressed at the beginning of my pitch. But Mark was the one Shark I wanted going into the Tank. So it worked out! What have been your biggest challenges with juggling a company and attending business school? Do the pros outweigh the possible cons? The biggest challenge of attending business school and running my business is balancing my time. There is so much that an entrepreneur has to do when running a growing company. Sometimes it’s difficult to do everything I need to because of case studies and group meetings in business school. But the amount I have learned in business school about how to build and run a multimillion-dollar company certainly outweighs these small cons. Where do you see 2400 Expert SAT Prep advancing in the next five years, and how do you believe Mark Cuban’s involvement will influence the company’s progress? In the next five years, I believe we can help one million students prep for the SAT so that they’ve improved their SAT scores an average of 300+ points, resulting in great college acceptances and scholarship awards for our students. The best part of this business is getting success emails from students such as one that I got the other day that stated: “Thank you for writing the SAT 2400 book—it was a great help and I ended up getting in wherever I applied, including Harvard, Yale (currently in Trumbull College), and Princeton. I’m a Pakistani American from Brooklyn—not wealthy by any means—and couldn’t afford a private tutor so I had to find a way to self-study, and your book really did the trick.” Mark Cuban not only has a huge brand that will help the company, but he’s already been helpful in guiding the strategic direction of the company. How would you advise current MBA students who are hoping to get their businesses off the ground during their studies? Don’t worry about failing. Too many people are risk averse and afraid to dive in. You have to fail first in order to succeed. I look at every failure as an opportunity. Every time I have been rejected by a university (Harvard Business School, Wharton, Stanford Graduate School of Business), literary agent, book publisher, licensed content partner, Shark, etc., I see it as an opportunity to tell a great underdog story later! Life would be so boring if everything came easy. Those who are afraid to fail will never succeed. The post mbaMission’s Exclusive Interview with Shark Tank Contestant Shaan Patel, Founder of Prep Expert appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
05 Mar 2016, 08:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: HBS Is for Everyone |
 Harvard Business School (HBS) offers an excellent MBA program—this is largely a given, and we are not calling that into question. However, what we will call into question is whether HBS (or any other school, for that matter) is right for you. Every year, we get a few calls from confused MBA aspirants who say, “I visited HBS, and I am not sure if there is a fit,” as if that indicates some sort of problem. Indeed, and this may be shocking to some, HBS is not for everyone—particularly those who do not relate well to case-based learning, those who want a lot of flexibility in their first-year curriculum, and those who would prefer a small class size (HBS’s Class of 2017 has 937 students, while the same class at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, for example, has just 246). We hope that applicants will use this post as a jumping-off point to critically appraise their target MBA programs and determine which schools are indeed right for them. Start by asking yourself the following questions:
Again, these questions are just a start—we could pose many more, but the point is that you will get far more than a brand from your MBA studies. You will gain an education and an alumni network in return for your investment of two years and thousands of dollars. Thus, you should skip the rankings, determine what is important to you, and then do your homework to identify a program where you will truly fit. The post MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: HBS Is for Everyone appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
06 Mar 2016, 10:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: GMAT Impact: How to Solve Any Sentence Correction Problem, Part 3 |
With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense. In Part 1 of this article, we talked about the five-step process to answer Sentence Correction problems, and in Part 2, we discussed some drills to build the needed skills. Make sure to read both of those before continuing with this third article in the series. Drill Number 3: Find a Starting Point Once again, open up your Official Guide and look at some problems you have done before. This time, do NOT read the original sentence. Instead, cover it up. Compare the answers and try to articulate all the things that the problem is testing. Note that you can tell what is being tested even if you cannot tell how to answer. For example, you might see a verb switching back and forth between singular and plural. If the subject is not underlined, then you have no idea which verb form is required, because you literally have not even seen the subject. You do, though, know that subject-verb agreement is at issue. Drill Number 4: Eliminate Answers Once again, this drill involves problems you have already done. (Sensing a pattern? We learn the most when we are reviewing things we have already done!) This time, though, you are going to get to use the whole problem. Right after you finish a problem, add the following analysis to your review: (1) Why is the right answer right? Why is each of the four wrong answers wrong? (2) How would you justify eliminating the right answer? What is the trap that would lead someone to cross this one off? (3) How would you justify picking any of the wrong answers? What is the trap that would lead someone to pick a wrong answer? You are probably already doing the first one, but most people skip the second and third steps. The first is important, but you can learn more! When you learn how you (or someone) would fall into the trap of thinking that some wrong answer looks or sounds or feels better than the right one, you will be a lot less likely to fall into that same trap yourself in the future. Next Steps Practice these steps until they start to feel like second nature to you. At the same time, of course, learn the grammar rules that we all need to know. Put both pieces together, and you will master sentence correction! The post GMAT Impact: How to Solve Any Sentence Correction Problem, Part 3 appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
06 Mar 2016, 12:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: B-School Insider Interview: Alumnus, UCLA Anderson, Class of 2015 |
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An ambitious individual who grew up in the west, this UCLA Anderson alumnus was always looking for ways to learn, see, and do more—he even started his own construction and landscaping business while still a teenager. Despite developing a keen interest in biology and economics while in undergrad, he returned to the construction industry out of college, having accepted a compelling management-level role that allowed him to travel the world and oversee large projects. Eventually, though, his interest in exploring other options sparked his pursuit of a master’s degree in business, and he ultimately enrolled at the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Anderson School of Management. mbaMission: What originally inspired you to attend business school? Anderson Alumnus: I liked what I was doing, but there were limited opportunities within my industry, and I knew switching industries would be challenging. I thought business school was the best way to open up my options. I would have stayed in the industry that I was in [construction] had the right opportunity arisen, but I felt that I would have much better options long-term if I did something different for awhile. That was the way I was leaning. I knew that something different would be best for my long-term career, so I went in with that mentality. mbaMission: And what led you to choose UCLA Anderson for your MBA? Did it ultimately match your expectations? AA: It definitely did. I didn’t know many people who had attended business school before I went to business school. One person I worked with had gone, but it was an exec ed [executive education] program, so a very different experience. I didn’t know quite what to expect. I went in thinking it was going to be very academically rigorous, I guess kind of like undergrad but with bigger problems. Actually, when I was interviewing at Stanford, I told the main interviewer why I wanted to go to business school, and she said, “You’re going to be in for the time of your life, and right now, you have no idea what to expect.” That kind of helped me understand what business school would be like. So I went in expecting to have a pretty life-altering experience that would take me so many places, not just in my career but everywhere else in my life. And I did have that. One big reason I chose Anderson is location. I’ve been out west, I love the weather, I grew up in Montana and spent a lot of time in Utah, and I was sick and tired of the snow and that lifestyle, and I just wanted to go enjoy my life for a few years be able to stay somewhere I like after business school. So that was a big thing. I looked for schools where I would be able to work in and around the area. I think 70% of UCLA grads stay in California once they graduate. So that was a big deal. Another reason was culture and lifestyle. Every school says they have a great culture, and I’m sure they all have unique cultures and they’re great in some senses, but UCLA just fit me unlike any other. It