MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Published: August 16, 2016
Wharton, HBS, Kellogg Class of 2018 Profiles Reveal Subtle, Interesting Shifts
Despite its continuing rise in recent years in terms of average GMAT scores—considered an all-important metric in certain annual rankings of schools—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School back slid just a hair this year, according to its Class of 2018 Profile, released today. After a meteoric rise of 14 points since 2012 to 732 last year—placing it second only to Stanford Graduate School of Business—Wharton this year slipped to a mean GMAT score of 731. The range of GMAT scores the school accepted this year also widened, encompassing everything between 570 to 780, as compared to last
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Published: August 16, 2016
Foster School MBA Offers Outstanding Value
There’s no reason a top MBA program can’t be affordable. While the average MBA student debt exceeds $100,000 for many top-ranked schools, that’s not the case at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. MBA graduates from the Foster School can expect just $35,104 in debt; that’s over $3,000 less than last year. And that lower debt doesn’t mean less opportunity. Foster grads have one of the highest job placement rates and highest salaries, averaging 95.6% in employment and $118,405 in earnings. The reason for the Foster School’s affordability is because the school has been able to offer more
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Published: August 15, 2016
Top MBA Recruiters: Walt Disney Co.
When the Most Valuable Player in the Super Bowl gets carried off the field in victory and glory, the sideline reporter always asks, “You and your teammates just won the Super Bowl, what are you going to do next?”
The athlete replies with the same classic phrase each year: “I’m going to Disneyland!”
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Published: August 14, 2016
Real Humans of MBA Admissions: Shari Hubert of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business
Shari Hubert knows MBA admissions from both sides, having successfully navigated the process as a candidate herself, securing a spot in the Harvard Business School (HBS) Class of 2000. Leading MBA admissions at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business since 2013, she’s now on the other side, getting to know current applicants and trying to determine which of them bring the characteristics and experience that best fit with the values of the school. In keeping with our Real Humans of MBA Admissions series, Hubert shares below some of what makes her who she is. If you are applying
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Published: August 10, 2016
Career Services Director Q&A: Liza Kirkpatrick of Kellogg’s Career Management Center
Liza Kirkpatrick, director of full-time MBA programs for the Career Management Center at the Kellogg School of Management, has a long career in recruiting. Before joining Kellogg, she spent almost a decade with a staffing firm, helping to grow it from 12 people to five different offices in Chicago. When she came to Kellogg in 2008, she immediately had to prove her worth in a down market. Since then, she has held several different positions within career services but has always remained focused on student coaching, with oversight of the employer relations team, the coaching team and the operations team.
In the interview that follows, she unpacks the recruiting process at Kellogg, shares some of the shifts she’s seeing in terms of employer hiring and student aspirations and stresses the importance of thinking about your career goals before arriving on campus.
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Published: August 9, 2016
Johnson’s New Dean Steps Excitedly into Uncharted Territory at Cornell’s College of Business
As we reported here, Cornell’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management appointed a new dean in early July, part of a larger reorganization that will integrate Johnson, the School of Hotel Administration and the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. Falling under the heading of the Cornell College of Business, the union promises a wider range of courses for students, enhanced abilities to draw top recruiters and faculty and greater efficiencies and depth in specific fields. We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Johnson Dean Mark Nelson
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Published: August 8, 2016
Published: August 7, 2016
Real Humans of MBA Admissions: Kurt Ahlm of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
It’s that time again—where we offer insight into just who it is who’ll be deciding your fate in the upcoming MBA admissions season. This week we’re featuring Kurt Ahlm, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Ahlm is a veteran in the admissions world, having started out in undergrad admissions at Northwestern University 20 years ago. He then worked in corporate recruiting for a stint before returning to higher education at Chicago Booth in 2002. MBA admissions, he finds, provides the perfect mix of the academic and corporate worlds,
