On Monday, May 1, Chicago Booth stated that businessman and philanthropist Ross Stevens, Ph.D. '96, had given the school's Ph.D. program $100 million to help push the boundaries of academic business research. The program will be called the Stevens Doctoral Program to honor Stevens.
People often decide to pursue an MBA without giving it much thought, but that's not a good idea. Before you start getting ready to apply, you should really think about why you want to get the degree and make sure it's the right choice for you. Here are five indicators that can help you decide if you're ready to apply to business school or not.
Have you ever woken up from a recurring nightmare in which you had to take an exam for which you hadn't studied? No one likes the feeling of not being prepared. And this worry takes over many parts of our professional lives. No one wants to be caught off guard in front of an MBA admissions committee, a current client or boss, or even a networking event. The answer is to be confident in all of these conversations and presentations. How? Preparedness. In this blog post, we'll talk about what you should do to get ready for a variety of common career scenarios.
Becoming a great manager is essential for becoming a great leader. Good managers not only extract great output from their employees, but they also relieve the executive team of most of the day-to-day operations, allowing them to focus on more tactical challenges. Leaders develop a vision, while managers develop goals and guide their teams toward shared goals connected to that vision. This blog post will go over five strategies to becoming a successful manager.
Fewer and shorter essays, increased gender equality, and the popularity of the GRE testing (instead of the GMAT) are just a few of the developments in MBA admissions that might be informative for today's applicants. The types of MBA applicants schools are looking for and what makes them stand out have undergone significant changes. In this blog post we talk about how business school applications have changed over the past ten years and how these patterns affect the way you should approach your MBA application today.
What is a decent GMAT score, and should you retake it? Have you taken the GMAT or GRE at least once but are unsure whether your score is competitive enough for top MBA schools? The solution, however, is not as simple. It totally depends on the school and the candidate. If you come from an overrepresented application pool a better GMAT score may be all you need to stand out from the crowd. However, if you're on the verge, consider the following five questions in this blog post.
People don't talk about Sloan as much as its elite counterparts. Nobody immediately thinks about it in terms of being a top 5 program until you start digging and realize, wow, this program is insanely good. Most importantly, because of its unique end-of-October deadline and equally unique two-round admissions process, we would wager that application quality on Sloan apps is far lower than on other top programs (which is a *massive* problem if you want to be admitted there). Candidates often don't even start on their Sloan apps until after the October 3-16 gauntlet of deadlines and then they race to finish because they fear waiting until the "last" round. Indeed, since today is October 4th, it's something of a "last call" for Sloan interest. If you want to be serious about getting into MIT, you had better get started - and that includes bringing on a consultant.
As an MBA admissions consultant, I have worked with a number of clients over the past 5 years. Invariably, the most common question I receive is "What are my chances of getting in?" Answering this question qualitatively requires years of admissions consulting experience with dozens and dozens of clients. Doing the question justice and providing the client with meaning insight requires several hours of examination. Even then, as the applicant matures and the application process begins, the applicant's "chances" can change remarkably.
However, there has to be some way of getting into the analytics of how MBA admissions committees view their applicant pool. I mean, Wharton is not going to take an applicant with a 480 GMAT, there is just no way. There has to be a range, cut-offs and some way to statistically examine applicant pools.
I searched high and low on the WWW for such a tool. I could find none in the GMAT/MBA space. What I found were mostly models that analyzed a few criteria from an applicant's POV. That is, these models looked at things like:
While these factors are important in the decision-making process, they do not necessarily view things from the admissions committee perspective.
With this in mind, I when out and created a model that analyzes an applicant's prospects of entering the top 25 U.S. business school programs from an admissions committee view. I developed this tool for Veritas Prep as part of my MBA admissions consulting responsibilities.
The explanation from the Veritas Prep website does a great job of explaining what function the tool serves:
"This tool was created to generate an optimal range of business schools for you. By "optimal," we mean that these are the highest-ranked schools to which you have a reasonable chance of getting accepted. While no model is perfect, especially in beta, you can use the range of schools at the bottom of this page as a way to start narrowing your choice of MBA programs."
"Please don’t take the model too seriously. Since it only utilizes a subset of data, it cannot be considered a comprehensive tool for all situations and applicant profiles. The admissions process is highly subjective, and no one model can serve as an "oracle" or "magic eight ball.""
Click here to access the Veritas Prep Business School Selector.
A significant number of my clients are from India (non-US citizen). In my consulting conversations with them, the one thing I bring up with them is their status as an over-represented applicant group. That is, there are a lot of applicants applying from India, probably more so than any other group. Applicants to business school are not necessarily going to be compared against the whole pool but rather a subset. Additionally, a majority of my clients are from the IT consulting and operations arena within India, further reducing their opportunities to distinguish themselves from the pack. While you many never hear an adcom talking about this phenomena, any grade, GMAT, work or extracurricular activity not up to snuff is a dealbreaker. The Indian undergraduate institution is of particular importance to the adcoms as well.
I used to be a Kaplan tutor and instructor. Now I occasionally tutor students individually. It’s been my experience that if your aptitude is “average+” and you want to score above a 700 you need about 30 hours of instruction and then about another 50-70 hours of studying on your own. This seems like a lot but to some of my students it has been a slam dunk way of scoring 700+ by studying close to 100+ hours.
Data from GMAT, the creators of the GMAT, bolster this positioning. 700+ scoring students study 114 hours according to GMAC themselves.
I would definitely start studying 3 months out. This means taking a class course or tutoring if you have the money. After the class is done I would recommend taking one practice CD test a week (Sunday Afternoons).
During the week, stay after work for 75 additional mins and take a verbal section or a math section on CD.
The class course should teach you how to approach each problem. The tests and CDs should teach you timing.
I taught the GMAT for about 3 years. In that time, I had the pleasure of teaching over 250 students. Along the way, I also had the privilege of helping a select few craft their admissions packages. Based on my experience and in order of importance, I present the following 8 factors I consider critical to getting into a top b-school:
