MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
How These Haasies Landed Jobs at McKinsey, BCG, Apple, Facebook and Google
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business hasn’t yet released employment statistics on its Class of 2016 graduates, which makes sense since barely a week has passed since they walked across the stage to collect their diplomas. Like most peer schools, Haas’s Career Management Group will share those details in the fall when they have complete data.
Source: UC Berkeley Haas, Class of 2015 Employment Statistics
In the meantime, we’ve got something perhaps even more valuable than a long list of statistics. Namely, personal stories from actual Haas students who have landed jobs at some of the hottest hiring firms around—and how they did it.
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Why McKinsey and Company Loves to Hire MBAs
When it comes to careers MBAs are likely to land, working for a management consulting firm like tops the list. McKinsey and Company is one such firm that conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis for companies around the world in order to evaluate management decisions across the public and private sectors. McKinsey is considered one of the most prestigious management consultancy firms globally and the firm’s clientele includes 80 percent of the world’s largest corporations, along with an extensive list of governments and non-profit organisations. More current and former Fortune 500 CEOs are actually alumni of McKinsey than of any
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Cornell’s Johnson School Becomes Latest Leading Business School to Name a New Dean
The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management today announced that its next dean will be accounting scholar Mark Nelson, who has been teaching accounting at the school since 1990 and also spent three years as associate dean for academic affairs. Nelson will begin his five-year term on July 1st, becoming the school’s 12th dean. He will succeed Soumitra Dutta, who will step down from the post June 30th. On March 22nd, Dutta was appointed to serve as dean of the nascent College of Business, which will bring together Cornell University’s three accredited business schools: the School
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LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman Donates $1M, Expertise to Support Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, yesterday announced that he will give $1 million to support entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School and across the University of Oxford. In addition to the generous monetary gift, Hoffman will also serve as senior advisor at “The Oxford Foundry,” a new dramatically increased space for entrepreneurship designed to serve not only Saïd but the larger university and the local community. In this role, Hoffman will give his time and advice to help start and scale new ventures.
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Friday from the Frontlines: Tuck’s Global First-Year Project
This week’s Friday from the Frontlines comes to us from Nicholas Ritter, a second-year MBA student at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business who is spending the summer interning with IBM Watson’s Life Sciences team in New York. Prior to business school he worked as an electrical and product engineer for Nabsys, a biotech startup developing genomic sequencing technology. In his free time he is a Tripod Hockey Captain, a Revers Energy Fellow, an admissions associate and hard at work to form a Tuck Toboggan Club. In the post that follows, Ritter shares about his global first-year project with scaffolding manufacturing firm
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UC Berkeley’s Haas School Appoints New Assistant Dean of Full-Time MBA Program and Admissions
Changes in the MBA admissions office are not unique to Harvard Business School (HBS), where last month longtime reigning managing director Dee Leopold departed, replaced by HBS alumnus Chad Losee. This week, the news comes out of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where Peter Johnson has been appointed the new assistant dean of the full-time MBA program and admissions. “Love when we lure a former member of the team back to Haas,” Dean Rich Lyons tweeted out yesterday. “Pete Johnson is back to head our full-time MBA program.” Indeed, Johnson knows Haas well, having
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Clear Admit Launches New Strategic Partnership with MBA Mama
Clear Admit’s own roots stretch back to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—where co-founders Graham Richmond and Eliot Ingram both received their MBAs and Richmond went on to work in the Wharton Admissions Office. Continuing to hone their expertise in the MBA admissions process at top-tier schools, the two Wharton MBAs would soon launch Clear Admit, the leading independent resource for top-tier MBA candidates.
MBA Mama Co-Founder and CEO Divinity Matovu (Wharton MBA 2017)
Meanwhile, another Wharton MBA student has been hard at work on her own business concept. Wharton rising second-year MBA student Divinity Matovu is co-founder and CEO of MBA Mama, an online platform providing ambitious women with tools and resources to leverage an MBA and strategically navigate family/career planning. Together with co-founder Nicole Pontón, an MBA student at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, the two have been making the MBA Mama name known far and wide. The things the duo had been working on caught our eye, and we reached out to Matovu last fall to ask if she would share some of her experiences as an MBA mom in our Fridays from the Frontline column. She graciously agreed.
