Weekly Columns
Keep up with the latest school facts and news from your fellow MBA applicants.
Published: February 11, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: An MBALauncher Shares Her Round 2 Application Process
Today’s Friday from the Frontline features an interview with Lisa Atufunwa, a 29-year-old Denver native who submitted applications to five schools as part of Round 2. Business school has always been a part of her plan, and she’s hoping the MBA will help her pivot her career.
Currently working in communications for a range of tech companies, startups and public holding companies, Atufunwa is targeting schools with strong programs in marketing. Her post-MBA goal is to become an assistant brand manager in the personal beauty sector, working for a company like L'Oréal, Sephora or Estée Lauder. “That’s always been a personal passion of mine,” she says.
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Published: February 4, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Kellogg MBAs Gear Up for Super Bowl Ad Review
It’s time for the Super Bowl—and at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, that means it’s also time for the Super Bowl Ad Review. Brands spend more than $2 billion each year to advertise their products through Super Bowl commercials, some more effectively than others. For the 12th year running, Kellogg marketing students will apply their unique framework for evaluating an ad’s brand-building potential as part of the 2016 Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review.
As the players take the field on Sunday, more than 50 Kellogg MBA students will team up with marketing professors Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker to determine the winners and the losers in the battle of the brands. They’ll us the ADPLAN framework to evaluate each ad according to six critical criteria: Attention, Distinction, Positioning, Linkage, Amplifications and Net Equity.
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Published: January 28, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Yale SOM MBA Student Tests His Mettle on Shark Tank
This week in Fridays from the Frontline we’re featuring an exclusive interview with Shaan Patel, a 26-year-old, second-year MBA student at Yale School of Management (SOM) who tonight will appear on ABC’s Shark Tank. Patel, who is taking a two-year leave of absence from medical school to get his MBA, also runs a company on the side that helps high school students prepare for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. The Las Vegas native launched the company—called 2400 Expert SAT Prep—to teach others the strategies that helped him achieve his own perfect 2400 SAT score.
In the interview that follows, he shares how business school prepared him for Shark Tank and why he thinks the MBA is a valuable path for entrepreneurs. He also offers tips for business school students who want to try their hand at getting on the show. (Even thought he had to wait in line for nine hours for the casting call—missing a pitch competition taking place back on campus as a result—he thinks it was worth it.)
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Published: January 21, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Triumphant Reapplicant Gains Admission at UCLA Anderson
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Our Fridays from the Frontline contributor this week took these words to heart, reapplying in fall 2015 after an unsuccessful application process the year before. A young female Indian engineer, she had relatively strong scores and grades, but not a ton of experience under her belt. Read on to learn some of the steps she took to strengthen her application the second time around—gaining admission at UCLA Anderson.
While happy to share her story with the Clear Admit audience, she wants to remain anonymous until she actually matriculates. So until then, we’ll just refer to her as the Pull That MBA Trigger blogger.
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Published: January 14, 2016
Fridays from the Frontlines: Kellogg MBAs Take Silicon Valley
Welcome back to Fridays from the Frontlines, where each week we feature the perspectives of current MBA applicants, students and recent alumni wherever they are in the trajectory of business school. Today we’re pleased to feature a post from Luke Murphy, a first-year MBA candidate at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, who recently led a group of fellow students on a trek to San Francisco startups. He was a good one to help organize the trip, having grown up in the Bay Area and worked there for years before business school, most recently as director of business development at Nasdaq in San Francisco. But as you’ll see in the post that follows, even he was surprised by some of what the trip revealed.
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Published: January 12, 2016
MBA Admissions Mashup: Admitted Students Weekends
Every Wednesday, we share a round-up of the latest news from admissions blogs at the top business schools. Congratulations to all Round 1 applications who have received positive news from their target schools! (Needless to say, we urge you to head on over to MBA LiveWire to share the good news!) Now that you’ve been admitted, you’re surely receiving invitations to attend Admitted Student Weekends where you’ll have plenty of opportunity to mix and mingle with other future MBAs. Your future classmates await! With this in mind, we’re taking a look at schools hosting admit weekends as
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Published: January 7, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Juggling Motherhood and the MBA at HBS
How many times have you heard someone liken pursuing an MBA to drinking from a fire hose? Between the coursework, student clubs, networking, recruiting—there aren’t enough hours in the day. Now imagine doing it as mom to a three-year-old.
Katie Colgary is a second-year student doing precisely that—juggling motherhood and the MBA at Harvard Business School (HBS). She graciously agreed to share this recent blog post with Clear Admit’s readers, in which she reveals how she does it, as well as what resources are in place at HBS to help make doing it possible.
