Fridays from the Frontline
Keep abreast of the latest happenings in the business school blogosphere! This weekly column summarizes recent posts from MBA student and applicant blogs.
Published: November 3, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: The Supply Chain Master in Your Kitchen
Most MBA students head to business school expecting to learn about management from professors, peers, class discussions, team projects and text books. Which, of course, they do. But the management lessons don’t stop there.
Sagar Doshi, an MBA student at the University of Oxford’s Saïd School of Business, has been writing about his experiences on campus in a series of blog posts on the Oxford Saïd MBA Blog. “I'm in a short, one-year MBA program, and one of my goals has been to get to know the people and community around me as much as possible,” he tells us. This desire has prompted his posts, many of which focus on aspects of life at Saïd that some might take for granted or overlook entirely. We’re sharing one today that provides a glimpse into the management practices that help keep the school’s kitchens running smoothly and the students well fed.
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Published: October 20, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Reflecting on the HKS/HBS Joint Degree Program
Harvard today is hosting an information session in Budapest on its joint degree program, through which students can study at both Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and Harvard Business School (HSB) and complete both their Master in Public Administration (MPA) and their MBA in just three years. Can’t make it to Budapest but still interested in learning more about the HKS/HBS joint degree program? You’re in luck. Our Fridays from the Frontline today comes to us from Rafael Rivera, a student in the HKS/HBS joint degree program now in his third and final year. In his post, Rivera shares
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Published: October 13, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Catching the Political Bug at Tuck
Sure, climate factors into how some people decide which business school to attend. But usually it has to do with warm temperatures and sunshine, not elections. Not for Justen Nestico. A second-year MBA student at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Nestico chose Tuck in part because of its location at the heart of what has proven to be one of the wildest presidential races in the nation’s history. In the post that follows, Nestico shares how he and other Tuck students who’ve caught the political bug are ideally positioned to watch the electoral process unfold first hand. Our
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Published: October 6, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Enhancing Diversity in Business Starting at Kelley
Indiana University's Kelley School of Business is today kicking off a two-day celebration marking 50 years of participation as a member school of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management. Kelley was one of just three founding member schools—but the Consortium’s ranks have since grown to include 18 of the best business schools in the country.
In anticipation of this important milestone, Ruby Jones, a Kelley School first-year MBA student and Consortium Fellow penned a beautiful essay explaining the Consortium to those who are unfamiliar, describing her journey from a nonprofit career to business school and sharing how she hopes—with her MBA—to assist the next generation of diverse leaders. Our thanks to Jones for granting permission for us to republish her essay here.
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Published: September 29, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Tackling Inequality—An HBS Independent Project
"Did you know that nearly 80 percent of HBS alumni are asked to serve in nonprofit boards at some point in their lives post-HBS?” asks Harvard Business School (HBS) second-year MBA student Molly Palmersheim in a post this week on the HBS MBA Voices student blog. That statistic spurred Palmershein and other students—as part of an independent study in their EC year with HBS Professors Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Nien-hê Hsieh—to design a course that could help train students for these roles they were so likely to take with nonprofit community organizations.
For Palmershein, part of being the kind of “difference-making” leader HBS students are educated toward becoming would naturally involve volunteering with community organizations. “I came to HBS knowing that community leadership would live alongside my professional and personal lives post-HBS,” she writes. But she didn’t realize how the skillset she was developing at HBS could change how she worked with nonprofits.
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Published: September 22, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: A CBS First-Year MBA Student Reacts to Police Shootings
Columbia Business School (CBS) was one of the first schools to join students at Wharton earlier this week in response to the recent deaths of black men at the hands of police in two U.S. cities. Soon, students at six or more schools had come together, dressed in black, both to mourn the losses but also to let those deaths serve as a rallying cry for dialogue both at business school and in the business world beyond.
Adding to the dialogue, this week’s Fridays from the Frontline is a thoughtful, candid essay from CBS first-year MBA student Lyndon Mouton. In it, Mouton provides the poignant and at points painful perspective of an African-American male faced with continuing issues of race and policing that interfere with the business school education he is working so hard to obtain.
Before matriculating at CBS over the summer, he worked in private equity in Chicago and New York. Our thanks to Mouton for sharing his thoughts here with the Clear Admit audience.
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Published: September 15, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Chicago Booth Admissions Director on the Impact of Booth’s Flexible Curriculum
Last week we featured a student blogger from Harvard Business School (HBS) explaining why, for him, that school’s required curriculum provided the business foundation he believes will best prepare him for a seat at any business table. This week, our Fridays from the Frontline comes from Kurt Ahlm, associate dean of student recruitment and admissions at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. On the “Booth Insider” blog, Ahlm recently extolled the virtues of that school’s extraordinarily flexible curriculum—though the timing was simply to coincide with Booth’s upcoming Round 1 deadline and was certainly not
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Published: September 8, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Everything You Need to Know About the HBS Required Curriculum
As Stefan Coburn, Harvard Business School Class of 2017, looks back on what he learned in his first year of business school, it’s clear that he is a satisfied customer. “I never could have imagined the extent to which the required curriculum (RC) would deliver so much knowledge in nearly every essential aspect of business, from marketing to finance to operations to leadership,” he writes. If you have HBS in your sights, don’t miss this comprehensive analysis of the school’s signature first-year required curriculum. And if you just hit submit in time for the Round 1 deadline, best
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Published: September 1, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Darden MBA Student on Google’s Great Perks
This week’s Fridays from the Frontline post comes to us from Jimmy Figueroa, a second-year MBA student at UVA’s Darden School of Business just back from his summer internship at Google in San Francisco. A veteran of New York’s financial services sector prior to business school, Figueroa had a no-nonsense view of what to expect from a job and an employer. “It was always a no frills environment where you work hard, work long and perform,” he writes. And if you do well, you’ll get rewarded monetarily. Free cafes, gym classes, game rooms—the companies that have those don’t
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Published: August 25, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Five Questions with Kellogg Professor Blake McShane
As we wait for students to get into the swing of things at campus enough to begin blogging and applicants to really dive into the application process, we’re taking a bit of a departure from our regular Fridays from the Frontline routine to share the perspective of a business school professor.