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MBA DecisionWire Data Analysis Examines Yields for HBS, Chicago Booth and Fuqua
Welcome back for the fifth in our series of posts offering analysis of the data we are receiving on MBA DecisionWire. MBA DecisionWire is a resource that allows candidates to share where they’ve decided to attend business school based on the offers they received.
If you have made your final decision in terms of where you will attend, please share on MBA DecisionWire. You can also use the filter options to see how other candidates have made their choices.
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Darden Invites Reapplicants to Sign Up for Feedback Sessions
The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business has long stood out for the resources it devotes to helping unsuccessful applicants understand how they can strengthen their candidacy and reapply. This year is no exception.
In a blog post late last week, Darden announced that its admissions committee is currently offering 15-minute phone sessions with candidates who are seeking to reapply to the school in the fall and would like feedback on their applications.
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Friday from the Frontlines: Kellogg’s Efforts to Infuse Design Thinking into the MBA
For those of you not yet familiar with the MMM Program at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, it is an immersive dual-degree program that pairs the rigorous business education of the MBA with a strong foundation in design thinking and innovation. Graduates of the MMM Program receive an MBA from Kellogg and an M.S. in design innovation from the Segal Design Institute at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The first degree-granting program of its kind, the MMM program was designed to help students become innovation experts capable of driving the entire innovation lifecycle of a product, service or business strategy. In addition to its unique curriculum, the program also features an annual MMM Innovation Council, drawing together business innovation leaders, including many MMM alumni.
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Admissions Director Q&A: SMU Cox’s John Roeder
As the latest addition to our Admissions Director Q&A Series, we recently connected with John Roeder, assistant dean of graduate admissions at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (SMU). Roeder is a graduate of the Cox MBA program, so he knows the school and its offerings inside and out.
Roeder oversees all of the graduate programs at Cox, including the full-time MBA, “which is obviously close to my heart since it’s my program,” he says. He obtained his undergraduate degree from SMU as well, before heading into consulting at Andersen. Heading back to SMU for business school he then took an alternate path to head into graduate management admissions. “I graduated on a Saturday here at Cox and was working at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management the following Monday,” he says.
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Career Services Director Q&A: NYU Stern’s Beth Briggs
An English major with a master’s degree in social work, Beth Briggs brings an array of resources to her role as senior director of the Office of Career Development at NYU’s Stern School of Business. After devoting the first portion of her career to various forms of social work, she transitioned to a more formal consulting role at Mercer, where she spent eight years, initially as a team writer but ultimately as a principal in the firm. At Mercer, she worked with a range of New York City‒based clients across industries around their human capital needs.
Coming to NYU Stern in 2008, she started initially at what has since become the school’s Office of Student Engagement, helping to run its NYC experiential learning programs, including Stern Consulting Corps, through which MBA students work with for-profit and not-for-profit organizations throughout New York City. Briggs left the Office of Student Engagement for the Office of Career Development in 2009, where today she leads the career coaching, relationship management and operations teams for full-time MBA students.
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Stanford Graduate School of Business Taps Renowned Economist as Its Next Dean
‘Tis the season for the appointment of new deans at leading business schools. Following on the heels of last week’s appointment of a new dean to lead the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) today announced that it has appointed a new dean to succeed Garth Saloner, who will step down after seven years in the post.
Stanford has named economist Jonathan Levin, former chair of the Stanford Department of Economics and a noted expert in the field of industrial organization, to serve as its tenth dean. Levin’s appointment is effective September 1, 2016, Stanford President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy announced today.
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Dean-to-Be Q&A: Ross’s D. Scott DeRue
Last week, the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business announced that a new dean has been appointed to succeed Alison Davis-Blake when her term comes to an end on June 30th. Taking the reins is 39-year-old D. Scott DeRue, who joined the Ross faculty in 2007 as an assistant professor of management and has since gone on to lead the school’s executive education, part-time MBA and executive MBA programs.
