Posts by Clear Admit

Interview with second year. More formal, little back and forth conversation until I was allowed to ask questions. Walk through the resume How did I choose my college/major/sport? Why MBA, Why SOM? What do you do for fun? What class did I sit in on during the visit/previous visit? What did I think? 5 minutes for questions for interviewer. Read more

Apply 1/4/11, Invite 3/17, Interview 3/29, Accepted 4/4! After a two and a half month excruciating wait I got a call from MIT asking me to interview. In fact, she made is sound like I had already been invited (email or something) and that I hadn’t responded (she was “hoping I was still interested in applying”). I’m in the DC area and I found out the only available dates were at an interview fair the next week where I’d be one of a lot of people interviewing or I could interview on the 29th, the final day of interviews for Read more

Pretty straight forward questions (info not present in the application) but not the most typical ones, so it was not completely a blind interview. List of interview questions: Tell me what did you do for fun in high school Why did you choose your undergraduate university What was your master thesis about? Why did you choose your first job and why did you leave What 3 words would your boss say if he was asked to qualify you Why YALE SOM Questions for me At the beginning the interviewer told me that it was going to take only 25 minutes, Read more

I interviewed with a member of the admissions committee, and although I was only allotted 30 minutes, it ended up to be almost an hour and a half. I know everyone is looking for the type of questions, which is really important in preparation, but the most important factors are really knowing your resume, motivations, why Kellogg, what about Kellogg, and being yourself. The interview started with the basic questions: walk me through your resume what are your short term and long term goals. Before my interview, I really spent a lot of time studying Kellogg and knowing the programs Read more

Roxanne Hori, associate dean for career management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, is the most recent participant in our continuing Career Services Director Q&A Series. Hori has been in her current role for the past 16 years, so she certainly has some perspective to share. Earlier in her career she worked in recruiting for a range of corporations, including a Chicago bank. She first came to Kellogg as a career coach, a position she held for about five years before returning to banking. But ultimately she came back to Kellogg to direct the Career Management Center, where she’s stayed ever since. Read more

Today’s GMAT tip comes from test prep firm ManhattanGMAT. In this article, they share helpful tips on how to solve critical reasoning problems that require you to evaluate a conclusion.  Read on to see what they have to say! This week, we’re going to tackle a harder GMATPrep critical reasoning question from the Evaluate A Conclusion category. Let’s start with the problem. Set your timer for 2 minutes! * ”Capuchin monkeys in Venezuela often rub a certain type of millipede into their fur. Secretions of these millipedes have been shown to contain two chemicals that are potent mosquito repellents, and mosquitoes carry parasites that debilitate the capuchins. The rubbing behavior is rare except during the rainy season, when mosquito populations are at their peak. Therefore, the monkeys probably rub the millipedes into their fur because doing so helps protect them against mosquitoes. “Which of the following would it be most useful to determine in order to evaluate the argument? “(A) Whether the two chemicals provide any protection for the millipedes against their own predators “(B) Whether the type of millipede used by the capuchin monkeys in Venezuela is found in other parts of the world “(C) Whether animals other than capuchins rub insects of any kind into their fur “(D) Whether the only time the millipedes are readily available to the capuchins is during the rainy season “(E) Whether secretions of any other insects accessible to the capuchins contain chemicals that repel mosquitoes” Read more

This week as part of our continuing Career Services Director Q&A Series, we touched down in Texas. Stacey Rudnick, director of MBA Career Services at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, took time to participate, and we’re so glad she did. Rudnick has been the MBA career services director at McCombs for almost seven years, and before that she worked as a senior associate in career services at her alma mater, Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Read more

Today’s GMAT tip comes from Veritas Prep.  In this article, they provide helpful advice on understanding the concept of remainders. Read on to see what they have to say! Unless you teach math, chances are that you haven’t used a remainder in years. Remainders in division are basically placeholders for kids who haven’t yet learned decimals or mixed numbers; as soon as you learn what to do with the remainder, you tend to never touch a remainder again…until of course you take the GMAT. Consider the problem 11/3. 3*3 is 9, but then there are 2 left over that will not divide evenly. So in this case, 11/3 = 3 remainder 2. Read more

This week we’re learning about career services at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. We had a great interview with Sheryle Dirks, associate dean of career management, who leads Fuqua’s Career Management Center (CMC). Dirks has been at Fuqua since 1998 and in her current role as associate dean since 2005. She came to career services from the MBA admissions world, having worked in MBA admissions in the Chicago area. “I loved the intermingling between the corporate world and the education world” that career services offered, she says, so when she landed a job in career management at Fuqua she was thrilled. Dirks manages a staff of 22 full-time career management officers as well as six contract coaches who work with Fuqua both locally and in areas where the school has a lot of alumni. The CMC provides career services to all of the degree programs that go through the business school, which include the full-time MBA program as well as three executive-style programs in which students continue to work while in school and a one-year degree program for slightly younger students.  Read more

