Jeanette Brown, Author at Clear Admit

Published: December 10, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: A Wharton Alum Takes Issue with Fellow Alum Donald Trump

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has continued to grab headlines in the past week, most recently for his call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." His comments have drawn strong reactions, including from opponents such as Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who said in an address to the media Tuesday, “We have no place for that kind of ignorance and tolerance and lack of understanding of what our country is about.” Trump’s supporters, too, have also been quite vocal, and his popularity in the polls continues. In a national telephone poll conducted December 4th through 10th by the New York Times/CBS News, seven in 10 voters likely to vote in the Republican primary felt Trump was well equipped to respond to the threat of terrorism, with four in 10 saying they were “very confident” in his response. In this category, Trump led all other candidates, both Democratic and Republican. Read more

Published: December 3, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: MIT Sloan Student Scrutinizes Her MBA Balance Sheet

Is the high cost of an MBA worth it? This question gets bandied around frequently, most often by skeptics on the sidelines who have never set foot in a business school classroom. This week in Fridays from the Frontline we are pleased to share a recent post from a current MIT Sloan MBA student who gives us her take on whether the significant funds she’s invested into her two years at Sloan was money well spent. Erica Zendell is a Sloan MBA who will graduate this spring and a self-proclaimed “bargain-hunter.” She wants to feel like she’s gotten value for her investment—be it when she buys a piece of clothing or commits six figures and two years to business school. Read more

Published: November 26, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: Kellogg First-Year Reflects on the Talent of Her Classmates

As those of us here in the United States attempt to work off hearty Thanksgiving meals, some are still reflecting on the things for which we're thankful. In that spirit, our Fridays from the Frontline post today comes from Nikita Sunilkumar, a first-year MBA student at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Sunilkumar, a California native who worked as a production engineer at Boeing before business school, entered Kellogg as part of a record-breaking class made up of 43 percent women. As she shares here, she took part in an eye-opening exercise as part of the school's Women's Business Association led by Kellogg Professor Victoria Medvec, one designed to help participants recognize and appreciate the remarkable talent of their classmates. Our thanks to Sunilkumar for sharing her thoughts—and for business schools across the globe working toward gender parity. Read more

Published: November 23, 2015

LiveWire Data Offers Insight into MIT Sloan, Stanford GSB Interview Invitations

In recent weeks, Clear Admit’s MBA LiveWire has continued to be on fire with submissions from applicants making their way through the Round 1 application process at top schools. We’ve received reports regarding a great many schools—including Columbia Business School, Oxford’s Said Business School, NYU Stern and Cornell’s Johnson School. For today, though, our data analysis will focus on MIT Sloan and Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), whose interview invitations and rejections have given scores of LiveWire participants cause for elation or despair. Read more

Published: November 19, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: An INSEAD Student in Asia Mourns for Paris, Holds Hope for the World

INSEAD student Edouard Chehade was not in Paris one week ago today. But he knows Paris well, having spent part of his MBA studying just southeast of the city in Fontainebleau on INSEAD’s Europe Campus. Today he is in Singapore on INSEAD’s Asia Campus, finishing up the final weeks of his MBA program. Paris, though, has been a topic of every moment’s discussion since the November 13th terrorist attacks that killed 129 and injured more than 350, he says. In the post that follows, Chehade mourns for the victims, those in Paris but also those who have survived or succumbed to similar events in Bombay, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Algeria, Pakistan and countless other countries. The remarkable diversity of the INSEAD class—where students represent more than 80 nationalities—means that he has friends who have lived in many of these very places. Read more

Published: November 12, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: Conquering FOMO at INSEAD

Watching LiveWire, we’ve seen lots of INSEAD interview action in the past few weeks, including this disappointed but determined post from an India applicant in Malta who didn’t get an invitation: “Spent all of summer in pursuit of INSEAD,” he or she wrote. “Heartbroken but not Fallen yet!!” Cue a collective “aww” in the Clear Admit office. Keep calm and stay positive! In today’s Fridays from the Frontline, we hear from someone who did make the cut at INSEAD only to arrive on campus and confront a challenge of a whole new sort: FOMO, or fear of missing out. Read more

Published: November 2, 2015

Clear Admit LiveWire Lights Up with Wharton Interview Invitations

Wharton interview invitations are rolling out as we speak—we’ve already received more than three dozen reports via the Clear Admit LiveWire. It’s too early for analysis, but let’s just say that there are quite a few 700+ GMAT scorers reporting rejection. Here’s what we know from past admissions cycles at Wharton. Historically, Wharton has typically interviewed roughly 40 percent of applicants to the MBA program, though this does vary depending on application volume. Selectivity has generally fallen between 14 percent and 19 percent in recent years, which suggests that you can assume a roughly one in three chance of admission if invited for an interview. Of course, these are all based on past application seasons, and Wharton could change things up at any point. Read more

