On Monday, May 1, Chicago Booth stated that businessman and philanthropist Ross Stevens, Ph.D. '96, had given the school's Ph.D. program $100 million to help push the boundaries of academic business research. The program will be called the Stevens Doctoral Program to honor Stevens.
People often decide to pursue an MBA without giving it much thought, but that's not a good idea. Before you start getting ready to apply, you should really think about why you want to get the degree and make sure it's the right choice for you. Here are five indicators that can help you decide if you're ready to apply to business school or not.
Have you ever woken up from a recurring nightmare in which you had to take an exam for which you hadn't studied? No one likes the feeling of not being prepared. And this worry takes over many parts of our professional lives. No one wants to be caught off guard in front of an MBA admissions committee, a current client or boss, or even a networking event. The answer is to be confident in all of these conversations and presentations. How? Preparedness. In this blog post, we'll talk about what you should do to get ready for a variety of common career scenarios.
Becoming a great manager is essential for becoming a great leader. Good managers not only extract great output from their employees, but they also relieve the executive team of most of the day-to-day operations, allowing them to focus on more tactical challenges. Leaders develop a vision, while managers develop goals and guide their teams toward shared goals connected to that vision. This blog post will go over five strategies to becoming a successful manager.
This essay topic analysis looks at MBA admissions essays for Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB) for the 2022-2023 admissions season. Stanford is asking applicants to answer the same two questions it has been asking for a few years. The word limit of 1,050 words from last year was kept, and applicants were told to use 650 words for Essay A and 400 words for Essay B. There are also two essays about the candidate's impact and background that are optional. Let's take a deeper dive.
What are the MBA application readers looking for? Get into the mind of how MBA application readers think. Avoid too much jargon. Understand how the admissions committee is constructed. Remember that you are APPLYING to attend b-school & not yet graduated. Do NOT submit the same resume you would for a job opportunity.
In the past, we have chalked this up to its unique end-of-October deadline and equally unique two-round admissions process. We even went as far as to say that we would bet on the application quality at Sloan is far lower than on other top business school programs. Candidates would not even even start on their Sloan apps until after the October 3-16 gauntlet of deadlines and then they race to finish because they fear waiting until the "last" round. Simply put, a lot of applicants have viewed Sloan as an after thought, and we've done our share of walking clients back from making mistakes associated with that mindset. Well, all of that has changed.
In fact, I always tell my clients to start their online MBA application at the very beginning of the application process because it can help you understand what you are in for. Most people think that HBS does not have a "goals" essay. Technically, they are correct. But they do have a 500 character goal statement on the actual online form. They also want you to rank your extracurricular equities in order of importance. And if you read the language on the application carefully, it seems as though they only want you to fill out activities that occur during your undergraduate career. To make it that much more difficult, Harvard only provides you a few hundred characters (not words) of precious application UI to do so. By the way, this does include characters like spaces. Surprise! But not a good surprise if you waited until the 11th hour to open up and start reviewing the online application. There are many other instances of these types of requirements – MBA app hoops you have to jump through – when you were least expecting.
But since this blog post is about what you can and should do before finally pressing "submit", I do not want to revisit what you should have done. Let us focus on what you can do right now.
Today, we are going to be breaking down the failure essay and the biggest reasons why everyone blows it. This is particularly relevant to the season, as we begin to take on our usual batch of INSEAD clients (for both January and September intakes) and that schools asks a very tricky little failure question. We have a very specific approach to the accomplishment part of that essay that transforms run-of-the-mill answers into INSEAD-worthy submissions, but we're going to keep that locked in the vault. The failure essay though ... we owe some thoughts to the masses, just as a public service.
As a follow up to my earlier post today (regarding the video HBS references in their essay prompt), I wanted to unleash a marathon of HBS Case Method videos that I found during my research. So grab some popcorn and sit back - this is sure to beat the Game of Thrones marathon you had planned for tonight (but not really.) Ha.
No doubt everyone in this space will be analyzing those changes today (I am too), but my guess is they will come to incorrect conclusions in many cases. There are a lot of reasons why people make incorrect determinations when analyzing changes, but much of it can be attributed to cognitive bias - everything from recency bias to bounded rationality to confirmation bias. We tend to read things in one way and our flow of assumptions follows that set path. I will explain what I mean with the context of each questions - but just be forewarned that this blog post serves two functions: an analysis of Tuck's questions, but also an attempt to figure out why people trip up and make errors in interpretation.
I taught the GMAT for about 3 years. In that time, I had the pleasure of teaching over 250 students. Along the way, I also had the privilege of helping a select few craft their admissions packages. Based on my experience and in order of importance, I present the following 8 factors I consider critical to getting into a top b-school:
