Chicago Booth
Amerasia Consulting
How to Approach the HBS Interview

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.

How to Approach the HBS Interview
Application Advice, Application Process
Amerasia Consulting
Are You MBA-Ready? Here Are 5 Indicators You Are

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.

Are You MBA-Ready? Here Are 5 Indicators You Are
B-school Life, Key Thoughts, Leadership
Amerasia Consulting
How to Prepare for Important Career Moments

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.

How to Prepare for Important Career Moments
Key Thoughts, Leadership
Amerasia Consulting
5 Ways To Becoming an Effective Manager

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.

5 Ways To Becoming an Effective Manager
Key Thoughts, Yale SOM, Gender Equality
Amerasia Consulting
Women And Equality at the Leadership Table

Imposter syndrome for women is real, according to Kris Mercuri, director of MBA admissions, recruiting, and outreach at Yale, and women must acknowledge it as one of the things they can manage. Women are required in all areas as thought leaders and decision-makers but how do women can actually get there? In this blog post, we discuss the obstacles of gender parity and how to overcome them.

Women And Equality at the Leadership Table

Applicant Strategy

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Personalizing Your Interest in an MBA Program

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Time for a quick blog post that comes from what I'm seeing each day, which is really rigid, hard-to-read Why School X sections.  I give the same note to every single client so now I'm giving it to everybody: the simplest and most important thing you can do to improve your Why School X portion of career goals essay is to personalize any and all content.  

What do I mean by "personalize?"  Simple: make anything you write about the school specific to you, your experience, your desires, or what you require from a program.  Never just state absolutes, generalities, or even known truths and facts - always make them personally-held viewpoints.  Examples are the best way to understand this (after the jump): 

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A Decision Tree for the Ross 2014-15 Essays

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A Decision Tree for the Ross 2014-15 Essays

I wanted to try something a bit different today when breaking down the new Ross essays, which is to post the decision tree I am going to be asking my clients to use this year. 

Why would I just share this with the public, you might ask?  In part because the real value of our services with Ross (unlike with some other schools) is going to be in implementation rather than in the setting of strategy - so I don't feel I am cheating my clients at all.  Further, we just don't have that many clients select Ross, to be honest.  This is confusing to me, as Ross is an amazing school and a true value pick ... but that's a column for a different time.  Today, I want to present a really simple way to work through Ross' seemingly wide open essays.  I'll be using one part common sense and one part program knowledge, but both are born out of lots of experience just being someone in this world (by "in this world" I mean working in "higher education" and with "people trying to maximize their lives and abilities").  Let's get into it. 

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A Decision Tree for Your Chicago Booth Presentation Essay

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A Decision Tree for Your Chicago Booth Presentation Essay

It's very rare that we blog at the height of the deadline season, but something is coming up a lot that a quick post might help people with - and that is what to do with Booth Essay 3 when your presentation isn't coming together like you want. 

With the deadline bearing down, not everyone is able to make things happen exactly the way they want and the compulsion to use a "great essay" (from another school) rather than create a Powerpoint presentation is quite strong.  However, there are many experts on record - including us, in our Booth Strategy Memo that all clients receive - saying that you basically must use a presentation format.  So, what should you do? 

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Should You "Think Bravely" on Your Kellogg Application?

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Should You "Think Bravely" on Your Kellogg Application?

We just finished the Round 1 gauntlet (for the most part - yes, we're talking to you, NYU Stern applicants!)  We noticed in the October flurry that many of our clients were concerned about Kellogg's new marketing slogan.  In case you haven't noticed, Kellogg recently launched a new "motto" that reads: "Think Bravely: we believe that business can be bravely led, passionately collaborative, and world changing."

The introduction of this laboratory-cooked slogan caused much hand-wringing among Round 1 applicants, so now that we have a moment, we wanted to address it and help out those of you applying to Kellogg in Round 2.  So, should you focus your applications on "Thinking Bravely"?  Let's break it down.

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5 Tips for Applying to MIT Sloan

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5 Tips for Applying to MIT Sloan

MIT Sloan is one of "those" schools - the ones that seem to slip into the nooks and crannies of the admissions process. People don't talk about Sloan as much as its elite counterparts. Nobody immediately thinks about it in terms of being a top 5 program until you start digging and realize, wow, this program is insanely good.

Most importantly, because of its unique end-of-October deadline and equally unique two-round admissions process, we would wager that application quality on Sloan apps is far lower than on other top programs (which is a massive problem if you want to be admitted there). Candidates often don't even start on their Sloan apps until after the October 3-12 gauntlet of deadlines and then they race to finish because they fear waiting until the "last" round. 

With those things in mind, we are breaking out another of our 5 Tips posts, with an eye toward improving the quality of Sloan applications.