was a casual place where everyone was incredibly friendly, always willing to help, and it just had the feel of a community, so that really helped. I knew I was going to be going in for two years of intense work, so I wanted to make sure I would enjoy everything else around me while I was there. And UCLA definitely beat those expectations. mbaMission: So what was living in the Los Angeles (LA) area like? One of the things we hear about Anderson is that students really need to have a car—you have to drive, you can’t really get around otherwise. Is that true? AA: Well, things in LA probably changed a lot when Uber and Lyft came out, the ride-sharing services. Most people at UCLA do have a car; I would say probably 80% or more. But most people also use Uber almost on a daily basis, especially going out at night. So during the day, getting to and from school, you use your car most of the time, but when you’re going to activities, going to the beach, going elsewhere, fighting traffic, and trying to find parking, you don’t want to deal with it. Uber is really cheap in LA, so it works. Still, some people don’t have cars. I guess if you choose student housing, Anderson is right off campus. It’s still probably a 20-minute walk, because it’s on the opposite end of campus, but it’s right there and quite affordable, from what I understand. I have friends who lived there. It was very affordable, and you have a pretty good community of students there. A lot of them are international students. You can live close to campus is what I’m saying. Westwood is where I lived my first year, which is the city the campus is in. I still drove to school every day, because it was a half-hour walk versus a ten-minute drive. But most students live in Brentwood first year, and a lot of them rotate out to San Monica second year. They do that for the lifestyle. I think if you’re willing to sacrifice having to get in your car and drive to and from school when you go, you’re able to live by the hot spots in LA. There’s a lot of night life in Brentwood and Santa Monica; you obviously have the beach, you’ve got so much to do during the day, or you can just get out and bike anywhere. Your first two quarters at Anderson are pretty tough, because you’re on campus so much that you do need a car, but after that, you have enough flexibility to where you’re only going [to campus] maybe three days a week, so you can ride with other people. And having a bike is probably important beyond that to enjoy the time during the day. mbaMission: Sure. Does the school provide any parking? AA: Grad students at UCLA get priority with parking permits. You’re not guaranteed a permit, I don’t believe, but I never had an issue. As long as you follow the requirements they have to apply by certain dates, then I’ve never heard of anyone not getting parking. If you forget and then you have to go back, it’s difficult, but Student Affairs at Anderson is phenomenal. If you need something and you don’t have it, they will do anything and everything they can to get it for you. They work with the parking office and the students a lot to help overcome that. mbaMission: That’s good to hear. What would you say was the most surprising thing you encountered during your MBA experience? AA: There was a lot that was eye-opening. I guess it was just the impressive level that everyone in the program is at. In undergrad, you have such a diverse group of people, where some are exceptionally talented and some are less talented naturally. At Anderson, you didn’t have that much of a dichotomy. Everyone is incredibly talented and is more than capable of doing almost any job you’d get coming out of business school. So you’re surrounded by a community of people who enjoy life, have fun, and are incredibly talented when it comes to extracurriculars. I mean star basketball players, star athletes, things like that. But then they’re also incredibly intelligent, good in the classroom, and professionally successful. mbaMission: What were your thoughts on the core curriculum? Do you think that was a good approach? AA: I liked it in the sense that it forced you to get out of your comfort zone a little bit and take classes you may not have taken otherwise, or at least for me. Accounting, statistics, finance, marketing, you get the whole breadth of everything, and I think it’s good to get exposure to all that and see what you may have thought you liked but weren’t sure, and then find some areas you didn’t think you would like but fall in love with. I know quite a few people took marketing classes and decided they really liked that. Someone at Anderson was going into fashion and retail and then took some finance classes and fell in love with investment banking. Now she’s at BAML [Bank of America Merrill Lynch] in New York. Just a complete 180. And so I think the core exposes us to things like that. But it’s not too heavy. What I like about Anderson is you’re not forced into too many classes. You have to take a few core classes, and then there are some guiding segments you have to take, some of the upper division classes in certain areas, but you’re given flexibility within that. I really liked being able to pick and choose within a larger pool. mbaMission: Did you end up selecting a track? AA: I didn’t. I think the track is always touted in the literature, but to be honest, once you’re inside, it becomes much less relevant, and I rarely knew of someone who was worried much about following the specific tracks, at least when I was there. It may have changed since last year, but no one really focused on it; it wasn’t a huge thing. It just helped guide your first couple quarters, the way you take your classes. But beyond that, for electives, most people didn’t pay a lot of attention to the tracks. I didn’t. mbaMission: So in your experience, people don’t often go that route? AA: Most people will take maybe three or four classes that are on the track recommendation list, and if you’re close enough, you might as well finish it out. But people mainly go for the top classes. It’s pretty clear at Anderson. There’s a bidding system for courses, so everyone knows which classes are best, taught by the best professors, the most engaging, and that’s what everyone shoots for. So you lose focus of the tracks very quickly and work on getting into the better classes. mbaMission: Can you tell me about your AMR [Applied Management Research] project? Everyone has to do one, don’t they? AA: Yeah, you have a few other options, but I think the vast majority do AMR. You can do BCO [Business Creation Option], so if you actually have a start-up that has been vetted—you have to go through a class to get your business plan read and approved—then you can form a team that actually launches that start-up during school. And some teams do that. There’s also a real estate team, which is really only one team of five students. They have an annual competition against USC [University of Southern California], and we tend to win that almost every year. Anderson has phenomenal real estate faculty, so we do well there. And then there is AMR, which the vast majority of students do. I formed a team with two of my really close friends, who were also my roommates, plus two other women, and we got an international project working with a nonprofit organization based in the Pacific Islands. It was an awesome project and really fun. The problem wasn’t necessarily well defined, so it was a really ambiguous project, which I guess is helpful for the real world in the sense that you get out into these careers now, and you’re handed a project that can go any different way. Having to manage that was interesting. It was a good process; it built teamwork, which was something that I had done a lot of, but rarely with people at that level. So you’re working in teams with a lot of very intelligent people who often take very strong stances in their opinions. So you’re balancing those personalities but also trying to figure out who has strengths in which areas. That was kind of the best aspect I pulled out of it, learning how to work in teams in that sense. As far as strategy and implementation goes, we didn’t really get to see any implementation from our recommendation. The strategy wasn’t too complex. Essentially, they wanted to know whether they should open a trade office in the U.S., but then it went well beyond that. It was also how do we secure funding for this office, what strategy should we implement with this office, should we try to collect fees off what we’re doing, or should we look just for donations from local governments? There’s a lot of research needed to get to that point, but it wasn’t that we were changing the organization’s overall direction or strategy; it was pretty clear-cut what the options would be. All in all, I think AMR was a big growing experience for myself and most people in the program. mbaMission: Did you do any traveling as part of your MBA experience? AA: For my AMR, I did. Our team actually went down to Fiji and Samoa to do some primary research. And then we took a week after that and enjoyed some time on a private island in Fiji, just the five of us, which was cool. The school funds most of it, other than the personal time spent afterward, and then there are grants and organizations on campus, nonprofits within Anderson, that you can secure funding from to help pay for the trips. So it was a really cool experience that we didn’t have to put much money out-of-pocket toward. That was the only thing I did as far as formal school travel for projects. I did a ton of travel with friends, just exploring the world while we were there, probably ten trips—a lot of them out of the country. mbaMission: That’s great. You’ve touched on this a little already, but how would describe or characterize your Anderson classmates? AA: