May 18th, 2012
The Wall Street Journal’s Melissa Korn reported today that, following three years of declining application volume, some business schools are returning to pre-Great Recession levels. But then again, many others are not. So, on the one hand:
• Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management: applications for its full-time MBA climbed 16% this year over last, to ~2,100 this year, approaching an all-time volume peak.
• Penn State Smeal College of Business saw a 14% application volume increase over last year.
• Boston’s Simmons School of Management has enjoyed a 23% increase through mid-May.
But, on the other:
• Application volume at Stanford Graduate School …
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May 16th, 2012
The Latin American business magazine América Economía has released its latest ranking of business schools outside of Latin America. Given that the criteria for inclusion included their effectiveness and relevance for Latin American students, it should be no surprise that three Hispanophone business schools made the magazine’s top 10. Schools like Wharton, Booth, MIT, and INSEAD appear nowhere in the top 33 because they, apparently, did not share the requested data on their “specific appeal” to Latin American applicants. It is, therefore, a most incomplete ranking.
Here, at any rate, are the top 10:
1. Harvard Business School
2. Stanford Graduate School of …
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May 15th, 2012
Celebrated Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen recently drew an intriguing and, for some, provocative parallel between HBS’s case method and the theological philosophy informing Dr. Christensen’s own faith, the Church of Latter-Day Saints:
“If this HBS case method [which teaches students to ask 'What great question yielded that answer?'] took a religious form, it would look a lot like Mormonism. Our founding prophet organized the LDS Church around answers to questions that he asked of God…. The reason why much of Christianity went off the rails in the Middle Ages is that their leaders concluded that God had already …
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May 14th, 2012
The ‘career progress’ section is the section in longer (750+-word) goals essays where you provide the context for your goals statement (the why behind the what) by talking about how you have gotten to your current decision to pursue an MBA. It can be integrated with or used to answer questions like (a) why an MBA now and (b) why are your goals meaningful to you. I am assuming here what ideally will be true: that your post-MBA goals, even if not directly tested in your current life, can be connected to something you have experienced in your career or …
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May 10th, 2012
CASE STUDY: The Boring Becomes Exciting
Ankur was an Indian male with the usual profile: after graduating from a top-tier Indian engineering college he’d earned his technical master’s at a U.S. university and then joined a major technology firm, where because of the long gestation periods of his firm’s products, he had risen no higher than R&D software engineer. Ankur’s GMAT was high, his par-for-the-course extracurriculars showed no unusual leadership, and in conversation diffidence was dominant note. To say Ankur was a typical applicant, in other words, would be the understatement of all time: he was the living, breathing apotheosis of …
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May 8th, 2012
Goals essays typically involve three key sections (not necessarily in this order):
• Your professional experience or career progress: the broad trajectory (including any evidence of ‘fast-track’ career pace), inflection points, and goal-shaping experiences of your career thus far (not a blow-by-blow walk-through of your résumé).
• Your career plans (short- and long-term goals).
• Your reasons for needing an MBA (briefly) and in particular one from this school (aka ‘Why Our School?’).
The order of these sections will vary depending on the wording of the school’s goal essay prompt and the particular tack you decide to take in responding to it. Whichever structure …
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May 5th, 2012
London Business School is feeling the positive effects of the Arab Spring, at least in terms of Egyptian applicants heading to LBS’s Dubai campus (opened in 2007). A total of 113 students enrolled at LBS Dubai in 2011-12, the most in the past three years. Of these, five were from Cairo, up from zero four years before. Denise Johnsen, Senior Recruitment Manager at LBS Dubai, told Gulf News: “We’ve not been affected by the Arab Spring, per se, but have seen increasing number of student commuters based in Cairo. Upon interview, the candidates, mainly entrepreneurs, saw the coming business potential …
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May 4th, 2012
The EMBA program at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has experienced a 33% increase in applicants from the health care industry over last year, according to Politico.com. The reasons these applicants are giving is unambiguous: the industry is dysfunctional. Jeremy Macdonald, director of marketing and recruitment for MIT’s Executive MBA Program put it this way: “The health care guys seem to be saying, we need to turn to other industries. We need to look to business schools, which are doing research on how industries evolved, so we can be proactive about it. People started …
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May 2nd, 2012
The specific focus of your post-MBA goals colors almost every aspect of your application—from school selection (based on goals-relevant study tracks and courses, clubs and extracurricular events geared to your industry, number and quality of organizations recruiting for your industry, etc.) to the content of your non-goals essays to the guidelines you provide recommenders. For this reason, you should begin work on a basic goals essay very early in your application process.