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Published: August 4, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: The Pre-MBA Journey—What to Do with Your Summer Vacation
This week’s Fridays from the Frontline comes to us from a soon-to-be first-year student at MIT Sloan School of Management. Jayesh Kannan, a member of Sloan’s Class of 2018, reflects on the happy news of his acceptance (which conveniently came on his birthday!) before diving in to outline all that he hoped to accomplish before getting to campus. If you’re gearing up to apply to business school this fall, tuck this away for suggestions of how to spend next summer. If, like Kannan, you’re coming to the end of that summer before business school, how many of the things
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Published: August 1, 2016
Summer Reading: Biographies of Business Tycoons
There’s no better season than summer to kick back in a hammock, relax with an ice-cold beverage and soak up grizzly war stories from entrepreneurs who came, saw and conquered—and have the battle scars (and book deals) to prove it. Here are 10 bios that offer priceless insights for MBA students and emerging entrepreneurs:
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Real Humans of MBA Admissions: Wharton’s Frank DeVecchis
Next up in our series of glimpses into the real people behind MBA admissions is Frank DeVecchis, who has been director of admissions for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School since March 2015. His tenure at Wharton began well before that though—he started back in 2009 as associate director for the Wharton Fund and led global immersion programs, academic affairs and academic operations from 2011 to 2015. He also got his own master’s degree, in higher education, from the University of Pennsylvania. So he’s most certainly an insider. In talking to him, his allegiance is abundantly clear. “Wharton is
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Fridays from the Frontline: What It’s Really Like to Work at Amazon
Our Fridays from the Frontline this week comes from an MBA student at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who has spent the summer interning at Amazon’s Seattle offices. A New York Times article last summer described the Amazon workplace in harsh terms, a “bruising” place where one employee reported seeing nearly every person he worked with cry at their desks. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is known for his allegiance to data-driven management and regular culling of staff that aren’t delivering results. But what’s it really like to work at Amazon? Darden first-year Linden
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Meet a Rotman MBA Alum Changing U.S. Literacy
There’s no doubt that the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto has an impressive list of MBA alums. The Financial Times has ranked it as the #1 Business School in Canada for the tenth year in a row, and that’s just the start. Recently, Forbes interviewed Sage Salvo, Founder of Words Liive and a Rotman MBA alum. Salvo’s story started in the D.C. Public School system where he performed well, thanks to his gifted classes. However, when he moved schools, suddenly he stopped being so engaged and almost failed 8th grade. It was all because he couldn’t connect with the school
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LBS Admissions Director on Reduction in Required Essays, Importance of Interview
With London Business School announcing its essay questions for the upcoming application season this week, we thought it a good time to check in with David Simpson, admissions director for the school’s MBA and Master in Finance programs, to see what led to some of the changes implemented this year.
David Simpson, admissions director, MBA and MiF, London Business School
In brief, LBS has decided to reduce the number of essays it requires from two to one, while retaining an optional essay.
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Changing of the Guard: Derrick Bolton to Leave Stanford GSB Admissions
Just as Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) welcomes a new dean of school, it will be losing its beloved, longstanding dean and director of MBA admissions. On September 1st, as newly appointed Dean Jonathan Levin takes office, it will be without Derrick Bolton at his side leading MBA admissions for the world’s most selective business school. Bolton has accepted a new role as dean of admissions at the recently launched Knight-Hennessy Program.
Derrick Bolton, who has led MBA admissions at Stanford GSB for the past 15 years
For the past 15 years, Bolton has helped decide the fate of more than 90,000 hopeful Stanford MBA applicants, ultimately giving a nod to about 6,000 of them. Indeed, he is credited with increasing applications to the Palo Alto school by 55 percent during his tenure, making it the hardest business school to get into not just in this country but in the world.