I would say as unselfish as you could find a lot of the time. Most of them are willing to help. I think that’s one thing that is pretty unique at Anderson—when you’re recruiting and doing that kind of stuff, I think a lot of other schools get pretty competitive; you hear those stories. At Anderson, I never once saw anyone doing something to harm anyone else or to make sure that they got an internship or a job or an interview at the expense of anyone else. When people got done with interviews, they’d come out and tell their friends how it went and help get their friends ready for interviews and things like that. That was one really cool thing. Another was just a curious class. I mean, everyone wanted to learn what other people were doing, what they had done before school, how their internships went. We went to Europe, for instance, last summer and ended up staying with one of the guys from our program, with his family for a week in Italy. Everyone is more than willing to accommodate and do whatever they can in that sense, but people also want to explore everyone else’s background and see what kind of people they are beyond the professional aspect. I came from a very different background, so people were quite curious. It was, “You built temples. Explain that.” So, I talked to people about sourcing material, where we looked for different building products, and so on. Even with this random stuff, everyone wanted to learn. It was a fun experience to always be surrounded by such intellectually curious people. mbaMission: Did you have any particularly standout professors or courses? AA: I didn’t do as well on the bidding system as I would have hoped. They publish each year what the prior year’s results were, so you know what people bid [for different classes]. I used that a little too heavily as a guide, and for some reason, our class ended up bidding way more than the year above us. So I missed out on some classes I really wanted to take, but I had a few standouts; one of them I kind of lucked into. It was a really difficult class. A lot of work. And the professor is very demanding. But he’s also probably the best professor at Anderson in my eyes and to a lot of other students. It was “Corporate Financial Reporting” with Eric Sussman as the professor. He just won, last year while we were there, a UCLA-wide award for teaching; he was one of UCLA’s teachers of the year. He’s won countless Anderson awards. He’d been an accountant by trade for a long time and worked for an accounting audit firm. And then he got into real estate. Now he’s built out this real estate portfolio and a real estate management company and has done extremely well there. My favorite thing about him is that he’s not teaching for the money; he’s teaching because he loves it, because he wants to educate these students and give back. I think he went to [Stanford] GSB for his grad school. The class was basically accounting on steroids. What you’re doing is literally each week, taking a new company and picking apart its financial statements, analyzing them and looking for problems. So he’d pick companies that everyone was familiar with in the sense that they had heard the name before, but not everyone knew what had happened with the company. And he presents it, and you go through it, and he points out all these problems that could be leading to the demise of the company, and then toward the end, you find out what really happened. Half of them went bankrupt, and Sussman would basically go through the financial records for these companies for the five years leading up to their bankruptcy and show that there was a clear path. It’s fascinating. He’s traded stocks quite a bit and has been very successful in that space, too, and I believe he also teaches an equity valuation course. So he’s not just talking from a textbook or speaking from no experience; he practices what he preaches, and he does very well at it. So engaging, so passionate. I mean, seeing a teacher that genuinely does it not for the money but because they care—that was awesome. And if you were late, you’d have to buy snacks or treats or something for the entire class the next week—it’s his way of politely saying, “I’m here taking my time. I’m showing you respect; you better respect everyone else by being on time.” But he made it fun. Some professors could be jerks about this kind of thing, but Sussman made it fun and still accomplished what he needed. That’s kind of how his whole class was. Professor Sussman is also incredibly flexible when it comes to helping students. If you need the help, he will find a way to make time for you no matter your level. He truly was a passionate practitioner who invested so much in the students and school. People like him make Anderson exceptional. mbaMission: Nice. AA: Another one is Paul Habibi. Anderson somehow has a secret real estate program that is just phenomenal, and Habibi is part of that. He has a real estate company as well. At our real estate club events, those two [Sussman and Habibi] battle to see who has made the most money on deals, but in a fun way. They basically take good-natured digs at each other, like Habibi makes fun of Sussman for wearing his Joseph A. Banks buy-one-get-six-free suits, and Habibi hears it for his fancy clothes, and he and Sussman just go back and forth. The banter whenever they do events together is awesome. They’re both wildly successful in real estate and equally impressive professors and people. It’s cool to see. mbaMission: Is the dean [Judy Olian] pretty accessible to students? AA: I would say definitely. She holds office hours every couple weeks. I went to one of her first office hours, just to talk about my experience so far, talk about a few things I didn’t love, talked about what I did enjoy, sat and had a half-hour conversation with her. She was more than accommodating, and I think that helped throughout the program. Every time I saw her after that, she would remember my name and say hello. So that was cool. I think there are times, though, when she seems a little out of touch with the rest of the program, probably just because of her job in the sense that she is traveling around securing funding, overseeing the higher levels of the school. The associate deans right below her are probably the most tuned-in people I’ve seen. So, when I was there, we had the Assistant Dean [and Director] of Student Affairs Susan Judkins—she retired last year—but she knew every single student in that program, I kid you not. She knew their name, knew what they did, knew their story. If you needed anything, you could go to her, and she would make it happen. And [Associate] Dean [Robert] Weiler, he’s kind of the heartbeat of the program from the student perspective. He’s very involved, and if there are problems on campus, I think most people would reach out to Student Affairs or to Dean Wyler and talk to him. Just because Dean Olian seems a little more removed in that sense. But if you ever did have a problem that you felt she needed to be aware of, or you just wanted to talk about other aspects of the program, you definitely could get access to her. mbaMission: That’s good to hear. Were you involved in any student clubs or organizations? AA: Yeah, quite a few, actually. First year, I was very involved, but then I decided my second year to kind of tone it back some and enjoy the free time I would have before I came back to the real world. So first year, I was a vice-president in the Management Consulting Association [MCA], and I was a section social chair. Each section elects a set of officials, presidents, academics chair, and so on. And there’s also a social committee that has representatives from each section. Planning parties is the wrong way to put it, but they ensure there’s a balance between social activities and work, and doing that actually takes a lot of work. We put on all the tailgates for the students at the Rose Bowl when we have home football games, plan the Halloween party, a lot of those events. And that took a lot of my time. Beyond that, I was in the Public Speaking Club and active with Challenge for Charity—which I could do a whole hour on itself. It’s huge at Anderson. It’s not a club you’re necessarily part of, but I was the captain of the dodgeball team my second year and co-captain of softball my first year, so it required a little time. I was also part of Out at Anderson, the LGBTA [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and associates] organization on campus. Out at Anderson provides a neat opportunity to support the broader LGBT community at UCLA and is pretty well known on campus. The accepting nature of everyone on campus with regard to lifestyle choices was apparent, and it made me proud to be an Ally in the club and a member of the Anderson community. Most people sign up for too many things and then find they actually don’t have time to do what they signed up for. But there’s a very good balance of interest clubs, identity clubs, professional clubs, and fun activity clubs. Typically, you’ll choose one professional club, so IFA [Investment Finance Association] if you want to do finance, MCA if you want to do consulting. Some people do both and try to figure out which one suits them, but most people realize it’s too much work. And then they’ll usually choose two or three identity clubs or social activity clubs beyond that. Anderson Eats is one where people just go out to restaurants and eat. The beer club and wine club have become big. I mean, there’s anything and everything you could want, and if you want more, it’s pretty easy to create a new club. mbaMission: Nice. What do you think about Anderson’s facilities? AA: I would actually say that facilities are some of Anderson’s weakest points. Nothing is falling apart—it’s not bad in that sense—it’s just