MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Rob Adams Announced as New UW Foster Entrepreneurship Center Director
For years the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship has integrated entrepreneurship into the very fabric of the University of Washington, particularly its Foster School of Business. Now, with Seattle angel investor, startup mentor, and former Cisco acquisitions manager Rob Adams as the next director, there are more great things to come. Adams succeeds Connie Bourassa-Shaw, who will be stepping down at the end of June to take her place as the part-time executive director of the Foster School’s new Master of Science in Entrepreneurship degree program.
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Owen Graduate School Renovating With Future in Mind
Earlier this month, speaking to 329 members of the Owen Graduate School of Business Class of 2017, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman recalled the recent past. A ‘93 Owen alum, Friedman fondly remembered her time as a student, dropping references to AOL floppy disks, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Meatloaf’s biggest hits. Beyond Friedman’s nostalgic flair, her commencement speech also emphasized how important innovation will be for Owen’s new MBAs.
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Admissions Director Soojin Kwon Shares the Skinny on Ross’s New Application Essays
Soojin Kwon, who leads MBA admissions at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, began her most recent Director’s Blog by suggesting that things are quiet on campus right now—only to reveal big news about planned changes to its approach to essay questions this year.
Soojin Kwon, Ross director of admissions
The two are connected, of course. It’s the relatively quiet time—when students jet off for global immersion courses around the world or gear up for summer internships every bit as far flung—that the Admission Committee can finally catch its breath, review its process, and really examine what’s working and where there might be opportunity to change things up a little.
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Fridays from the Frontline: Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone at HBS
Today we are pleased to share a recent post from the Harvard Business School (HBS) “MBA Voices” student blog, written by newly minted HBS MBA LaToya Marc. She walked across stage this week to receive her degree, culminating a busy two years in which she balanced the pressures of coursework, recruiting, and extensive involvement in student clubs with motherhood.
Marc served as co-president of the Student Association, which she says was her most rewarding experience while at HBS. (Click here to see her addressing her fellow classmates on Class Day with Libby L. Hoaglin, her Student Association co-president.) She also pushed through plenty of anxiety—like many of her fellow classmates, she confesses to worrying that she was an “admissions mistake”—to speak up in class and defend her points of view as part of HBS’s signature case method of learning.
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Oxford Saïd Expands New Global Leadership Council & Responsible Business Forum
Like many leading MBA programs in the global arena, the University of Oxford Saïd Business School is continually working to enhance its opportunities for students, professors, and alumni. Most recently, the school expanded its global reach with the establishment of a new Global Leadership Council, which has the goal of advancing the school’s business education model. In addition, the second annual Responsible Business Forum provided a platform for the next generation of business leaders to address social and environmental issues.
Both the council and the forum brought together global companies and educational stakeholders to support the development of mutually beneficial relationships.
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$20 Million Alumni Gift Expands Social Sector Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business has received a $20 million alumni gift that will expand social innovation and entrepreneurship research and programming, the school announced earlier this week. The gift comes from Tandean Rustandy, MBA’07—founder of a successful Indonesian ceramic tile manufacturing company—and the school’s Social Enterprise Initiative has been renamed the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation to reflect his generosity and its expanded mission.
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Bain, LinkedIn Partner to Help Get More Women to the Top in Business
Despite outnumbering male college graduates and making up 40 percent of the classes at several top MBA programs, women represent just 25.1 percent of senior managers and executives at S&P 500 companies and a paltry 4.4 percent of CEOs, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit organization promoting inclusive workplaces for women. What gives?
Leading consulting firm Bain & Company partnered with LinkedIn in late 2016 to answer that very question—and come up with recommendations for how to effect change. Together, Bain and LinkedIn conducted a survey of 8,400 men and women on LinkedIn who work for U.S. companies and hold at least a bachelor’s degree. They asked this group—which included everyone from entry-level employees to top leaders at firms spanning all major industries—about their career aspirations and how confident they felt in their ability to reach the executive level.
Analysis of the results revealed that though men and women have similar aspirations when they graduate from college, women’s aspirations and confidence dropped significantly a few years into their careers.
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Fridays from the Frontline: Johnson MBA Immersion Program Helps Build Confidence Through Skill Acquisition
A hallmark of the Johnson Graduate School of Management, which is part of the larger Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, is its intensive immersion program. In the spring of their first year, Johnson MBA students take part in a hands-on semester of integrated course and field work focused on a particular industry or functional role. Johnson currently offers seven immersions—in Capital Markets and Asset Management, Investment Banking, Managerial Finance, Strategic Operations, Strategic Marketing, Digital Technology, and Sustainable Global Enterprise—as well as a Customized Immersion that allows students to create their own intensive courses of study.
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Is Trump Rhetoric Driving Prospective International Business School Students to Canada?
Graduate management education has become increasingly global, but fewer prospective business school students from outside the United States cite America as their most preferred study destination than have in the past, according to a recent report from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). Anti-immigrant rhetoric and uncertainty around potential changes to student and work visas—coupled with growing numbers of high-quality programs in other parts of the world—have driven the decreased appeal of U.S. programs, GMAC’s data suggests.
