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I was interviewed by a second year MBA student in Ann Arbor, MI. The student had his laptop for the interview and was working off of a set of questions and topics in order to steer our conversation. After going through my resume he asked a few typical questions on leadership, teamwork and achievements. He then went on to ask about “Why MBA,” “Why Ross,” and “Why now.” He had a lot of follow up questions to my answers regarding my MBA school and timing. It was apparent he was really trying to make sure I felt Ross was a Read more

Case studies from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business will now reach a wider audience of business professors, practitioners and policymakers – not to mention students and alumni – thanks to a new distribution agreement with Harvard Business Printing. Twenty cases from the Berkeley-Haas Case Series have already been added on the Harvard Business School Publishing website, including cases providing insights into Netflix’s pricing strategies, Genentech’s use of culture to drive business and a startup’s search for the right market for its new technology. Read more

The process top business schools use to screen candidates is coming under greater scrutiny in the wake of the revelation that an MBA student was admitted to Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) after having been expelled by Harvard Law School for falsifying his transcript. A Wall Street Journal article this week reveals that while thorough background checks have become more the norm at top business schools in the past decade, not all schools have a formal process in place. This newfound focus on what protocols MBA admissions offices use to verify information on candidates’ applications comes amid the trial of Mathew Martoma for alleged insider trading at SAC Capital. Martoma, it turns out, was admitted to Stanford’s MBA program not long after being expelled from Harvard Law School for falsifying his transcript to try to obtain a judicial clerkship. He graduated from Stanford in 2003 and joined SAC in 2006. Read more

MIT’s Sloan School of Management will offer its first massively open online course (MOOC) free to the general public in the spring semester, a data analytics class called Analytics Edge, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports. The online course will feature the same curriculum as the popular on-campus offering, which includes case studies of the Oakland A’s “moneyball” strategy, dating site eHarmony and the 2012 presidential election, according to the Bloomberg BW report. Students in the new MOOC will watch prerecorded lectures and submit assignments online. Read more

For the fourth year running, a professor of strategy and leadership at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business has released his picks for worst CEOs – adding a new twist this year by also sharing the five CEOs he deems the best of 2013. Tuck Professor Sydney Finkelstein has become an expert on CEO failures. Since 2010, he has provided an annual roundup of the world’s five worst top executives, and he has also published a book on the same topic, Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes. Read more

The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College is exploring adding a new master’s in management program for undergraduates with liberal arts degrees, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports. The proposed program, which could launch by September 2016, was announced by Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon in a speech to faculty last week. The one-year master’s program would be open to anyone with an undergraduate degree and would provide a “high-level introduction to business,” Tuck Dean Paul Danos told Bloomberg BW. Dartmouth is currently examining a range of factors that will determine whether or not the school moves forward with the plan, including market data, student interest and logistical considerations, Danos added. Read more

Round 1 applicants to the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business can expect to receive invitations to interview today, according to Ross Director of Admissions Soojin Kwon. In a recent post to the Ross Admissions Blog, Kwon shared that all Round 1 interview invitations will go out today, including for those applying through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Management. The school’s associate admissions directors spent the past weekend completing their review of applicants, and the students who conduct interviews on behalf of the school entered their availability into the interview scheduler. Applicants will be able to schedule an interview time as soon as they receive their invitations, Kwon added. Ross this year is officially debuting a new team-based activity as part of the application process, an optional component designed to give the admissions team more insight into how candidates engage with other people. This was something Kwon and her team felt they didn’t get enough of a sense of from the one-on-one interviews. For the first 10 minutes of the half-hour exercise, candidates will each be given two random words to weave into a story to share with their group. (The groups are made up of four to six candidates.) Working together as a group, participants then spend the remaining 20 minutes connecting their word pairs into a business challenge and solution to present to an observer. Read more

Two professors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, together with a third professor from Yale School of Management (SOM), have been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2013. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Booth Professors Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen and Yale SOM Professor Robert Shiller for their research helping to explain how and why the prices of stocks and bonds change over time. The Nobel honors the three professors’ empirical analysis of asset prices, which began with Fama and collaborators in the 1960s demonstrating that stock prices are very difficult to predict in the short run, in part because new information is very quickly incorporated into the prices. “These findings not only had a profound impact on subsequent research but also changed market practice,” notes the Nobel announcement for the 2013 prize. As an example, the announcement cited the emergence of index stocks in markets around the globe.  Read more

Hello and welcome to another edition of Fridays From The Fronline, Clear Admit's ongoing observation of the outstanding lives of b-school student and applicant bloggers. This week found applicants putting their HBS applications to bed while students continued to enjoy getting into the swing of all things MBA. MBAReapplicant made progress on his Yale and Sloan essays and promised an update once they were finalized. TimBob submitted his Harvard application and set his sights on the Wharton and Haas deadlines. HammO powered on in his goal of submitting six applications in the first round, noting that he was alive...insane, but alive. Domotron also submitted his HBS application, which was followed by a mini-celebration before getting serious and hunkering back down to work on Wharton. MBAGirlJourney submitted her HBS application a little early and while she wasn't 100% convinced it would lead to an interview, she felt confident that she had done the best she could. Sarah  moved to save money, prepared to retake the GMAT and wrote her first essay. Cambridge '15 Laurent continued his story of meeting the founder of Linksys. Read more

Incoming first-year MBA students at Columbia Business School (CBS) will discover a redesigned core curriculum, part of the school’s efforts to keep pace with a changing business marketplace. The school unveiled 12 new videos today explaining the changes, which include a greater emphasis on entrepreneurship and leadership. Students in the Class of 2015 will encounter one of the most significant changes to the core beginning in orientation. As part of the redesign, the core’s leadership course will be pushed forward, to take place in the weeks before regular classes start, rather than in the first semester, as has been the case in the past. Students will also have more electives to choose from during the first year, a shift intended to give them greater ability to customize their MBA course to fit individual career goals and better prepare for summer internships. Read more

The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University last month approved a new MBA concentration in energy finance, further expanding the resources it offers prospective MBA students interested in the energy and environmental sectors. The school also features an MBA concentration in energy and environment. The new energy finance concentration is designed to give participating students a foundation in the specifics of global energy markets while allowing them to explore in greater depth issues of project finance, markets and trading, corporate finance and risk management, the school announced. Read more