Published: November 1, 2015

Darden Hosts Inaugural Diversity Week

Last week, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia hosted five full days of events, panels and workshops devoted to exploring the challenges and benefits of diversity in business. The Darden Student Association (DSA) and the Diversity Student Advisory Group (DSAG) helped launch this inaugural Darden Diversity Week as part of an effort to place discussion of diversity-related issues front and center within the Darden community. The idea for a week focused on diversity was first raised by Darden’s student liaisons from the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the representation of African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans in business schools and corporate management. The suggestion, coming on the heels of a year in which a range of events focused the nation’s attention on both race relations and marriage equality, was readily embraced by the DSA’s first-ever vice president of diversity, second-year MBA student Patricia Martin. Previously, the DSA had a single vice president for both diversity and international students, but in recognition of the fact that the needs of the two groups are different, the roles were broken apart this past year. Read more

Published: October 29, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: MBA Mama on Pitching as a Female Entrepreneur

This week in our Fridays from the Frontline series, we are delighted to have as our contributor Divinity Matovu, a first-year MBA student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Matovu, whose focus at Wharton is on entrepreneurial management and finance, also happens to be a mother of two and the co-founder and president of MBA Mama, an online platform where millennial moms can find the products, services, tools and inspiration they need to pursue an MBA. Her passion for start-ups (she’s launched four of her own) and women’s empowerment shines through in the following post, where she shares a recent experience she had pitching to an all-male panel as part of Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program (VIP). Her spirit and pluck are evident as well. Even amid everything else she’s doing, she finds time to blog regularly—check out her posts to learn more about some of her other passions, including technology, financial inclusion and African affairs. We’re grateful to Divinity for lending her voice and perspective to our series. Read more

Published: October 22, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: MBA Data Guru Analyzes Interview Acceptance Rates

This week, we’ve had the pleasure of connecting with Wayne Atwell, a second-year MBA student at NYU Stern School of Business, who is perhaps better known as the MBA Data Guru. In January 2014, while in the midst of applying to business school himself, he launched a website with that name after crunching numbers to figure out his own chances of getting into the various schools where he had applied. (Atwell is pictured above, far right, with his Stern block and their strategy professor, Sonia Marciano.) In using data to answer his own questions about the MBA application process, he realized he was also answering the questions of other MBA applicants, and so www.mbadataguru.com was born. As for why and how he’s kept updating it, even now amid the hectic pace of a full-time MBA program? “Mainly I like playing around with data,” he says. “I find it fun.” But he’s also gotten to chat with lots of MBA applicants, learned a bit about web development and managed to grow an audience, he adds. “Still, it’s more of a hobby than anything else." Read more

Published: October 18, 2015

Applicant Reports via LiveWire Shed Light on HBS, Chicago Booth Interview Invitations

Clear Admit’s MBA LiveWire has been ablaze with submissions over the past two weeks, prompting us to perform a little data analysis. Though we’ve been hearing from people who’ve applied to a range of schools, the greatest concentration of reports have involved Harvard Business School (HBS) and the University of Chicago Booth’s School of Business, each of which has been busy both issuing invitations to interview and “releasing” candidates from consideration. So what did we find when we charted the results? Let’s take a look at HBS first. Read more

Published: October 15, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: Duke / Fuqua Alum on How Team Fuqua is Central to Duke Culture

Happy Friday! We’re back again this week with another edition of Fridays From the Frontlines. This week we bring you Steven Ma, Duke / Fuqua Alum (Class of 2015). Prior to Fuqua, Steven graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Biology – not your traditional MBA applicant. When Steven made the leap into the MBA world, he found that the resources just weren’t there for him. His blog, From Bench to Board, aims to chronicle his experiences and learnings with the aim of helping those who are interested in earning an MBA without the Read more

Published: October 12, 2015

Judge Business School Alumnus and Faculty Member Develop Innovative Electric Vehicle Technology

This post has been republished in its entirety from its original source, metromba.com. Peter Hiscocks, senior faculty in management practice at Cambridge University Judge Business School, along with alumnus Erik Fairbarn, recently developed POD Point, a business that provides electric car charging stations in businesses, homes and public spaces. The innovative electric vehicle technology runs on a web or mobile app, which gives users a 15-minute window to cancel or continue the charge. The app platform replaces an old system that required users to scan a card into the station. Read more