More prospective students than ever—nearly three in five (59 percent)—intend to apply to programs outside of their country of residence, according to the 2017 mba.com Prospective Student Survey Report, released this week by GMAC. That’s up from 44 percent in 2009. Those looking beyond their own country’s borders do so in pursuit of a higher-quality education (says 63 percent of respondents), better odds of securing international employment (58 percent), and to build an international network (51 percent). And a third of candidates (34 percent) who prefer to study outside their country of citizenship say they also hope to land a job in the country where they go to school.
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Business School Whisperer Edward Snyder to Take Sabbatical from Yale SOM
Yale School of Management (SOM) Dean Edward Snyder today announced his plans to take a sabbatical starting August 1, 2017, the school reports. Though he will continue to work on strategic projects, he will step away from daily management responsibilities. Anjani Jain, who is currently senior associate dean for the MBA program, will serve as acting dean.
Yale SOM Dean Edward Snyder
Snyder has been at the helm at Yale SOM since 2011, having been reappointed to a second five-year term in January 2016. In announcing his reappointment, Yale University President Peter Salovey praised Snyder for the impressive gains the school had already made under his leadership. “We have seen the School of Management flourish along many dimensions—notably among them, the spectacular new Edward P. Evans Hall; the strategic expansion of the school’s programs, both degree and non-degree; the opening of Yale Center Beijing, which is managed by SOM on behalf of the university; and the development of a strong SOM team, internally and externally,” Salovey said in a statement.
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Are Specialized Master’s Programs Cannibalizing MBA Programs?
Business schools have been launching increasing numbers of non-MBA business master’s degrees—but not without worry that these very offerings could be gobbling up prospective applicants to their MBA programs. Responding to these concerns among its member schools, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) added new questions to its 2017 mba.com Prospective Students Survey to find out. Based on analysis released yesterday of responses from more than 11,000 individuals who registered on mba.com between February and December 2016, schools may be able to breathe a sigh of relief. “We have heard schools asking, ‘Are we cannibalizing our
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Darden Adds New August Deadline for Future Year Admissions MBA Program
The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is offering college seniors a rare second chance to make a first impression—announcing this week that it has added an August 1st deadline for its Future Year Admissions MBA Program. The program, first announced last summer, is geared toward undergraduate students in their final year of study or students who have gone on directly from college into a fifth-year master’s program. It originally featured a single May 1st deadline, but Katherine Alford, who leads admissions for the new program, shared in a video yesterday that
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7 Continents, 7 Marathons, 1 Student at Georgetown McDonough
Finding balance in your life during an MBA program can be a challenge, which makes time management is one of the most important skills for MBA candidates and students to develop. It’s difficult enough to attend classes and complete assignments, and most students also juggle club involvement, competitions, family, and leisure activities. And then there are students like Nick Stukel, an MD/MBA ’18 student at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Nick Stukel Not only does Stukel manage his MBA program and personal life, he also balances medical school, running marathons, and heading his nonprofit
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Fridays from the Frontline: 5 Things I Learned About Succeeding in Silicon Valley as a Woman
Today’s post comes to us from Nancy Hoque, an evening & weekend MBA student at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. A former solutions architect designing mission-critical communications for the U.S. military, Hoque is also founder of a modest scarf fashion startup for Muslim women. At Haas, she’s played an active role, serving as vice president of Haas Tech Club and the Women in Leadership Club, as well as a Haas Lean-In Ambassador. She’ll spend her summer working in product marketing management for next-generation cyber security at Symantec. Longer term, she hopes her MBA will prepare her for a leadership role
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Wharton’s Mother’s Day Graduation Is Both Fitting and Bittersweet for One MBA Mom
That graduation for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School MBA Class of 2017 falls on Mother’s Day could not be more poignant for impending graduate Divinity Matovu. Her path to business school—and her journey while there—has been indelibly marked both by her own mother and by being a mother herself.
A Wisconsin native who studied political science and African-American studies as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California (USC), hers was far from the traditional route to Wharton. For starters, she is a first-generation college graduate, the daughter of a truck-driving father and a machinist mom. That said, her mom’s entrepreneurial instincts ran deep—and their examples lodged firm in her daughter.
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The MBA Rankings Debate
As reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal, deans and research faculty at more than 20 business schools are urging their peers at other schools to refuse to participate in academic rankings published by leading media outlets such as Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, and the Economist.
“Rather than ‘acquiesce to methods of comparison we know to be fundamentally misleading,’ the administrators are urging their peers at other schools to stop participating in a process they say rates programs on an overly narrow set of criteria,” read the Journal article, published May 9th.
Deans and faculty from USC Marshall School of Business, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, and OSU Fisher College of Business are among those protesting the approaches used by media outlets to aggregate multiple factors into a single ordinal rank—and they are airing their grievances in the form of a research paper scheduled for publication in the May issue of Decision Sciences Journal.