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Published: December 31, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: The HEC Paris MBA Experience with Footnotes
Happy 2016 everyone! Today in Fridays from the Frontline, we’re featuring a post submitted to us by Prashant Khorana about his HEC Paris MBA experience. On Twitter, Khorana (@prashantkhorana) describes himself as a data scientist/mathematician who is passionate about analytics, economics, finance, leadership and investing and who hates unproductive activities.
Titled “Brief Notes on the HEC Paris MBA Experience,” the post is nonetheless longer than we generally publish here—especially with the footnotes, which Khorana doesn’t want you to miss. So we’ve offered you a taste to whet your appetite and encourage you to follow the link below to read the post in its entirety. He covers everything you’ve ever wondered about HEC Paris, from getting in to settling in, from learning French to surviving St. Cyr and triumphing at MBAT. Many thanks to Khorana for sharing his experience with the Clear Admit audience.
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Published: December 24, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: Forté MBALauncher Shares Her Round 1 Application Experience
Natalie Neilson learned about the Forté Foundation’s MBALaunch program—a 10-week, hands-on workshop for promising female applicants to business school—in a somewhat backwards fashion. It all began with an interest in looking into business schools abroad, with the MBA program at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School sparking her curiosity. After researching, she realized that Oxford did not come to many events in DC, but she saw that the school would be participating in an upcoming Forté Forum, and so she went. At the forum, she saw people wearing name tags with a special ribbon that said “MBALauncher,” so she asked to learn more. Before long she would be wearing an MBALauncher ribbon herself.
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Published: December 17, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: A Successful Round 1 Applicant Shares His Tips on Managing the Process
This week we are delighted to feature the following post from Preston Landers, a senior consultant for Deloitte Digital who has just completed the application process for business school. As you’ll read, he applied to seven leading MBA programs, got interviews at six and has now been admitted at three. He humbly calls himself an amateur, but we think the advice he offers is spot on. Our thanks to Landers, whose frequent posts on Reddit’s MBA thread spurred us to ask him to contribute something here on Clear Admit. And a hearty congratulations for a job well done! We
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Published: December 10, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: A Wharton Alum Takes Issue with Fellow Alum Donald Trump
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has continued to grab headlines in the past week, most recently for his call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." His comments have drawn strong reactions, including from opponents such as Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who said in an address to the media Tuesday, “We have no place for that kind of ignorance and tolerance and lack of understanding of what our country is about.”
Trump’s supporters, too, have also been quite vocal, and his popularity in the polls continues. In a national telephone poll conducted December 4th through 10th by the New York Times/CBS News, seven in 10 voters likely to vote in the Republican primary felt Trump was well equipped to respond to the threat of terrorism, with four in 10 saying they were “very confident” in his response. In this category, Trump led all other candidates, both Democratic and Republican.
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Published: December 3, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: MIT Sloan Student Scrutinizes Her MBA Balance Sheet
Is the high cost of an MBA worth it? This question gets bandied around frequently, most often by skeptics on the sidelines who have never set foot in a business school classroom. This week in Fridays from the Frontline we are pleased to share a recent post from a current MIT Sloan MBA student who gives us her take on whether the significant funds she’s invested into her two years at Sloan was money well spent.
Erica Zendell is a Sloan MBA who will graduate this spring and a self-proclaimed “bargain-hunter.” She wants to feel like she’s gotten value for her investment—be it when she buys a piece of clothing or commits six figures and two years to business school.
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Published: November 26, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: Kellogg First-Year Reflects on the Talent of Her Classmates
As those of us here in the United States attempt to work off hearty Thanksgiving meals, some are still reflecting on the things for which we're thankful. In that spirit, our Fridays from the Frontline post today comes from Nikita Sunilkumar, a first-year MBA student at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.
Sunilkumar, a California native who worked as a production engineer at Boeing before business school, entered Kellogg as part of a record-breaking class made up of 43 percent women. As she shares here, she took part in an eye-opening exercise as part of the school's Women's Business Association led by Kellogg Professor Victoria Medvec, one designed to help participants recognize and appreciate the remarkable talent of their classmates. Our thanks to Sunilkumar for sharing her thoughts—and for business schools across the globe working toward gender parity.
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Published: November 19, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: An INSEAD Student in Asia Mourns for Paris, Holds Hope for the World
INSEAD student Edouard Chehade was not in Paris one week ago today. But he knows Paris well, having spent part of his MBA studying just southeast of the city in Fontainebleau on INSEAD’s Europe Campus. Today he is in Singapore on INSEAD’s Asia Campus, finishing up the final weeks of his MBA program. Paris, though, has been a topic of every moment’s discussion since the November 13th terrorist attacks that killed 129 and injured more than 350, he says.