when you see some of these other campuses that have been built in the past five years, ten years, even, they’re new and have more features. Anderson just seems a little old. It’s not grungy at all, but it seems like it could improve. Very few of the classrooms have windows. You get to enjoy the amazing LA weather the rest of the time, so you probably don’t need to see the sun those three hours you’re in class, but at GSB, for instance, the classrooms have floor-to-ceiling windows that they’ll open up throughout the day. That’s kind of a neat learning environment, but at Anderson, it’s not that way. It’s not something you worry about when you’re in class, but when you see the other campuses, you realize it could be improved. Quiet study spaces on campus are also a little short. They redid the library, and they built a lot of study rooms that are all open top, because they’d done a survey of all the students, and the students said they still wanted a little banter; they didn’t want it completely quiet when they were in the libraries doing work, so they kept the study spaces open that way. But over time, they realized there’s actually too much noise. So when finals roll around and when AMR projects are in the thick of it, it’s tough to find quiet areas. You’re never going to be left without a study area, it’s just, how quiet is it going to be? Other than that, you have access to the rest of UCLA, which is phenomenal. You get access to the Wooden Athletic Center; it’s pretty solid. The basketball courts—you can play on the same courts that the visiting NBA teams warm up on when they come to town. Cool stuff like that. mbaMission: Did you have much interaction with alumni? AA: My perspective is, you get a lot of interaction with recent grads—one to three years out, there’s tons of interaction. They’re always on campus, they come back for events. Tour de Strand is a bike-ride, bar-hopping event we do, and tons of alumni come back for things like that. So you get introduced in informal settings, where it’s a lot more comfortable than a cold call—“Hey, can I get an informational interview with you?” As far as finding alumni that are a little deeper into their career, maybe five or ten years out, they’re not really on campus as often. You can find them and get access to them, or be referred to them; that’s kind of the best way. But there aren’t a lot that you interact with regularly. There are events that we do each year—there’s the HTBA [High Tech Business Association] Conference and the PULSE Conference each year, for instance—so you get a lot of alumni coming back to do things like that. Also, during orientation, each section had a group of four alumni come back and do a panel. Most of them had been out in the workforce for five-plus years, so they were more seasoned vets, and you could kind of see what the long-term horizon out of Anderson looked like. It was cool to see that. It was refreshing to know that coming from Anderson, you can get into these pretty high-level positions not that far out. And orientation at Anderson is huge. It’s one of the times when they really go all out to make sure that you get all the resources you need. mbaMission: Great. How did the school’s career development office help you with your job search? AA: Parker [the Parker Career Management Center] helped a lot. Each individual student is assigned a career counselor or career advisor based on the field they want to go into. If you want to switch, you can formally, but there’s also a lot of just informal talking with different career counselors and advisors throughout the process. I had started with one, Amanda Durant, who worked mainly with students wanting to go into consulting or strategy-type roles. And she knew what she was talking about. She was strict; she demanded a lot of work. The mock interviews you had with her were more frightening than actual interviews with a lot of companies. mbaMission: That’s good, though. AA: Yeah, exactly, because she was so serious! She took it very seriously. It wasn’t shooting the s–t with her at all in our meetings. She would get to know you and your story and have fun with you that way, but once she turned her face to business mode, it was business mode. I think she retired or left to do private consulting last year, but there are those kinds of people throughout. So Dean Wyler, who I mentioned earlier, used to oversee Parker, and he revamped it a few years ago. They were in trouble as far as performance five or six years ago, and he did a really good job turning it around. He put Regina Regazzi in charge of it, and she’s also a career advisor for finance students. She does an awesome job and is probably more committed to making sure that her students succeed than almost anyone I’ve seen. When Regina’s students got big offers from companies, they would call her at whatever hour to fill her in, because she was so invested in much of the recruiting. She and the other advisors were by your side for the whole process. To me, it’s neat that I know almost all of the Parker team by name, because I could always leverage any of them, if needed. I regularly used Emily Taylor to find info on recent industry hiring trends, and when Chris Weber joined, I leveraged him a few times for insights on strategy roles. I was incredibly impressed by the Parker Career Center. If you want the time, you’ll get the face time. If you want them to stay until 8:00 at night and help you with stuff, they will. They go to a lot of events on campus, you see them outside of that as well, and you can really find the advisors almost anywhere. The Parker database is also a big thing. They do a really good job of posting all the jobs that come through formal on-campus recruiting. And they also do a really good job of interacting with alumni and having them post jobs at their companies that are available through less formal means. There are countless jobs you can apply for throughout your time at Anderson. They still have that for alumni as well. mbaMission: Nice. What resources or experiences did you have at Anderson that you believe helped prepare you for your current job? AA: I think a lot of it was just the breadth that you get at Anderson They force you through the core to take classes in everything, and then they give you such a wide breadth of electives that a lot of people just explore so many areas. And what I need to do my current job—it’s somewhat marketing, but it’s also strategy, it’s also analytics—I just need so much experience and exposure everywhere that I think that was the biggest thing, just being able to come here and talk accounting with people. Before Anderson, I would have had no idea what a balance sheet really looked like or understood the depth of a company doing $100-plus billion dollars a year in revenue. So being able to come in and have intelligent conversations about COGS [cost of goods sold] and other things like that was good. Coming out of business school, I don’t think you’re expected to be an expert in any one area unless you go into a very specific role, but you need to have experience and exposure in many different areas, and that’s what Anderson did. I didn’t become an expert in finance or marketing, but I got enough exposure to where I could hold my own and then become an expert in the company I work at. That was the big thing I got out of it. mbaMission: That makes sense. Switching gears, what would you say your favorite social events or extracurricular activities were at Anderson? AA: Too many. [Laughs.] They have so many awesome events that it’s hard to say. C4C is huge; I loved C4C, Challenge for Charity. It’s a cool thing to do. You bring in a lot of money for good causes, and at the same time, you get exposure to so many other schools and students and just have a heck of a time for a few days. And the football games are always awesome, the tailgates. Anderson probably throws the largest tailgates of any of the UCLA groups, even undergrads. Beach days were also awesome. Saturdays, you’d often hang out, go ride along the beach, play some beach volleyball, bike over to a happy hour, spend a few hours drinking, and then go out and get ready for the night. That was a cool thing at Anderson, being able to do that sort of thing the entire time you’re in the program. Going to the beach and surfing in the morning in December is hard to beat. What I’m trying to do now is figure out how to get back there! mbaMission: I’m sure. What do you think more people should know about Anderson that they probably don’t know? AA: I think, when you’re getting your MBA, what a lot of people probably don’t think about a lot is the lifestyle they’re going to live while they’re there. What I realized is that in your two years, you’re going to have a very similar education almost anywhere you go as far as the core classes. You’re going to take finance, you’re going to take marketing, you’re going to take statistics, and you’re going to have very similar faculty. We had teachers from GSB, from Wharton, from [Michigan] Ross; teachers who have taught everywhere came here. It’s not like you have a lower caliber of teachers at Anderson. You’re getting a very similar experience in that sense. But what is not similar, I think, is the access to the resources you have outside the school or even within the broader community. UCLA is an enormous world-class university, and you have access to all the other colleges on campus. You can take classes there, access the facilities, the resources, the city. Beyond that, it’s just the lifestyle you can live in LA—like I said, going to the beach in December. You have stresses that come with business school, and you don’t want to go home after class and have to deal with shoveling your sidewalk or trying to find somewhere to park in the snow. You want to go home and meet some friends out and have fun, and LA is just a phenomenal city for that. You have so many neighborhoods—Hollywood, downtown, Santa Monica, Venice—and they’re just such different areas that honestly, the opportunities are endless. There are 50 things I had on my to-do list that I didn’t get to while I was there. I mean, I had to go climb up to the Hollywood sign after I graduated because I didn’t have time before. mbaMission: This is why you want to go back! AA: Exactly! I still have a lot to do. It’s just a world-class city. That’s my point, you’re going to have a very similar experience in business school, from what I can tell from talking to students from other places, but it’s all the other ancillary benefits that LA provides. I would encourage people to go hang out on UCLA Anderson’s campus for a day or two, because you get a feel for the student body and how engaging they are and how genuine the entire community is. It’s a pretty cool experience. mbaMission: Thank you so much for giving us some great firsthand insight into the Anderson experience. I learned a lot. AA: Sure, I’m happy to help. The post B-School Insider Interview: Alumnus, UCLA Anderson, Class of 2015 appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