Blake McShane, an associate professor of marketing at Kellogg, teachers courses in customer analytics, marketing research and data analysis. A statistical methodologist, McShane has developed statistical models for fields ranging from online advertising and neuroscience to paleoclimatology and baseball. Below, McShane talks about this marketing research course and what he hopes students get out of it, what he loves most about teaching at Kellogg and his own research.
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Published: August 18, 2016
Friday from the Frontlines: From Lesotho to the Hilltop
Our Friday from the Frontlines submission comes to us this week from Tahira Taylor, a full-time MBA student at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. As you’ll read, Taylor’s path to the MBA was unlike some of her classmates. Specifically, her journey to Georgetown included prior stops in Morocco and Lesotho, where she worked with the Peace Corps.
Earlier this year we reported that McDonough has been selected by the Peace Corps to join the Paul D. Coverdell Fellowship Program for returned Peace Corps volunteers. It is through this program that returned volunteers like Taylor bring the valuable learning and experience they gained through the Peace Corps to the MBA classroom. Recipients of the Coverdell Fellowship receive a minimum of $10,000 in tuition scholarship funding per year and the ability to apply for graduate assistantships. In addition, they complete internships in underserved American communities, where they can continue to put to use some of the skills they learned as volunteers while layering on some of the tools they are learning in business school. Talk about a win-win.
Read on to learn about the transferable skills Taylor has discovered served her just as well in Africa as they do in the business school admissions process and the classroom.
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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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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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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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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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Fridays from the Frontline: An Open Letter to Donald Trump from Members of Wharton’s Community
As anyone who has had even half an ear open to U.S. politics knows, presidential candidate Donald Trump has been quick to cite his affiliation with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In an open letter to Trump shared via Facebook recently, a contingent of Wharton students, alumni and faculty chose to express their thoughts on Trump’s candidacy as it relates to the school’s diverse community.
Please note that the following sentiments reflect the views only of the 600 signatories to date—they are not affiliated with the Wharton School. Clear Admit also does not take a stance with regard to politics, national or international.
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Friday from the Frontline: First-Year Project for PayPal France
This week’s post comes to us from Tuck rising second-year Ashley Cahill, a Connecticut native who spent the five years before business school working in Shanghai, China, in public relations roles for the American Chamber of Commerce, Weber Shandwick and a sustainable agriculture startup. As you’ll read, her international experiences have extended right into the MBA program thanks to Tuck’s First-Year Project, which Cahill completed in Paris as part of an assignment for PayPal France. Our thanks to her for agreeing to share her experience with Clear Admit’s audience. This post has been republished in its entirety from its
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Friday from the Frontlines: How to Be an Ally After the Orlando Tragedy
The devastating attack on an Orlando nightclub earlier this week drew responses of support and unity from MBA students and professionals around the globe, as showcased in yesterday’s Top MBA Tweets of the Week. We also took note of this insightful piece on LinkedIn posted by NYU Stern alumna Rachel Hurnyak (MBA ’15), who now works as a project manager for Tesla. We first connected with Hurnyak last May, just after she was honored by Stern Dean Peter Henry for her work to promote inclusion and diversity within Stern’s MBA class. Hurnyak was instrumental in helping lead Stern’s
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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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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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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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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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Fridays from the Frontline: Having to Decide Between Multiple Schools
In last week’s Fridays from the Frontline, we circled back with an applicant who’d shared his admissions journey with us earlier in the process to see how it concluded. For this week’s post we did the same, checking in again with Natalie Neilson, who shared her application process here back in December. What we didn’t plan on was the fact that both of these applicants would reveal that they're heading off to the same school in the fall! (For anyone not heading to Wharton, 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!)
But though both applicants ultimately chose Wharton, the processes they followed in arriving at that decision took different turns. Neilson, for her part, was in the enviable spot of having to decide between multiple schools—eight of them. While perhaps one of the better stressors to face—you’ll see that it was indeed stressful. Read on to learn her advice for narrowing your list, making peace with your decision and making plans for the next two years!
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Published: April 28, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Why I Chose Wharton
Decisions, decisions. Some lucky applicants have been wrestling with decisions over the past many weeks, with acceptances to multiple MBA programs giving them tough choices to make. Along the way, we’ve seen an uptick in submissions to MBA DecisionWire, giving us some insight into where candidates have decided to go based on where they were admitted. One applicant, Preston Landers, had three top schools to select from when all was said and done. Landers wrote a post for Fridays from the Frontline earlier in the application process, and we circled back to see if he would
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Published: April 21, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Reapplying to HBS
Earlier this week, Harvard Business School (HBS) released interview invitations for applicants in Round 3, as well as for undergraduate applicants to its 2+2 Program. (This deferred admissions program guarantees a place for admitted undergrads in the HBS class after they graduate from college and successfully complete two years of approved work experience.) As expected, MBA LiveWire lit up with submissions as the decisions rolled in—but unfortunately red rejections far outnumbered interview invites.
If you were among those “released” from consideration on Wednesday, don’t despair. As HBS itself notes, the school receives roughly ten applications for every available spot in the class, and every year it must turn away many qualified candidates. Not only that, reapplicants—people who were rejected on the first try—claim 94 spots in the Class of 2017. That’s almost a full tenth of the class!
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