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Jones School Rises in Ranking of Top MBA Programs
The Rice University – Jones Graduate School of Business MBA program has ranked No. 25 of the best full-time MBA programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. Over the last decade, Rice has seen a tremendous rise in ranking, increasing from below the top 40 to top 25 in all three top business school rankings: Bloomberg Businessweek (unranked in 2006 to No. 19 at present), U.S. News (No. 44 in 2006 to No. 25 at present) and Financial Times (No. 41 in 2016 to No. 24 at present). Rice is the only university to experience
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Fridays from the Frontline: Recent HBS Alum Turns Down Google to Found His Own Startup
Tim Chaves, a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Class of 2015, snagged a coveted internship at Google during the summer following his first year at HBS. His performance led Google to offer him a full-time job after graduation. He turned it down. Who turns down Google? He turned it down to found a startup. And here’s the real kicker: He has three young kids. “That’s so risky,” said basically everyone. But in the post that follows, you’ll see why he thinks it was absolutely the right choice. His startup, ZipBooks, is a free small business accounting software platform
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Student Alliance Helps Propel Wharton to Add Lactation Suite, Gender-Neutral Restrooms
Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett a few weeks ago sent out a briefly worded email with the scintillating subject line “Wharton Facilities Updates” to the Philadelphia business school’s community. Some may have been tempted to delete it without reading. In fact, the updates and the process that helped bring them about offer fascinating insight into efforts at the oldest business school in the country to foster a more welcoming and inclusive community.
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Michigan’s Ross School of Business Appoints Insider as New Dean
A celebrated professor who helped lead the school’s executive education program to its best performance in a decade will be the next dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, effective July 1st, the school announced today.
The school’s Board of Regents today approved a five-year appointment for D. Scott DeRue, who is currently the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration, associate dean for executive education and professor of management and organizations at the Ross School. He succeeds Dean Alison Davis-Blake, who will complete her five-year term at the end of June.
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Why Is Goldman Sachs Hiring So Many MBAs?
If you are looking for a career in finance, it’s likely that industry giants like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are already on your wish list of potential employers. As it turns out, the same companies you are looking for may just be looking for you.
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Push-Up Throw Down Sweeps Business Schools, Raising Awareness of Veteran Suicide
Veteran organizations at leading business schools are getting in on the latest challenge to sweep the internet—this time to raise awareness of the incidence of suicide among veterans. The #22PushupChallenge is so named to reflect statistics that suggest that 22 veterans, on average, commit suicide each day. Untreated or inadequately treated mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress (PTS) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) are often to blame.
Christopher Molaro, co-director of alumni relations for the Wharton Veterans Club at the University of Pennsylvania and formerly a captain in the U.S. Army, acknowledges that some have questioned the accuracy of this number. “The 22 number is not substantiated and is debated, but the cause is less about the specific number, 22, and more about building momentum to change the perception of mental health,” he says. “Whether it’s 22 or one per day, it needs to be addressed.”
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MBA DecisionWire Data Analysis Reveals Trends Among Stanford, Wharton, Booth Applicants
Welcome back for the fourth in our series of posts offering analysis of the data we are receiving on MBA DecisionWire, a resource that allows candidates to share where they decide to attend business school based on the offers they receive. If you have made your final decision in terms of where you will attend, please share on MBA DecisionWire. You can also use the filter options to see how other candidates have made their choices.
In the first two posts in this series, we dug into the MBA DecisionWire data to examine popular school pairings—that is, pairs of schools where applicants who apply to one often also apply to the other. In the first, we looked at the following pairings: Stanford and Berkeley Haas, Columbia and NYU Stern, and Wharton and Chicago Booth. In the second, we examined overlap between Michigan’s Ross School and Duke’s Fuqua School, Chicago Booth and Kellogg, and Stanford and Harvard.
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Fridays from the Frontline: Welcome Weekend at Vanderbilt Owen
Continuing our series of posts from applicants sharing how they arrived at a decision on where to enroll for business school, this week we hear from Dylan Bright about the admitted students’ weekend he attended at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. As you’ll read, the well-planned weekend helped him know that the Nashville school was the one for him.
If you’ve recently decided on where you’re heading in the fall, we’d love to have you share your decision-making process with us in a subsequent post. And if you haven’t already, remember to submit via MBA DecisionWire!
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UCLA Anderson Takes on Gender Inequality in Faculty Promotions
To address perceived gender inequality, faculty and staff at the UCLA Anderson School of Management will soon vote to implement revisions to the faculty promotion process, according to a recent article in the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s campus newspaper.
Suggested revisions, which include changes to the tenure and evaluation processes for Anderson professors, come in response to a July 2015 report by consulting agency Korn Ferry that found that the school fostered unconscious biases against female faculty members, according to the Bruin report. The Korn Ferry report also found that there is a perception that it is more difficult for women to earn promotions, tenure and equal compensation than it is for male faculty members.
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