07 Mar 2016, 09:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Monday Morning Essay Tip: Pluralize Nouns Whenever Possible |
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One way to conserve words in your MBA application essays and short-answer responses is to pluralize nouns whenever possible. Singular words often require an article such as “a,” “an,” or “the.” These words can add unnecessarily to your word count, thereby cluttering your page without contributing to your argument or style. Consider the following example: “A manager with an MBA can ascend the corporate ladder faster than a manager who lacks an MBA.” (18 words) Now consider this version, in which many of the singular nouns have been pluralized: “Managers with MBAs can ascend the corporate ladder faster than managers without MBAs.”(13 words) As you can see, the same idea is presented in both sentences, but one sentence contains five fewer words than the other. Given that essays can include dozens or even hundreds of sentences, pluralizing wherever possible is helpful in meeting word count requirements and de-cluttering the text. The post Monday Morning Essay Tip: Pluralize Nouns Whenever Possible appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
08 Mar 2016, 08:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Mission Admission: Should I Seek a New Position Before Applying? |
Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday. Although the 2015–2016 MBA admissions season is largely behind us, the 2016–2017 season looms on the horizon. Many business school aspirants are already considering how they might enhance their candidacy. Candidates can take a variety of steps to accomplish this, from boosting their community and personal profiles, to pursuing additional classes, to reinvigorating relationships with potential recommenders. Some even consider seeking a new position in a different firm or industry—but is this a good idea? If you are contemplating such a move, the first thing to consider is your tenure at your current firm. If you have been with the company for less than one year, changing positions is generally unwise. MBA admissions committees tend to appreciate consistency and frown on what they perceive as opportunism. So, if you have had several positions in the past that you held for approximately one year or less, staying put now and proving your commitment may be a good idea. If, however, you are a long-serving employee and want to embark on a new path, a move may bolster your profile. The next question is whether you are considering a horizontal or a vertical move. If you would be gaining an increase in salary and responsibility, you would almost certainly be making a wise choice and would also be insulated from concerns about tenure. MBA admissions committees want to know that you are a rising star. So, if you can obtain a new role that involves greater responsibility in the next nine months, you should grab that opportunity. As we often tell candidates, “What is good for your career is almost always good for your MBA candidacy.” However, before you move on, you may also want to consider whether you will be burning bridges at your existing firm. Maintaining your references is important, because you will need them soon for your application(s). Further, you may want to ask yourself whether you have enough time to achieve something impressive at the new firm. If nine months is sufficient time to add to your professional or personal narrative, then a new position may be worth pursuing. However, if you are joining an organization that has a one-year sales cycle, for example, you may not have much to offer by application time, and you may want to think twice about moving. Finally, we advise candidates to not pander to MBA admissions committees. If you think that a consulting or banking position will impress the admissions committee but such a position is not part of your intended career path, shifting into one of these areas would be pointless. Your potential move should be consistent with your personal goals, not with what you think an admissions committee wants. The committees want authenticity and differentiated candidates instead of a cookie-cutter “type” of candidate from a specific field. The post Mission Admission: Should I Seek a New Position Before Applying? appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
09 Mar 2016, 09:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Professor Profiles: Peter L. Rodriguez, UVA Darden School of Business |
Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school. However, the educational experience you will have is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we focus on Peter L. Rodriguez from the University of Virginia (UVA) Darden School of Business. Peter L. Rodriguez is an expert in the areas of international business, trade, and economic development, with a focus on corruption. He has used his PhD in economics from Princeton University to study investing—co-editing the book Angel Investing in Latin America (Darden Business Publishing, 2005)—and he is currently Darden’s senior associate dean for degree programs and chief diversity officer as well as an associate professor of business administration. In 2009, Rodriguez received an award for outstanding teaching at Darden, and in 2007, he won the school’s John Colley Award, which recognizes those who perpetuate Darden’s tradition of close interactions between professors and students. He has written several cases for Darden on topics ranging from the recent economic difficulties in the United States, to financial challenges emerging in Vietnam, to the effects of corruption and the economic impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Because of his personal interest in business developments in Latin America and Africa, Rodriguez has both planned and participated in Global Business Experiences (courses in which students travel to countries outside the United States to explore the culture and business environment there firsthand for several weeks) taking place in those areas. Students with whom we spoke view Rodriguez, known to many as simply “P-Rod,” as a very caring professor who pays special attention to each student, asking about their families and remembering their concerns. One second year described him to us as “one of the most loved professors [at Darden].” And an alumnus with whom we spoke described Rodriguez as “very funny, very articulate, not dry” but added that “he asks tough questions.” This graduate also noted that Rodriguez is very patient with students, helping each to probe deeply for answers and thereby guiding them to deeper insights. “He fills the room with kinetic energy when he walks in,” said an alumna we interviewed. “He understands who gets it and who doesn’t.” For more information about UVA Darden and 15 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. The post Professor Profiles: Peter L. Rodriguez, UVA Darden School of Business appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
09 Mar 2016, 13:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: General Assembly Co-Founder Brad Hargreaves Explains His Latest Endeavor, Common |
 Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO at Common and Co-Founder at General Assembly Today, many aspiring MBAs and MBA graduates want to join start-ups or launch such companies themselves. Is entrepreneurship as exciting as it seems? Is it really for you? mbaMission Founder Jeremy Shinewald has teamed up with Venture for America and CBS Interactive to launch Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast. Each week, Shinewald interviews another entrepreneur so you can hear the gritty stories of their ups and downs on the road to success. Innovation comes naturally to Brad Hargreaves, who has co-founded several companies including the educational institution General Assembly. His latest endeavor is Common, which offers community-based housing on a month-to-month basis. In this podcast episode, Hargreaves discusses what is next for General Assembly and what Common is all about. Tune in to hear these highlights and more:
The post General Assembly Co-Founder Brad Hargreaves Explains His Latest Endeavor, Common appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
10 Mar 2016, 09:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Beyond the MBA Classroom: Family Life at UVA Darden |