Published: October 12, 2015

Xerox CEO and Chair Ursula Burns receives UCLA Anderson’s John Wooden Global Leadership Award

This post has been republished in its entirety from its original source, metromba.com. UCLA Anderson School of Business bestowed Xerox Corporation Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns with the 2015 John Wooden Global Leadership Award. The event took place at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles on October 6, 2015. Read more

Published: October 8, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: Kindergarten Teacher, with MBA from Ross, Pursues Lifelong Tech Dream

How does a kindergarten teacher with a liberal arts degree score an internship at Apple? Find out in this week’s edition of Fridays from the Frontline. Jeremy Schifeling, helped in part by an MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School, not only landed a marketing internship on Apple’s iOS team, he went on to work at several educational tech firms and at LinkedIn before founding his own company designed to help others from non-tech backgrounds break into the field. He contacted us and generously offered to share his story, complete with data revealing that there are three times as many non-tech job opportunities for MBAs at internet firms (in marketing, HR, business development, etc.) as there are positions for computer science (CS) majors and engineers. So if you're from a non-tech background and want to know how make the shift, this post's for you. As always, we welcome the contributions of other current MBA students and applicants, as well as alumni! Please email Jeanette or Marianne if you would like to add your voice to the mix. Many thanks to Jeremy for his great post! Read more

Published: October 1, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: MIT Sloan MBA Student, Veteran Discusses Humility and Success

It’s Friday, and once again we’re bringing you insights straight from current MBA applicants and students as part of our Fridays from the Frontline column. Our contributor this week, MIT Sloan School of Management second-year Brian Kirk (pictured above, second from left), knows his fair share about the frontline, both figurative and real, having served as a U.S. Navy submariner prior to business school. In the post that follows, he offers some incredible insights about humility and its impact on success, drawn both from his time at Sloan and his military service. Worth the read. Kirk and other leaders of the MIT Sloan Veterans Association just hosted Veteran's Ambassadors Day, a day of programming and activities for prospective MBA applicants from the armed forces. They are planning a second Ambassadors Day in the spring, so if you are an active duty service person or veteran considering business school, check it out. Read more

Published: September 17, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: Kellogg Second-Year Shares Advice on Making the Most of the First Year

Welcome back to Fridays from the Frontline, a weekly column where we'll feature guest MBA student and applicant bloggers, as well as original pieces that incorporate multiple perspectives from applicants, students and recent alumni on all things MBA. As always, we welcome your contributions! Please email Jeanette or Marianne if you would like to add your voice to the mix. Many thanks to this week's guest blogger, Rohan Rajiv from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. This post has been republished in its entirety from "Inside Perspective," a blog featuring contributions from the school's full-time MBA students. Kellogg Second-year student Rohan Rajiv blogs there once a week about important lessons he is learning at Kellogg. You can read more of his posts here. A few months ago, I wrote a letter to an incoming MBA student in an attempt to help incoming students prepare for their two years at school. I tried staying away from specific advice in that post, as the assumption was that the framework ought to work for everyone. Today, however, I’m going to dig into my first year process and provide specifics on how I spent my first year. Read more

Published: September 10, 2015

Clear Admit Gears Up to Bring Back Fridays from the Frontlines

After a summer-long hiatus as business school students toiled away at their internships and prospective MBA applicants crammed for the GMAT, we are gearing up for the return of Fridays from the Frontlines, Clear Admit’s popular weekly feature showcasing the voices of real, live MBA applicants, current business school students and recent MBA alums. We’ve always loved following the wisdom, humor, triumphs, and tribulations of the MBA blogosphere — and we want to make sure that we’re capturing all of it as we go into the 2015-2016 season. We’ve lined up a roster of bloggers whose posts we enjoy and think would be relevant to Clear Admit’s readers, and we’re reaching out to invite them to participate as periodic guest bloggers on our site. We’ll debut our first guest blog post in the in this space next week. Read more

Published: August 9, 2015

UT McCombs Launches New LinkedIn Recommendation Option for MBA Applicants

Beginning this application season, the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin will let MBA applicants use recommendations from their LinkedIn profiles in lieu of traditional letters submitted by recommenders directly to the school. This new option, which went live with the McCombs’s 2015-16 full-time MBA application late last week, is a first among leading business schools. Feedback from previous applicants and admissions consultants drove the change, says Rodrigo Malta, McCombs director of MBA admissions. “We gather input from applicants at the end of each season, and one of the main pain points we identified were letters of recommendation,” he says. Every school was doing it differently, requiring applicants to go to recommenders with multiple requests. “AIGAC (the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants) also gave us feedback about how painful the recommendation letter process was to both applicants and recommenders, even driving some applicants to draft and submit letters on behalf of their recommenders,” he continued. Read more