That means figuring out what your post-MBA goals are. If you’re unsure (for example, because you hate your current career but haven’t worked out yet what else to do), …
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May 1st, 2012
“We have to move our people [global professional talent] from the west to the east and we have to make it easier. We have to pressure China and India to be as open to western people as westerners have been to Indian and Chinese immigrants.”
—Nirmalya Kumar, Professor of Marketing at London Business School, during ‘The Emergence of Growth Economies and Corporate Giants’, his presentation at Dubai International Financial Centre’s Conference and Exhibition Centre.
Source: “India and China the next destination for talent from the west,” Business Intelligence Middle East (www.bi-me.com), May 1, 2012.
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April 30th, 2012
Last September, the University of California Berkeley’s Haas Alumni Relations department conducted an online survey to determine asked how alums “feel about the school” and the alumni network itself. According to CalBusiness, this is what they learned:
• 90% of respondents are “extremely likely” to recommend Haas to a friend.
• 80% agree that California state funding cuts make alumni support more important than ever.
• 72% have a “strong emotional connection” to Haas.
Less encouraging were these findings:
• 58% were “neutral” about the quality of Haas’s alumni career services and support.
• 56% thought the Alumni Relations Office …
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April 28th, 2012
“Physicians have not gotten poorer over the last decade. But more and more you’re witnessing physicians who feel they could have done better if they had done something different.”
—Howard Forman, Yale School of Management professor, commenting on results of a recent Medscape/WebMD survey of 24,000 doctors representing 25 specialties. Which of these specialties are highest and lowest paying? According to Medscape:
Highest paid:
Radiology: $315,000
Orthopedics: $315,000
Cardiology: $314,000
Anesthesiology: $309,000
Urology: $309,000
Lowest paid:
Pediatrics: $156,000
Family medicine: $158,000
Internal medicine: $165,000
Diabetes/endocrinology: $168,000
Psychiatry: $170,000
The good news: both the number of medical schools in the United States and the number of med school applicants are growing.
Source: “Why Do So …
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April 27th, 2012
“Schools provide ‘reliability and an effort-reward-feedback structure,’ [Andrew Simmons, director of Brown University’s CareerLAB] said. Therefore, paths that are structured — professional schools, finance and consulting jobs and Teach for America, for example — are enticing to students, he said, because these options provide a familiar system in which effort and achievement meet rewards. These positions help students continue the familiar feedback loop of tangible rewards for achievement — except in the job market, rewards come in the form of offers rather than As.”
—”Looking ahead from inside the Ivy gates,” Brown Daily Herald, by Miriam Furst and Mathias Heller, April …
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April 26th, 2012
“The most important inputs to answer this question are a self-assessment of your risk profile and an evaluation if that profile is in alignment with your professional goals. The irony is despite the fact that MBA programs ask applicants to reveal these goals, the MBA degree may be most helpful for those whose professional goals remain unclear.”
—Dinesh Moorjani, founder/CEO of Hatch Labs (and Harvard MBA):
Source: “Is an MBA worth it for the entrepreneur?” CNN, April 24, 2012.
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April 24th, 2012
The future of admissions interviewing may be upon us. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) has rolled out a new application, LikeLive (formerly MyCollegeI), that promises to de-complicate the admissions interview process. LikeLive bills itself as “a digital space for this new generation of tech-savvy applicants to post interviews that would allow them to be ‘real and engaging,’ yet simple enough for busy colleges to easily access them.” Run by a team led by Bill Barnett, a veteran of the communications, advertising, and entertainment industry, LikeLive enables applicants to upload (at no cost) up to four-minute-long videos in a variety of …
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