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When you select an MBA program, you are not just choosing your learning environment but are also committing to becoming part of a community. Each Thursday, we offer a window into life “beyond the MBA classroom” at a top business school. The Darden Partners Association (DPA) at the University of Virginia (UVA) Darden School of Business sponsors social and outreach events for students’ significant others and children year-round, from walking groups and book clubs to movie nights and dinners, with the goal of helping these members of the Darden community get to know one another and more easily acclimate themselves to their new home and lifestyle. The DPA also organizes community service projects in Charlottesville, such as blood drives and fund-raisers for the local SPCA. It maintains a job list for current and incoming partners, supports international students in their adjustment to Charlottesville, and, through its family committee, plans events for children, helps parents find babysitters, organizes family-friendly social events, and serves as a general resource for parents. Students’ partners and families are integral parts of the Darden community because of the support they offer the students as well as the active role they have traditionally played in the Charlottesville community. Representatives from both the Office of Student Affairs and the Admissions Office told mbaMission that more than 50% of the students in Darden’s recent classes have been either married or in long-term committed relationships. Assistant Dean of MBA Admissions Sara Neher speculated that the number of these students is higher at Darden than at other business schools in part because the DPA is “incredibly active, committed, and fully involved in all aspects of the student experience” and also because “Charlottesville is so easy to live in, with a welcoming community and [low] unemployment.” One alumnus told mbaMission that he chose Darden over other schools in large part because of the school’s strong support for students’ partners, declaring, “They are welcome everywhere.” He made particular note of Family Day, a kind of open house for students’ partners, parents, and other visitors. The visitors attend and participate in class (a special case is used) and then enjoy a dean’s reception and barbecue. This allows partners to experience students’ daily life, meet their section mates, see their professors in action, and hear the dean’s views on the role of family and community at Darden. For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at Darden and 15 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. The post Beyond the MBA Classroom: Family Life at UVA Darden appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
10 Mar 2016, 13:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Diamonds in the Rough: Krannert for STEM Professionals |
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MBA applicants can get carried away with rankings. In this series, we profile amazing programs at business schools that are typically ranked outside the top 15. [img]https://www.mbamission.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Purdue-University’s-Krannert-School-of-Management-300x200.jpg[/img] As technical knowledge becomes increasingly relevant across diverse industries, many MBA programs seem to be vying to dominate the intersection of science and management education. Supplementing its global focus, Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management has developed a program specifically targeting students with a background in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In June 2014, Krannert launched a one-year, full-time MBA program for STEM professionals that was designed to bring management education to applicants who possess at least four years of work experience in a technical field. The specialized STEM program reflects, as Bloomberg Businessweek suggests, the growing role of STEM professionals in entrepreneurship, consulting, and managerial positions. The program’s curriculum entails a summer session and four modules that combine a business core and a wide selection of electives with STEM-related case studies and learning projects. The post Diamonds in the Rough: Krannert for STEM Professionals appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
11 Mar 2016, 09:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Friday Factoid: Program for Financial Studies at Columbia Business School |
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Already well known as a finance powerhouse, Columbia Business School (CBS) stepped up its finance game in 2010 with the establishment of the Program for Financial Studies. This umbrella initiative connects faculty who approach financial studies from a variety of disciplines with students, alumni, and external organizations. The program’s main goals are to support research, to enhance the CBS finance curriculum and related resources, and to create opportunities for the exchange of ideas between CBS students and faculty and members of the external finance community. Finance enthusiasts will enjoy the program’s case studies, including “The Norwegian Government Pension Fund: The Divestiture of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.,” written by Professor Andrew Ang, and “Don’t Be Evil: Google’s 2004 Dutch Auction Initial Public Offering,” written by the program’s director, Professor Laurie Hodrick. The post Friday Factoid: Program for Financial Studies at Columbia Business School appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
11 Mar 2016, 13:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: B-School Insider Interview: First-Year Student, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business |
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This first-year student at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business started the MBA program with a number of years of health care experience, having entered the industry soon after graduating from Vanderbilt University. Her enthusiasm for health care and desire to expand her career within the industry drew her to Fuqua’s Health Sector Management (HSM) program. mbaMission: Why did you decide to pursue an MBA in the first place? Fuqua First Year: I worked for a provider in the health industry for a long time. I started working in health care when I was really young, and I just wanted to work in a different health care sector. Right now, I’m recruiting for pharma and medical devices. So, basically I wanted to work in a different sector in the health care industry, and I really wanted to go back to California. Actually, I didn’t really think I would get into any MBA programs when I applied. I called a lot of the [MBA admissions] consulting companies, and they told me that I was really young. I was 24 when I entered Fuqua. I’m 25 now. A lot of the [MBA admissions] consulting companies said I should work for a year or two more first, but I went ahead and applied anyway. And I got into Fuqua, which was the only school I actually applied to, because I wasn’t sure if I would get in. I did early action, and now I’m in the HSM program. It’s a wonderful program. I don’t have any other experience to compare it to, but as someone who has quite a bit of health care experience—and coming from Nashville, which is a big health care area—I just think it’s been wonderful. And I really like all the professors in the program. mbaMission: That’s great. Did Fuqua have any other appeal to you beyond the HSM program, or was that really your primary focus? FFY: Honestly, tech is really big at Fuqua, so I also explored that for about two months, but I realized it wasn’t for me. And health care is really big at Fuqua, so it’s like consulting, tech, finance, all that stuff. So, it’s definitely not exclusively HSM. mbaMission: Right. Fuqua sends its graduates into a lot of different industries—we see that every year. How do you like living in Durham? FFY: Well, I don’t love it, because the city’s really small. But I know other people enjoy it. I live in a really nice apartment. Most of the Fuqua students live in either Station 9 or where I live, which is Berkshire Ninth. So the two apartment buildings are right next to each other. There’s a Harris Teeter [grocery store] between the two. It’s like a little community in this corner of Durham, and we see each other all the time. mbaMission: Are you close enough to campus to walk there, or do you have to drive? FFY: I drive. I guess, I think if I lived maybe five blocks closer, I might not. Most people drive, but there are people who take a bike. I don’t know anyone who walks. You definitely want a car if you go to Fuqua. It’s just easier. If you live in this Fuqua community, you could share rides and stuff, but if you have access to a car, it’s more beneficial. mbaMission: Sure. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve encountered while you’ve been at Fuqua? FFY: I didn’t know how busy it was going to be. People said, “You know, it’s crazy,” but until you experience it, you don’t really believe it. You have to be there. But it’s insanely busy. I don’t even notice the city much, because, especially the first semester, like last semester, we would often enter Fuqua at 7:00 a.m. and not leave until about 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. I mean, it’s a good kind of busy, and a part of it is intentional, by design. They do that to keep constantly challenging you. But we’re also busy with recruiting, academics, clubs, extracurricular activities. And you can do a lot of consulting projects here. I am doing consulting work for Duke Hospital. There’s a program called FCCP, basically the Fuqua Client Consulting Practicum. I didn’t do it myself, but if you join that, then you can consult for a local company or basically any company that wants Fuqua students to consult for them. I have a friend who was a consultant for Medtronic, so it doesn’t have to be a Durham company. They put you in a team, and you can do consulting for organizations like Duke Energy or Duke Recycle. So I didn’t do FCCP, but I was still able to consult through the Duke Hospital Learning Experience Program. You can consult directly for the hospital, and they only select seven students a semester. There’s just basically a lot of activities you’re involved in. It’s really crazy. mbaMission: One part of the Fuqua curriculum that isn’t always readily clear to candidates is the Global Institute (GI). Can you tell me a little more about that? FFY: Basically, you come to Fuqua, you move in, and it says that the official first day of class is July 29, but really, the GI is a whole semester; it’s basically the whole month of August. So, you take courses like “Leadership, Ethics, Organizations” and “Global Institutions and Environment.” These are mandatory classes. This is basically the first month that you’re going to be with your section. And all you do in that month is get acquainted with your CLEAD [Consequential Leadership, another mandatory component of the GI] team, discussing a lot what it means to be a leader, what’s ethical, a lot of kind of abstract concepts. If you’re from finance or something, you probably wouldn’t like it. I know people who were from very quantitative fields and didn’t enjoy it, because it was very “You should be this kind of leader; you should lead with this kind of mind-set; your organization should be like this.” It was those kinds of lessons, so some people didn’t really like it. But the real takeaway from that month of August is just getting used to your section and getting to know your CLEAD team. Because it’s the easiest semester out of all the semesters we have, there’s also lots of partying. I would say that’s been the only month so far where we could do well in school and still play pretty hard. And there’s no recruiting. mbaMission: That doesn’t start until September or October, right? FFY: Yeah, and also because the second years haven’t come back yet. So, there’s no recruiting, and so the month of August, for GI, is when you just get really acquainted. And during that month, you get to do things like volunteer for Durham Habitat [for Humanity]. They take you out to do a lot of team bonding. Like I said, the whole month is all about connecting to your section, connecting to your team, meeting people, without that extreme academic pressure. I mean, we worked in those two classes, but it was not extremely hard. mbaMission: That makes sense. What’s your impression so far of Fuqua’s core curriculum? FFY: Well, classes are two and half hours long. We get breaks, so it’s not too bad. I don’t think I’d say it’s either too hard or too easy. It’s all interesting to me, because I came from health care. They make us take classes like strategy and marketing, and I never had any formal education in those kinds of areas. The core curriculum, it’s good, but you’ll sometimes have bad classes—and by bad, I just mean maybe a professor didn’t lead the discussion very well. But in terms of difficulty, definitely quant classes are really hard, like decision modeling. Those classes can be very hard. The rest is manageable. I know people for whom it’s a challenge, and I know people who think it’s not that big of a deal. mbaMission: Have you done any traveling yet as part of your MBA experience, or do you plan on doing any traveling, either for a class or just for fun? FFY: Yeah, in the fall—you’ve probably heard about this—the Fuqua professional clubs organize a lot of Week in Cities trips. The reason I knew tech wasn’t for me was because I went to the Week in City in the Bay Area for the Tech Club. We visited companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Cisco, Intel, and all the people who received us were Fuqua alums. That’s how the club reaches out; they connect with Fuqua alumni at those companies, and they receive us, they give us a tour, they tell us what the internship program there is like, and that’s when I realized that tech wasn’t for me. But there’s a Week in City for health care, a Week in City for luxury and retail, like I say, for all the professional clubs. mbaMission: Do you think you’ll do any other traveling going forward? FFY: Right now, I’m doing a lot of traveling, but it’s all related to my second-round [internship] interviews. But once I get an offer with my first-choice company, what I’ll do is stay here in the fall to help the first years. But probably in the last part of my second year, I’m going to go study abroad in Japan. As far as other traveling you can do at Fuqua, lots of people do GATE [Global Academic Travel Experience courses]. Fuqua has lots of GATE programs. There’s one in China, one in South Africa. And this is unique, because it’s not school run, but all the students from Japan this year decided to host a Japan trek. So it’s a self-organized and -managed trip by the Japanese international students, where they’ll take a group of 20 students to Japan during spring break. mbaMission: Nice. How would you describe or characterize your Fuqua classmates? FFY: I want to say it’s connected to Team Fuqua, but there’s definitely a type of person that Fuqua admits. Basically when students interview [for a job] at Fuqua, people walk out of the interviews and say things like, “Hey, that interviewer is going to throw you a case” or “She’s going to ask you this question, so be prepared for it.” But at the other schools, the students don’t talk to each other; they’re like competitors. But at Fuqua, we’re very team oriented. In HSM, we are all recruiting with the same health care companies, but I’ve never felt like it was cutthroat or competitive. We definitely walk out of the interview and say, “Head’s up” about whatever happened. We’re more open to saying how it was; we’re not trying to keep secrets from each other. Basically, the type of student at Fuqua is very community oriented, very involved, very willing to help others. I have never reached out to anyone at Fuqua for help and been rejected, ever. And the first years, we reach out to second years who interned at our dream company to ask them what their experience was like. We seek lots of help from the second years. And everyone is very, very, very Team Fuqua. Even the alumni, as we go through recruiting—a lot of people who do informational interviews are alums. And I’ve never emailed someone and asked for information, and they said no. I even emailed this guy who is a very high-ranking VP [vice-president], and he still spared like 40 minutes to talk to me. It wasn’t just a yes-no kind of interview, either. He was very engaging and gave me lots of advice. So it’s not just the student body; even the alumni are very Team Fuqua oriented. mbaMission: That’s great. Have you had any particularly standout professors so far, anybody who has particularly impressed you? FFY: Yeah, I like David Riley. He teaches some of the health care classes. He’s really passionate about health care, and I’m really passionate about health care, so I never want to miss any part of his class. In fact, I have an interview next week that will make me miss the first half, and I’m kind of frustrated about that. He just knows a lot. He wrote articles that became law, health care law. He’s established, he consults to tons of pharma companies, and he’s just overall a great source of knowledge. mbaMission: Have you had any interaction with the dean? FFY: We see him at Fuqua Fridays when he’s not traveling the world. He’s a really nice man. We students are definitely closer to Russell [Morgan]. He’s our associate dean, and he’s around a lot more. I went through a really difficult experience my first semester, and my econ professor told me, “You need to go talk to Russell.” I literally walked up and got an appointment with him the next day, and he helped me through the experience, got me in touch with people who could support me, and helped me with some of the things I really needed help on. He’s wonderful. He’s very approachable. In fact, all the faculty are extremely approachable; they’re all helpful in that aspect. You can definitely walk in anytime and ask for help. mbaMission: That’s great. I’m sorry you went through that, but I’m glad somebody was there to help you. Are you part of any of the clubs at Fuqua? FFY: Yeah. You can join as many clubs as you want at Fuqua. There are two types of clubs: professional clubs and hobby clubs. So, professional clubs are like the consulting club, health care club, marketing club, entrepreneurial club, and the hobby clubs are like the outdoor activity club, culinary club, wine club—just whatever you’re interested in, there’s a club for it here. mbaMission: How do you have time to fit it all in with your studies? FFY: Well, that’s why we literally don’t leave Fuqua until about 11:00 p.m. sometimes! mbaMission: Sure. It still sounds like it could be a lot of fun. FFY: It is. mbaMission: Good. When people think about Duke, I think most people think basketball and sports. So, have you caught sports fever since you started the MBA program, or did you come to Fuqua as a sports fan already? FFY: Well, I didn’t care about sports at first, but once you come here, you have to care. I don’t really watch TV, to be honest, but the whole basketball and football thing at Duke, it’s very, very much a part of your life, and it’s actually quite fun. So, as someone who has been a nerd all her life, I think it would be hard to reject the sports aspect of life here, and it’s actually great. I don’t think there’s anyone here that would tell you, “Oh, basketball is not my thing.” Even if people don’t really like it, they still think it’s fun to be part of it. mbaMission: I see. What do you think are the