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Stanford Seed Program Builds on African Success, Expands to India
Like many children in Nigeria, Femi Oye grew up looking on as his grandmother prepared food for his family. Like many women in Nigeria, tragically, Oye’s grandmother was diagnosed with respiratory problems—the result of indoor air pollution caused by the fumes created as she cooked. Mamma Kike, as Oye called her, died as a result. But thanks to her grandson’s entrepreneurial spirit and Stanford Seed—a project of the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB)—millions of others have been spared a similar fate. Losing his grandmother gave Oye the resolve to create a
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NYU Stern Launches Two New One-Year MBAs: Tech and Fashion & Luxury
INSEAD, watch out. New York University Stern School of Business is getting into the one-year MBA game—and leveraging its New York City location in a major way. Stern announced yesterday that it will launch two new May-to-May MBA programs, one in tech and a second in fashion and luxury. In just 12 months, students in these programs will complete a foundational business core, a specialty area core, and electives. Along the way, they will work on real-life business projects for companies in tech or fashion and luxury respectively, gaining the experience
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Smith School CLIC Lunch and Learn Series Promotes Experiential Learning
Learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom, especially in MBA programs. In fact, it’s the outside learning experiences that can be most valuable for many MBA students and graduates.
Most full-time MBA programs organize events, clubs, competitions and other activities to provide their students with an opportunity to apply and refine the skills and knowledge they’ve acquired in the classroom. Business problems aren’t typically cookie-cutter, so it’s in students’ best interest to attend schools that foster creativity, flexibility, and teamwork.
Krishna Erramilli, associate dean at Illinois Tech’s Stuart School of Business, had this to say to the Chicago Tribune. “Business problems have become a lot more unprecedented, a lot more complex. To train our students to be successful in the 21st century, they must be able to go into a company, look at that problem and analyze the problem from multiple functional perspectives.”
That concept is just one of the reasons behind the Center for Leadership, Innovation and Change (CLIC) at the University of Maryland R.H. Smith School of Business.
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Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship Debuts Updated Business Plan Competition—Twine Takes Top Honors
Millennials have developed something of a reputation as job-hoppers—sticking it out for just a year or two with one employer before exploring a new opportunity somewhere else. A 2016 LinkedIn survey bore this out, revealing that the number of companies people worked for in the five years after graduating from college has nearly doubled over the past 20 years. Not only that, the number of companies people work for five to 10 years after graduating has been on the rise as well. One reason could be a lack of engagement at work. A 2016 Gallup
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Cambridge Judge MBAs Create New Energy Startups
The energy landscape is changing. Fossil fuels are on their way out as half of global R&D in the energy field is now devoted to developing low carbon alternatives such as solar and wind. The good news is that besides helping the environment, this changing landscape also opens up many unique business opportunities. That’s why schools such as the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School are helping students explore possible solutions with new energy startups.
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Tuck Taps Veteran Stanford GSB Admissions Director Luke Anthony Peña to Head Its Admissions Team
Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business has filled the void at the head of its MBA admissions team, naming Luke Anthony Peña as its new executive director of admissions and financial aid, the school announced today. Peña comes to Tuck from Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), where he has worked for the past five years, first as associate director and ultimately as director of MBA admissions. He succeeds Dawna Clarke, who led Tuck admissions for 11 years before stepping down in late 2016 to start her own admissions consulting firm.
Peña’s appointment culminates a comprehensive three-month search that drew many highly-qualified candidates, according to Tuck Dean Matthew Slaughter. In particular, the school sought someone who could help attract talented candidates for whom Tuck’s mission of “educating tomorrow’s wise leaders” spoke the loudest. “Luke’s expertise in MBA admissions—together with his wonderful warmth and creativity—will ensure Tuck is successful in welcoming even more of those students into our community,” Slaughter said in a statement.
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Summer Before Business School: When and How to Quit Your Job? Then What?
“I quit!” How many of us have fantasized about saying those two words to a boss at some point in our career, turning with a flourish and marching out the door, never looking back? While that kind of dramatic exit could offer a certain kind of short-term satisfaction, it’s perhaps not the best way to leave a job to head off to business school.
So what’s a better way to let your employer know that your days at the company are numbered? Just how long before business school starts should you plan to make your exit? And what’s the best way to fill the time before you start? For those heading to campus in the fall, these questions are top of mind right now. To get some answers, we checked in with some current MBA students and recent grads to see what they did—and whether they’d do the same if they had it to do over.
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HBS Admissions Director Shares His Perspective on HBS Financial Aid
Chad Losee, managing director of admissions and financial aid at Harvard Business School (HBS), recently took to his Director’s Blog to talk about how financial aid works at the school. The impetus for the post, he wrote, was having the night before attended this year’s “Fellowship Dinner,” and annual affair that brings together current students who have received need-based aid with the donors who make it possible. “It was an impactful evening (!) and it drove home a few points for me about how financial aid works at HBS that I thought I’d share,” read
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