In the post that follows, Chehade mourns for the victims, those in Paris but also those who have survived or succumbed to similar events in Bombay, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Algeria, Pakistan and countless other countries. The remarkable diversity of the INSEAD class—where students represent more than 80 nationalities—means that he has friends who have lived in many of these very places.
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Published: November 12, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: Conquering FOMO at INSEAD
Watching LiveWire, we’ve seen lots of INSEAD interview action in the past few weeks, including this disappointed but determined post from an India applicant in Malta who didn’t get an invitation: “Spent all of summer in pursuit of INSEAD,” he or she wrote. “Heartbroken but not Fallen yet!!” Cue a collective “aww” in the Clear Admit office. Keep calm and stay positive!
In today’s Fridays from the Frontline, we hear from someone who did make the cut at INSEAD only to arrive on campus and confront a challenge of a whole new sort: FOMO, or fear of missing out.
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Published: October 29, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: MBA Mama on Pitching as a Female Entrepreneur
This week in our Fridays from the Frontline series, we are delighted to have as our contributor Divinity Matovu, a first-year MBA student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Matovu, whose focus at Wharton is on entrepreneurial management and finance, also happens to be a mother of two and the co-founder and president of MBA Mama, an online platform where millennial moms can find the products, services, tools and inspiration they need to pursue an MBA.
Her passion for start-ups (she’s launched four of her own) and women’s empowerment shines through in the following post, where she shares a recent experience she had pitching to an all-male panel as part of Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program (VIP). Her spirit and pluck are evident as well. Even amid everything else she’s doing, she finds time to blog regularly—check out her posts to learn more about some of her other passions, including technology, financial inclusion and African affairs. We’re grateful to Divinity for lending her voice and perspective to our series.
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Published: October 27, 2015
MBA Admissions Mashup: Breaking News from HBS, Value of Alumni Networks, and the Importance Balance
Every Wednesday, we share a round-up of the latest news from admissions blogs at the top business schools. In this week’s edition of MBA Admissions Mashup, we take a look at some breaking news from HBS, the value of a vast alumni network, careers and internships, work-life balance, on-campus conferences as well as some last minute admissions advice. This morning, Harvard Business School Managing Director of MBA Admissions & Financial Aid, Dee Leopold announced that she will be stepping down from her post in May 2016. In the post, she assures all of you Harvard Hopefuls
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Published: October 22, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: MBA Data Guru Analyzes Interview Acceptance Rates
This week, we’ve had the pleasure of connecting with Wayne Atwell, a second-year MBA student at NYU Stern School of Business, who is perhaps better known as the MBA Data Guru. In January 2014, while in the midst of applying to business school himself, he launched a website with that name after crunching numbers to figure out his own chances of getting into the various schools where he had applied. (Atwell is pictured above, far right, with his Stern block and their strategy professor, Sonia Marciano.)
In using data to answer his own questions about the MBA application process, he realized he was also answering the questions of other MBA applicants, and so www.mbadataguru.com was born. As for why and how he’s kept updating it, even now amid the hectic pace of a full-time MBA program? “Mainly I like playing around with data,” he says. “I find it fun.” But he’s also gotten to chat with lots of MBA applicants, learned a bit about web development and managed to grow an audience, he adds. “Still, it’s more of a hobby than anything else."
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Published: October 15, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: Duke / Fuqua Alum on How Team Fuqua is Central to Duke Culture
Happy Friday! We’re back again this week with another edition of Fridays From the Frontlines. This week we bring you Steven Ma, Duke / Fuqua Alum (Class of 2015). Prior to Fuqua, Steven graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Biology – not your traditional MBA applicant. When Steven made the leap into the MBA world, he found that the resources just weren’t there for him. His blog, From Bench to Board, aims to chronicle his experiences and learnings with the aim of helping those who are interested in earning an MBA without the
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Published: October 8, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: Kindergarten Teacher, with MBA from Ross, Pursues Lifelong Tech Dream
How does a kindergarten teacher with a liberal arts degree score an internship at Apple? Find out in this week’s edition of Fridays from the Frontline. Jeremy Schifeling, helped in part by an MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School, not only landed a marketing internship on Apple’s iOS team, he went on to work at several educational tech firms and at LinkedIn before founding his own company designed to help others from non-tech backgrounds break into the field.
He contacted us and generously offered to share his story, complete with data revealing that there are three times as many non-tech job opportunities for MBAs at internet firms (in marketing, HR, business development, etc.) as there are positions for computer science (CS) majors and engineers. So if you're from a non-tech background and want to know how make the shift, this post's for you.
As always, we welcome the contributions of other current MBA students and applicants, as well as alumni! Please email Jeanette or Marianne if you would like to add your voice to the mix. Many thanks to Jeremy for his great post!
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Published: October 1, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: MIT Sloan MBA Student, Veteran Discusses Humility and Success
It’s Friday, and once again we’re bringing you insights straight from current MBA applicants and students as part of our Fridays from the Frontline column. Our contributor this week, MIT Sloan School of Management second-year Brian Kirk (pictured above, second from left), knows his fair share about the frontline, both figurative and real, having served as a U.S. Navy submariner prior to business school.
In the post that follows, he offers some incredible insights about humility and its impact on success, drawn both from his time at Sloan and his military service. Worth the read. Kirk and other leaders of the MIT Sloan Veterans Association just hosted Veteran's Ambassadors Day, a day of programming and activities for prospective MBA applicants from the armed forces. They are planning a second Ambassadors Day in the spring, so if you are an active duty service person or veteran considering business school, check it out.
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Published: September 17, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: Kellogg Second-Year Shares Advice on Making the Most of the First Year
Welcome back to Fridays from the Frontline, a weekly column where we'll feature guest MBA student and applicant bloggers, as well as original pieces that incorporate multiple perspectives from applicants, students and recent alumni on all things MBA. As always, we welcome your contributions! Please email Jeanette or Marianne if you would like to add your voice to the mix. Many thanks to this week's guest blogger, Rohan Rajiv from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.
This post has been republished in its entirety from "Inside Perspective," a blog featuring contributions from the school's full-time MBA students. Kellogg Second-year student Rohan Rajiv blogs there once a week about important lessons he is learning at Kellogg. You can read more of his posts here.
A few months ago, I wrote a letter to an incoming MBA student in an attempt to help incoming students prepare for their two years at school. I tried staying away from specific advice in that post, as the assumption was that the framework ought to work for everyone.
Today, however, I’m going to dig into my first year process and provide specifics on how I spent my first year.
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Published: September 10, 2015
Clear Admit Gears Up to Bring Back Fridays from the Frontlines
After a summer-long hiatus as business school students toiled away at their internships and prospective MBA applicants crammed for the GMAT, we are gearing up for the return of Fridays from the Frontlines, Clear Admit’s popular weekly feature showcasing the voices of real, live MBA applicants, current business school students and recent MBA alums.
We’ve always loved following the wisdom, humor, triumphs, and tribulations of the MBA blogosphere — and we want to make sure that we’re capturing all of it as we go into the 2015-2016 season. We’ve lined up a roster of bloggers whose posts we enjoy and think would be relevant to Clear Admit’s readers, and we’re reaching out to invite them to participate as periodic guest bloggers on our site. We’ll debut our first guest blog post in the in this space next week.
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Fridays from the Frontline: Join the Ranks!
As we mentioned last week, we're on the lookout for MBA applicants, students, and recent grads who are blogging or tweeting their b-school experiences -- or who would like to start as correspondents for Clear Admit.
If you don't already have a writing platform and feel daunted by the commitment of maintaining your own blog, writing as a correspondent for Clear Admit is a great way to share your insight and experience with the MBA community. We’ll ask our correspondents to weigh in on an admissions, b-school, or career-related topic 1-2 times per month, and will feature their thoughts on the Clear Admit blog (as well as links to any element of their online presence they wish to promote). And to show our appreciation at the end of the admissions cycle/academic year, we’ll reward our most active and insightful contributors with $200 Amazon.com gift cards.
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Fridays From the Frontline: Call for Correspondents
Are you thinking about documenting your MBA application process, b-school studies, or post-grad adventures? Do you already maintain a blog about your business school experience or post-MBA career? Clear Admit wants to hear from you!
We've always loved following the wisdom, humor, triumphs, and tribulations of the MBA blogosphere -- and we want to make sure that we're capturing all of it as we go into the 2015-2016 season. So, we're issuing a Call for Correspondents this week.
If you maintain a blog or tweet about your MBA experiences, please let us know via the form below! We'll be sure to add you to the Clear Admit Mashup page and follow you on Twitter.
And, in a new twist this year, we're seeking applicants, current students, and recent grads to serve as correspondents and regularly share their experiences directly with the Clear Admit audience. We'll ask our correspondents to weigh in on an admissions, school, or career-related topic 1-2 times per month, and will feature their thoughts on the Clear Admit blog (as well as links to any element of their online presence they wish to promote). To show our appreciation at the end of the admissions cycle/academic year, we'll reward our most insightful contributors with $200 Amazon.com gift cards.
Interested? Just complete the form below, and we'll be in touch!
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