best parts of Fuqua’s facilities? Or is there anything you’d like to change or think is missing? FFY: I think because we spend so much time at Fuqua, everything has just become normal for us, you know? Well, one thing is that they don’t serve dinner at Fuqua. That can be a pain. Last semester, there were company presentations at night, and the companies would always order food. So that’s how we got dinner. The clubs, too, if you have a club meeting, they’ll order pizza. Lots of people pack food, as well. You can also order your own pizza, or you can walk over to the undergrad side of campus where they serve dinner. I come back here to my apartment to eat. I mean, it would be nice if they served dinner, but there’s always something going on where they give us food, so it’s really not that big of a deal. But you definitely gain a lot of weight the first semester. mbaMission: Like the Fuqua 15 or something? FFY: Yeah. mbaMission: Interesting. Has the school’s career development office been helpful to you so far in your internship search? FFY: Yeah, they’re pretty helpful. Whatever you need help with, they’ll help with, whether it’s therapy for your stress, or someone to look at your resume or cover letter, or do a mock interview with you. The extensiveness of the career management center is very wide; they are very helpful. I have no real complaints, though I think there are maybe some management operation issues. Some of us think that the career center might be a little bit outdated in terms of understanding how certain companies operate, but I think a lot of it is a kind of black hole, too. But if you need to refine yourself as a candidate, they have all sort of things to help, like guest speakers, all types of career sessions. Depending on your industry, there is probably a person in the career center that specializes in that industry. I talked to the health care career specialist, and she helped me. You can go to her and just say, “I don’t know what company to apply to” or “I really want to work for this company” or “Do you know anyone who works with this company that doesn’t recruit at Fuqua?” They have decades of experience. mbaMission: Great. So, which social events or extracurricular activities have you really liked so far? FFY: Honestly, I really like Fuqua Fridays. It’s just a really great event where you can just sit down, eat, and share a beer with your professors. You can even share a beer with the dean if he’s there. It’s really fun. But I also like Fuqua Vision, which is basically a comedy and satire group, and they make fun of life at Fuqua. It’s a really good source of relief for us when we’re stressed. But a lot of things that I think of most are events that were organized by my section. So aside from the official Fuqua stuff, I’ve just really liked all the events that have to do with my section. It’s a lot of bonding, and they help us get to know each other better. mbaMission: What kind of social things do you do as a section? FFY: Well, we have a section holiday party. But mostly, we just text each other and say something like “Hey, does anyone feel like going to see such-and-such movie tonight? There’s a showing at 7:20. Message me if you’re interested.” Or people will say, “Hope to see you tonight at Tavern.” That’s a bar. Or, “A couple of us are going out. Come join us if you’re free.” Just little things like that. Not all of us have to get together, but a lot of us will let each other know what we’re doing. Even small things, like we also have like a section for dog lovers on GroupMeet , and they’ll be like, “I’m at X dog park right now. Feel free to join me.” And I have a dog, so I like that. Really just little things, like drinking, eating, or getting together with your dogs. Basically, the more inclusive your section is, the closer you are. mbaMission: Right. I’ll finish with one of our standard questions: what do you think more people should know about the Fuqua MBA program that they probably don’t know? FFY: Well, I know that living in Durham maybe sounds like a terrible idea to some people, but I would say that as someone who is still not in love with Durham, I honestly like living here, because Fuqua has such a wonderful community. If you come visit Fuqua, and you feel that you love the students and the professors and the community, don’t let Durham be any kind of deal breaker for you, because you can overcome that. You spend so much time with your Fuqua classmates and at school. I know international people who moved here from Tokyo and huge cities like San Francisco, and they still have a great time here because of how inclusive and wonderful the Fuqua community is. And aside from that, I was just thinking that fit is really important to Fuqua. That’s why we have second-year students interview prospective students, because ultimately, what they’re looking for is “Do I want you on my team? Can I see you at Fuqua Friday? Are you the type of person that will walk out of an interview and be willing to share your experience?” They’re looking for people who enjoy being in an inclusive community. mbaMission: Thank you. I really appreciate your taking the time to provide some insight into the Fuqua experience. FFY: Sure. Thank you. The post B-School Insider Interview: First-Year Student, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
12 Mar 2016, 09:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: I Must Have a Recommendation from My Supervisor |
The admissions committees often say they understand if an applicant does not have a recommendation from a supervisor, but do they really mean it? Even if they say it is okay, if everyone else has a supervisor writing, not having one would put you at a disadvantage, right? Wrong. We estimate that one of every five applicants has an issue with one of their current supervisors that prevents them from asking for a recommendation. Common issues include the following:
Thus, if you cannot ask your supervisor for his/her assistance, do not worry about your situation, but seek to remedy it. Start by considering your alternatives—a past employer, mentor, supplier, client, legal counsel, representative from an industry association, or anyone else who knows your work particularly well. Then, once you have made your alternate selection, briefly explain the nature of your situation and your relationship with this recommender in your optional essay. As long as you explain your choice, the admissions committee will understand your situation. The post MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: I Must Have a Recommendation from My Supervisor appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
13 Mar 2016, 07:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: GMAT Impact: The Process for Tackling Any Critical Reasoning Problem |
 With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense. I want to share our four-step Critical Reasoning (CR) process with you, a process that can be used on any CR problem. Here is the overall process: Step 1: Identify the question. Step 2: Deconstruct the argument. Step 3: State the goal. Step 4: Work from wrong to right. Those steps might sound obvious to some people and very vague to others. I will explain each in more detail, but I want to say first that each step is there for a very important reason, and each step has been split off from the others for a very important reason. You can find the full article on the Manhattan Prep blog, as well as additional articles that illustrate how to use this process with each of the various CR question types. Here are a few additional details for each step: Step 1: Identify the question. Use the question stem to identify the question. Each question type has certain characteristics; learn them. Step 2: Deconstruct the argument. Arguments can contain up to four main building blocks: premises, counter-premises, conclusions, and background. Every argument has premises, but that is the only component common to all. In addition, some arguments “contain” assumptions—that is, the assumptions are not written but can be implied based on the premises and conclusion. Step 3: State the goal. Each question type asks us to do a certain kind of reasoning; we need to make sure we know what it is. Each question type also has common error categories; remind yourself what they are, and you will be less likely to fall for them! Step 4: Work from wrong to right. This is just a fancy way of saying find and eliminate the wrong answers until only one answer is left. Your first focus is elimination; get rid of everything you know is wrong. Do not even ask yourself what might be the right answer until you have gone through all five answers once. Then compare any remaining, tempting answers. The post GMAT Impact: The Process for Tackling Any Critical Reasoning Problem appeared first on mbaMission - MBA Admissions Consulting. |
13 Mar 2016, 12:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: In Other News… The Best Online MBA Programs, Tips for Older Applicants, and a New Sustainable Business Center at NYU Stern |
 IE Business School campus, located in Madrid, Spain. The business school world is constantly buzzing with change and innovation. Each week, in addition to our regular news posts, we briefly touch on a few notable stories from this dynamic field in one roundup. Here is what caught our eye this week:
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Hi Generic [Bot],
Here are updates for you:
ANNOUNCEMENTS
 Wednesday, Apr 24, 2024 11:30am NY / 3:30pm London / 9pm Mumbai Watch earlier episodes of DI series below EP1: 6 Hardest Two-Part Analysis Questions EP2: 5 Hardest Graphical Interpretation Questions
Tuck at Dartmouth
AGSM at UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE
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