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.
You will need compelling recommendation letters to get admission to the top most competitive business schools. If you are enrolling for an MBA, you should get reference letters from your most supportive mentors. These letters aid the application process by making you seem more human. We'll outline ten tips in this blog to assist you in getting a stellar MBA recommendation letter.
The Wharton admissions committee wants the person who knows you the best at work – usually a direct supervisor – to attest to your skills, achievements, and qualities. They need that first-person POV brought to the table. Wharton wants to get the nuanced insight and real-world examples of how you perform with others.
Work on your MBA application resume last — within the last two or three weeks before the school deadline. Why? There are going to be things that you work on that come up at work, all recent updates you will need to capture and include in your resume. The resume is a living document that is constantly updated.
What happens if your current workplace does not support you going off to business school? If your current boss is unwilling to write you a letter of recommendation? Or you just can't ask them because it might jeopardize your current work situation? Well, this actually happens a lot. Luckily, we have five reasons and resolutions for this.
For one, it’s unethical. But even if you don’t care about that, you run the risk, of looking like a newb, as somebody who does not write a lot of recommendations. Secondly, you run the risk making your LOR's sound similar to each other. Thirdly, you run the risk of the LOR’s sounding very similar to your essays.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Rebecca Zucker , who is an executive coach and a founding Partner at Next Step Partners , speaks about how to not feel awkward sending a follow up email. Especially having to do it multiple times. Zucker mentions six tips to help you get the resonse you need.
Obviously, these are all gross estimates and generalizations, but it shakes out to about right and its easier to use 10% than “a percentage that is a LOT less than you think it is.” The bottom line is that most applicants assume a much higher level of importance, they spend far more time thinking and worrying about them, and they get far too involved in their production (the biggest issue of all). Let’s work through all three:
I tell my clients up front that they have to waive their right and that it is not really an option to not do so. Not waiving your right could tell the adcom that you don’t trust your recommenders. It could tell them that you are paranoid or overly anxious.
It could tell them that this applicant is a liability. What happens if he doesn’t get in? Is he going to go after his recommenders for throwing him under the bus? Is he going to create more headaches for all involved? Is the applicant going to create reputational risk for the school?
The adcom would rather just not deal with it.
A significant portion of my MBA admissions consulting applicants come to be with little to no extracurricular experience since their undergraduate days. While this is a problem that can be addressed, it can show a lack of proper planning over the long term. A lot of applicants don't think about the impact of their actions on their applicant competitiveness when the graduate from undergrad. To a certain extent, even I was the same way. What I like most about some of my clients is the the way some of them are way ahead of the game we call the MBA application process. Those that have been planning since day 1 to go back to b-school tend to be distinguishing yourself from your peers out of the gate and these habits show when constructing the business school application.
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.
As an MBA admissions consultant I often have to take a step back with my clients. Over the years I have learned a lot from my clients and have come to realize that the definitions of proper interview dress or attire varies by region, country and even culture.
This is the deal, and I dissuade anyone from thinking anything to the contrary:
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:
