MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
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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Discover Why You Need the Lehigh University Flex MBA
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The online MBA isn’t what is used to be. Just a few years ago, an online degree was considered a “fake” degree. Now, that couldn’t be further from the truth. At top schools like Lehigh University’s College of Business and Economics, an online MBA is more than a mode of study; it’s an invaluable experience.
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Chicago Booth to Seek New Dean as Sunil Kumar Leaves to Become Johns Hopkins Provost
University of Chicago Booth School of Business Dean Sunil Kumar is leaving to become the next provost of Johns Hopkins University, effective September 1st, the Baltimore school announced today. The Indian-born Kumar becomes the school’s 15th provost and the first-ever Asian to hold the position. Kumar just last year was appointed to a second five-year term as dean at Chicago Booth. In his tenure there, he is credited with helping raise more than $300 million, focusing on student recruitment, including increasing the female enrollment of full-time programs from 35 percent to 42 percent, and expanding courses for undergraduates,
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Fridays from the Frontline: One Week in Bangkok
This week’s Fridays from the Frontline has it all. A Shark Tank‒like pitch performed on live national television, a plan to help India’s smallholder farmers meet growing demand for local, fresh produce and even a Thai massage. Even though the team at its center—five MBA students from Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Business—didn’t take home the very top prize, we think the story’s a winner. Thanks to Jeremy Kuhre (MBA ’16) for sharing it with us! The following post has been republished in its entirety from its original source, Johnson’s Student Blogs page. One
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What Brexit Means for Britain’s Business Schools
With David Cameron having officially resigned and Prime Minister Theresa May taking up residence behind “the most famous black door in the world” at 10 Downing Street, speculations abound regarding just what the full implications of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union will be. Immediately following the Brexit vote, we reached out to admission directors at leading business schools in Britain to get their views on what it means for incoming MBA students in the short term, as well as what some of the longer-term impacts might entail.
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Robin Chase, MIT Sloan Grad and Visionary of the Sharing Economy
Robin Chase, MIT Sloan Graduate School of Management MBA (1986) and co-founder of Zipcar, is a visionary in the brave new world of the sharing economy and peer-to-peer technology.
It’s easy to take for granted the omnipresence of the sharing economy in our everyday lives. For some millennials, it's hard to recall that there was ever a time before they could walk outside, wave a gadget to a car windshield, and go on an unexpected road trip.
Robin Chase's Zipcar gave birth to a phenomenon.
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