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Corrections for The Official Guide for GMAT® Review, 2017
The below information about The Official Guide for GMAT® Review, 2017 is from the Graduate Management Admission Council—the makers of the GMAT exam. This content was originally posted on The Official GMAT Blog. Official Guide for GMAT Review Corrections We recently released The Official Guide for GMAT® Review, 2017 and we have discovered that this version contains a number of typos that occurred during the publishing process. We understand that these errors may make it difficult to understand certain content and could affect the study experience for the GMAT exam. Below, we’ve outlined options that provide updated materials. For complete details and a full list of
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Wisconsin Dean François Ortalo-Magné Heads to London Business School
London Business School (LBS) kicked off the week with an announcement that it will have a new dean beginning a year from now. François Ortalo-Magné, currently the dean of the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will serve as LBS’s ninth dean starting August 1, 2017, succeeding Sir Andrew Likierman, who will return to the faculty after his serving in the role since 2008. “I am delighted to be joining London Business School, an institution with an enviable reputation as one of the world’s leading business schools,” Ortalo-Magné said in a statement. “It has achieved so
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Real Humans of MBA Admissions: Rodrigo Malta of UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business
Brazilian-native Rodrigo Malta is next up in our series designed to showcase the real people behind the MBA admissions process at leading business schools. Malta heads admissions at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, where he himself got his MBA a decade ago. He went to work in marketing at Dell for a bit after graduating but was ultimately wooed back to the admissions office—where he’d also worked as a student—by mentor and then-Director of MBA Admissions Tina Mabley. He jumped at the chance to return to campus and work on something
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Fridays from the Frontline: How to Know When You’re Ready for an MBA
Knowing whether now is the right time for an MBA depends on a host of variables that are unique to each individual trying to make the decision. We were struck by a recent post on the MBA blog for the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business that gets at a few of the different answers that helped recent MBA students there decide that the time was right. Read on to hear how students from each of the three Berkeley-Haas programs (Full-time MBA,Evening & Weekend MBA, MBA for Executives) knew they were ready. The following post has been republished
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The ROI of a Technology Management MBA from the Foster School
If you’re considering earning a Technology Management MBA from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, there are many resources including The TMMBA ROI Blog Series to help you out. Throughout the series, the Foster School has dissected the value of the TMMBA program by interviewing a team of panelists. Technology MBA ROI Blog Series Blog 1 The first blog introduced the group of five panelists, all alums of the program. The panelists included: Mike McCarter: A 2014 graduate and the current Director of Online Operations at Microsoft. Amitai Rottem: A 2014 grad who became an entrepreneur after the
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New Study Shines Spotlight on Challenges Facing LGBT Entrepreneurs
Getting a startup off the ground is no easy feat, but a recent study shows that startups founded by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) entrepreneurs can face even greater odds. The study, conducted by StartOut—a national non-profit organization that supports, educates and connects LGBT entrepreneurs—found that entrepreneurs in the LGBT community are at risk for discrimination that can affect where they locate their businesses and their ability to raise capital and build trust with investors.
The study, “The State of LGBT Entrepreneurship in the U.S.,” was written by four StartOut members, two of whom work on the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The first study of its kind to shed light on the LGBT founders of high-growth companies, it was sponsored by Credit Suisse with support from Booth’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
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John Hanke, Berkeley Haas MBA ’96: The Genius Behind Pokémon Go
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and a very large and heavy rock at that) for the past few weeks, then you’ve probably heard of Pokémon Go. For those of you who do in fact live under a rock, Pokémon Go is the newest mobile game craze to sweep the world. The game tasks users to travel the world — yes, the real world — in search of various adorable Pocket Monsters. Using GPS technology and augmented reality, the game has created a revolutionary experience that has captivated the masses.
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Top MBA Recruiters: JPMorgan Chase
The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a multinational banking and financial services holding company based in New York, New York. JPMorgan Chase is one of the Big Four banks of the United States, along with Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. According to Bloomberg, in October 2011, JPMorgan Chase surpassed Bank of America as the largest American bank by assets.
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP@ CBS: Tamer Center Seeds Social Enterprise Ventures
From “shrink wrap for crap” to a “greenhouse in a box,” unique ventures tackling serious challenges around the globe were among those awarded seed funding by Columbia Business School’s Tamer Center for Social Enterprise earlier this month. The awards, announced July 7th, went to four teams of entrepreneurs from across the Columbia University community. Each team received $25,000 in seed funding to help take their ideas to the next level, as well as access to the Tamer Center’s array of social enterprise resources.
Bruce Usher, co-director of the Tamer Center and chair of the investment board for the Tamer Fund for Social Ventures, was thrilled and a little surprised when even more teams applied as part of the process this spring than in the inaugural round last fall. “This is only the second cohort, and after the first in the fall we weren’t sure how many additional ventures would apply for funding,” he says. In fact, they saw a slight uptick, from roughly 25 to 30 this spring.
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Real Humans of MBA Admissions: Johnson Graduate School of Business’s Judi Byers
Moving right along in our new series designed to give applicants a glimpse into the real, live people who run admissions at the world’s top business schools, we’re pleased this week to feature Judi Byers. The Hawaiian-born Byers now calls upstate New York her home, where she’s overseen admissions and financial aid at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Business since 2015. (Prior to that she directed admissions at American University’s Kogod School of Business in Washington, DC.) “I hope you’re getting the sense that I am very comfortable with who I am,” she said matter-of-factly as she rattled
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