George T. Geis (“Entrepreneurship and Venture Initiation”) has been voted Outstanding Teacher of the Year four times while at Anderson and currently serves as faculty director of the school’s Executive Mergers and Acquisitions Program. Geis is also the editor of a Web site that provides analysis of mergers and acquisitions deals in technology, media, and communications (www.trivergence.com) and writes a mergers and acquisitions blog (http://maprofessor.blogspot.com). One recent alumnus described him to mbaMission as an experienced investor and a funny and credible guy. He added that he had very much enjoyed the guest speakers Geis brought to class, as well as the strategic analysis of the board game industry, covered in a case discussion about the game Trivial Pursuit.

For more information about the UCLA Anderson School of Management and 15 other top-ranked MBA schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Each year, approximately 100 first-year students at UCLA Anderson and a handful of second years participate in an annual ski and snowboarding trip at the end of winter quarter. In the past, students spent five days in Whistler Blackcomb, Vancouver, but for the past two years, the ski trip has been to Breckenridge, Colorado. One first-year student we interviewed simply stated, “I feel bad for everyone who did not go on the Breckenridge ski trip this year.”

For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at UCLA Anderson or 15 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

For more information on UCLA Anderson or 15 other leading MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

William “Bill” S. Cockrum (“Managing and Financing the Emerging Enterprise”) has won numerous teaching awards, has become a “legend” for the case-study entrepreneurial financing course he teaches, and is credited on UCLA Anderson’s Web site with playing a key role in the school’s number one ranking for entrepreneurship by the Financial Times. He has taught more than 6,000 students at Anderson and was even recognized as the top entrepreneurship professor in the nation in a 1996 BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg Businessweek) survey.

For more information about the UCLA Anderson School of Management and 14 other top-ranked MBA schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

For more information on UCLA-Anderson or 14 other leading MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Challenge for Charity (C4C) is an annual fundraiser that brings students from nine business schools across the West Coast to the Stanford University campus to compete in a series of sporting events and trivia quizzes over a three-day period in the spring to raise money for the Special Olympics and a local nonprofit organization. During the academic year, students at the participating schools earn points for each hour of volunteer work they complete. Then, those students who have committed a minimum of six hours of C4C service are eligible to compete in the springtime event for the chance to win bragging rights and the coveted Golden Briefcase. UCLA Anderson students won the 2010 competition, having racked up the most volunteer hours and scored highest out of nine schools in the 26 sporting events that took place.

For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at Stanford, UCLA Anderson or 13 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Students in the LiS program must take four specified classes, including the LiS core course “Environmental Science and Engineering” and three sustainability-related courses, one of which must be taught outside the students’ primary graduate school. In total, the greater university offers more than 50 sustainability-related courses that Anderson students may choose from, ranging from “Effective Methods of Social Change” to “Management in Public and Private Nonprofit Sectors” to even “Urban Environmental Problems: Water Issues.” In addition to completing the program’s required four courses, LiS students must work on a team project related to sustainability with students from at least two other graduate schools within the university.

Moreover, mbaMission has learned that UCLA-Anderson recently hired a sustainability coordinator and has established positions for two sustainability chairs in each first-year section and one for second-year students. Business school may in fact be a window into the future…

For more information on UCLA-Anderson or 14 other leading MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Sanjay Sood (“Entertainment Marketing,” “Behavioral Research in Marketing,” “Elements of Marketing,” “Applied Management Research”) is an associate professor of marketing and the faculty director of the Center for Managing Enterprises in Media, Entertainment, and Sports at Anderson. An ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Consumer Research, Sood researches marketing management, brand management, advertising and consumer behavior. He was recognized as an MSI Young Marketing Scholar in 2003 and received his PhD in marketing from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 1999. One second-year student we interviewed for this guide said Sood brings “a lot of practical experience to the classroom” and uses connections from his work with Procter & Gamble to enhance his classes.

For more information about the UCLA Anderson School of Management and 14 other top-ranked MBA schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

REQUIRED ESSAYS:

Please be introspective and authentic in your responses. Content is more important than style of delivery. We value the opportunity to learn about your life experiences, aspirations, and goals.
1. What events or people have had the greatest influence in shaping your character and why?   (750 words)

In offering you the opportunity to discuss an event or people that have shaped your character, UCLA Anderson is trying to learn, not about others, but about you through others. So, if you were to write about Gandhi, you are not writing a biography of the man, but the story of his influence on you. Of course, we strongly advise that you not write about how Gandhi, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or some other highly notable public figure influenced you, because it will be very difficult to own your connection to this person – how has Gandhi, for example, influenced you, in a way that he has not influenced others? It is possible to write about how a less public philosopher or business leader influenced you, but the connection must truly be profound and his/her influences must be very deliberate in your current actions. You have to show how this person’s influence has manifest and indeed, “shaped” you.

Many candidates will write about family members, who can be a fine choice. Again, what needs to be clear is the cause and effect relationship. The reader needs to understand the profound influence the individual has had on you and needs not to learn about you through this person

Bad: My grandfather was born in 1935 in what is now Slovakia. He grew up on a farm and has subsequently always loved to grow his own vegetables.

Good: My first memories come from my grandfather’s garden, pulling up carrots, picking tomatoes and digging up potatoes. As we harvested what we had grown together, he would laugh and say to me, “You have to take time to watch the potatoes bloom…”

With respect to events, again, we are similarly learning about you through an externality and again, the event need not be known to the public, but here you have more leeway. For example, one could talk about the changes that occurred when a loved one went to fight in Iraq, but then, the experience is still focused on you and your life, your family, not on the war. Still, you need not worry if you did not have an experience that was this profound. Again, you simply need to think about an event that became an experience for you and the impact of it must be highly personal.

We often advise applicants to tell their stories narratively and to launch directly into the action; this approach would work particularly well for this essay. Starting this essay with a formal introduction, wherein you sum up for the reader what he/she is about to be told in the rest of the text, will prevent you from being able to create momentum or suspense in your story. Consider the following example:

Bad: “The most influential event in my life occurred when I defied expectations and was elected student president of my 50,000 person college.”

With this kind of opening, where is the mystery? Where do you go from there? By contrast, consider the following:

Good: “Rushing to class on a chilly fall morning, I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a poster advertising the upcoming class elections.”

By launching into the “action” of your story and maintaining the mystery within it, you will grab and hold your reader’s attention, and the story of your shaping event will have maximum impact.

2. What are your short-term and long-term career goals, and how will an MBA from UCLA Anderson specifically help you achieve these goals? (750 words)

Because Personal Statements are similar from one application to the next, we have produced the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge, via our online store. Please feel free to download your copy today.

Do not use up precious word count here detailing your professional career and accomplishments to date, but do include some general reference to your past work experience to frame why you need an MBA education to attain your stated goals. You must then clearly explain what UCLA Anderson offers in particular that will help you. As always, avoid telling the school what it already knows about itself, and instead strive to demonstrate links between specific offerings at the school and your aspirations. You will need to do your research to best identify direct ties between what Anderson offers and your professional goals, personal beliefs, study style, etc. The deeper your knowledge of the school, the easier pinpointing specific resources will be in the context of your future success, and thus, the more effective your essay will be. Take time to go beyond the school’s view book and Web site and contact students and alumni—and, ideally, visit the school and attend a class.

For a thorough exploration of UCLA Anderson’s academic program/merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to the UCLA Anderson School of Management.