We circled back recently to check in with an admissions director we hadn’t yet reconnected with as part of our Admissions Director Q&A Series – Rod Garcia of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Maybe it’s all the snow in Boston that gave him a little extra free time to take part. Whatever the case, we’re happy to have had a chance to catch up with him and think you’ll enjoy the interview that follows. An MIT Sloan veteran, Garcia has been at the school for the past 23 years and admissions director for the last 12. Before coming to MIT Sloan in 1988, he worked in admissions at the University of Chicago. Read more

Today’s GMAT Tip comes from our friends at Knewton.  In this post, they give helpful advice on how to use formal logic on the Critical Reasoning section of the GMAT.  Read on to see what they have to say! GMAT Critical Reasoning questions test your ability to use logic. In most cases this means making inferences, identifying details, and understanding arguments. Occasionally, however, you will have to apply formal logic to understand what a CR paragraph implies. Formal, or, classical logic, has its own set of rules, and questions that make use of it will try to trip you up with wrong answer choices that contradict those rules. Consider the example below: Studies have shown that a large percentage of car accidents are caused by aggressive driving. To help reduce the number of accidents and to promote traffic safety in general, insurance companies have begun to issue discounts to drivers who take defensive driving courses. Research shows that people who practice defensive driving are considerably less likely to get into a car accident. Therefore, the insurance company’s plan should help reduce the number of accidents. Read more

~ A CLEAR ADMIT EXCLUSIVE ~ Next up in our Career Services Director Q&A Series, we turn to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Here we reconnected with J.J. Cutler, who we first interviewed for our Admissions Director Q&A Series in February 2009. Since that interview, Cutler has been appointed deputy vice dean of admissions, financial aid and career management for Wharton, with direct oversight of the MBA Career Management Center. So it made sense to speak to him again in his new role for this series. A lifelong Philadelphia resident, Cutler has deep ties to the University of Pennsylvania, where he got both his undergraduate degree and his MBA. After receiving his MBA in 1997 from Wharton, he worked for a number of years in healthcare consumer goods and marketing, including time at ARAMARK as senior VP of marketing, seven years at Johnson & Johnson and most recently as the president of Lindi Skin, a start-up offering skin care products specifically designed for people with cancer. Read more

In the second installment of our Career Services Director Q&A Series, we connected with Pamela Mittman, assistant dean of career services and leadership development at NYU Stern School of Business. An alumna of NYU Stern’s full-time MBA program, Mittman brings both a student and alumni perspective to the role. Before joining Stern as an administrator more than 10 years ago, she worked in consulting and financial services. In her current role at NYU Stern, she oversees the recruiting process for all MBA students. Read more

~ A CLEAR ADMIT EXCLUSIVE ~ It’s a new year, and we’re launching a new series here at Clear Admit. To kick off 2011 we’ll be sharing our exclusive interviews with directors of career services centers at each of the top business schools around the globe. In this new series we have asked a range of questions designed to help prospective applicants get a fuller sense of the career services offerings at each MBA program. As with our Admissions Director Q&A Series, we have asked the same questions of each director in order to give applicants the ability to make direct school-to-school comparisons. We hope the interviews will help you learn what to expect when you get to campus, understand the relative strengths of each school’s career services centers, get to know a little about the directors themselves and think about what you can do before you even apply to help ensure that you have the most successful job search possible. In our debut interview, we speak with Regina Resnick, assistant dean and managing director of the Career Management Center (CMC) at Columbia Business School (CBS). Resnick has been at CBS since 1996 and has led the CMC since 1999. The role of the CMC has grown in Resnick’s decade plus at the school. Once serving just full-time MBA students, the center now provides services to Executive MBAs and MS students as well. Read more

Today’s GMAT Tip comes from our friends at Knewton.  In this post, they provide helpful hints on how to tackle particularly complex math problems.  Read on to see what they have to say! Here is a rather challenging GMAT math problem. Give it a shot: For every positive EVEN integer n, the function h(n) is defined to be the product of all the even integers from 2 to n, inclusive. If p is the smallest prime factor of h(100) + 1, then p is (A) between 2 and 10 (B) between 10 and 20 (C) between 20 and 30 (D) between 30 and 40 (E) greater than 40 So, where do you start? It is difficult to figure out how to approach a question like this one, since it’s a mix of so many different concepts: properties of even numbers, prime numbers, factors, and functions. No one wants to see a complex question like this on the GMAT, especially when you’re struggling to keep up your pace and finish the section on time. Read more