Published: August 5, 2015

LiveWire Data Offers Interesting Insights into Admissions Results

Clear Admit launched its MBA LiveWire feature in December 2014, giving applicants unique real-time insight into how their peers are faring in the admissions process at 33 leading MBA programs around the world. Perhaps most fun, LiveWire lets people share the good news when they are accepted to their target school. It also gives those still waiting to hear a heads up that decisions are rolling out. But more than that, seeing the self-reported GMAT scores and GPAs of other applicants also enables those who follow LiveWire to benchmark their own credentials against their peers. Now, with almost eight months of collected data, LiveWire also provides a means of analyzing prior admissions cycles. In fact, we have just undertaken the first analysis of LiveWire responses, and the scatterplot here showcases what we’ve found. Read more

Published: June 18, 2015

Fridays from the Frontline: Join the Ranks!

As we mentioned last week, we're on the lookout for MBA applicants, students, and recent grads who are blogging or tweeting their b-school experiences -- or who would like to start as correspondents for Clear Admit. If you don't already have a writing platform and feel daunted by the commitment of maintaining your own blog, writing as a correspondent for Clear Admit is a great way to share your insight and experience with the MBA community. We’ll ask our correspondents to weigh in on an admissions, b-school, or career-related topic 1-2 times per month, and will feature their thoughts on the Clear Admit blog (as well as links to any element of their online presence they wish to promote). And to show our appreciation at the end of the admissions cycle/academic year, we’ll reward our most active and insightful contributors with $200 Amazon.com gift cards. Read more

Published: June 11, 2015

Fridays From the Frontline: Call for Correspondents

Are you thinking about documenting your MBA application process, b-school studies, or post-grad adventures? Do you already maintain a blog about your business school experience or post-MBA career? Clear Admit wants to hear from you! We've always loved following the wisdom, humor, triumphs, and tribulations of the MBA blogosphere -- and we want to make sure that we're capturing all of it as we go into the 2015-2016 season. So, we're issuing a Call for Correspondents this week. If you maintain a blog or tweet about your MBA experiences, please let us know via the form below! We'll be sure to add you to the Clear Admit Mashup page and follow you on Twitter. And, in a new twist this year, we're seeking applicants, current students, and recent grads to serve as correspondents and regularly share their experiences directly with the Clear Admit audience. We'll ask our correspondents to weigh in on an admissions, school, or career-related topic 1-2 times per month, and will feature their thoughts on the Clear Admit blog (as well as links to any element of their online presence they wish to promote). To show our appreciation at the end of the admissions cycle/academic year, we'll reward our most insightful contributors with $200 Amazon.com gift cards. Interested? Just complete the form below, and we'll be in touch! Read more

Published: June 4, 2015

Fridays From the Frontline: Preparing Women for Future Board Opportunities

The following is a guest post from Amanda Schmid, a first-year student in Kellogg's Full-Time Two-Year MBA Program. The post was originally published on Kellogg's Full-Time MBA blog, the Inside Perspective. Amanda worked in hospitals in DC and Baltimore as a clinician and a department head before pursuing her MBA, and she hopes to play a strategic or general management role at a medical device company after graduation. Only 18% of S&P 500 boardrooms contain women. It will likely take 30 years for that number to grow to 30%. In order to continue supporting women in leadership, the Women’s Business Association (WBA)recently hosted a panel to hear how two prominent female executives navigated their careers to lead them to positions on several boards. Read more

Published: May 28, 2015

Fridays From the Frontline: Choices

Welcome back to Fridays From the Frontline, our weekly summation of happenings in the business school blogosphere. This week, MBA applicants, current students, and admissions bloggers have made important choices from a variety of different topics in the business school sphere, and life in general. Read more

Published: May 21, 2015

Fridays From the Frontline: Divergent Paths

The following is a guest post from Naija MBA Gal that was originally published on her blog. Naija MBA Gal is a consultant specializing in risk assurance at one of the big consulting firms, and she is planning to attend the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago in Fall 2015. You can follow Naija MBA Gal’s application journey on her blog. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Read more

Posts by Jeanette Brown

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