Yesterday, Harvard’s President Drew Faust sent a letter to Harvard’s deans, informing them that the school’s endowment has shrunk by $8 billion (yes, $8 billion, but they still have $36 billion left.) While this figure represents the amount lost by Harvard as a whole and not by HBS exclusively, the fact remains that many business schools—which typically manage their own endowments—may now be facing significant losses. This could negatively affect the operating revenue generated by the endowments, thereby resulting in a reduction in scholarships being offered, an inability to hire or retain top professors, potential increases in tuition and more. Although it is not yet time to sound the alarm, candidates should pay some attention to this situation. Still, when interviewers ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” we would not recommend responding with “How is your endowment performing?”

Many bankers are expecting the worst as bonus season approaches and news has potentially leaked from Merrill Lynch that its bonus pool will drop by 50% this year.  Still, Bloomberg attempts to offer an encouraging note: “Even if Merrill set aside nothing for compensation in the fourth quarter, the firm’s 60,900 employees still would reap an average of $184,000 in compensation and benefits for the full year.” Of course, this would only be encouraging if your bonus was less than the average last year; it is doubtful that the average MBA at Merrill earned less.
 

Each week Integrated Learning posts a 700 level GMAT question on our blog and follows up with the answer the next day. Are you up for the challenge?

Of the 130 passengers on the airplane, 60 had been to France, 90 had been to England, and 80 had been to France or England, but not both.  How many people had been to both France and England?

A) 0
B) 15
C) 25
D) 35
E) 55

Integrated Learning  provides professional, experienced GMAT tutors throughout the United States.

When it comes to the tone of your essays, it is important that the Admissions Committees experience your certainty and self-confidence. Being clear and direct about who you are and how you see your future is vital. Consider the following basic examples:

Weak: “I now have adequate work experience and hope to pursue an MBA.”

Strong: “Through my work experience, I have gained both breadth and depth, providing me with a solid, practical foundation for pursuing my MBA.”

Weak: “I now want to pursue an MBA.”

Strong: “I am certain that now is the ideal time for me to pursue my MBA.”

Weak: “I have good quantitative skills and will succeed academically.”

Strong: “I have already mastered the quantitative skills necessary to thrive in my MBA studies.”

Weak: “With my MBA, I hope to establish myself as a leader.”

Strong: “I am certain that with my MBA, I will propel myself to the next levels of leadership.”

The key in all of these examples is to use self-confident language—instead of “hope,” use “will;” instead of “good” skills, show “mastery.” While it is important to avoid sounding arrogant, by being assertive and direct, you will inspire confidence in the reader and ensure that you make a positive impression.

As interview decisions continue to be released, it is important to remain calm and let the Admissions Committees do their work. While it is natural to be apprehensive if you have not yet received an interview invitation, you will not increase your chances by calling the Admissions Office and asking if they do indeed have all of your files or if an interview decision has been made. In fact, such calls can actually have a negative effect on your candidacy, inadvertently positioning you as pushy or even belligerent.

Admissions Offices are increasingly transparent and should be taken at their respective words. If they say they are still releasing decisions, then they are in fact still doing so. If they say that the timing of your interview decision does not signify an order of preference, then it does not. As painful as it is, unless something has changed materially in your candidacy, all you can really do is wait patiently and try not to think about the decision or second guess your status. 

Yesterday, Integrated Learning posted a 700 level GMAT question on our blog. Today, they have followed up with the answer:

Ans: C
This is a dependent probability problem.  If you want to find the probability of choosing 2 black marbles, you will need to figure out the probability that the first marble will be black and that the second marble will be black.  In this case, the question wants to know if that probability is larger than 1/3.

As you can see, when less than half the marbles are white, the probability of choosing 2 black marbles can be higher or lower than 1/3, depending on how many black marbles there are.  This is not sufficient.

Statement 2 tells us that the probability of choosing one black marble and one white marble is 7/15.  This is a trap.  Since the probability given is exact, it may seem that only one scenario of black marbles and white marbles will work.  If you work through all the scenarios, you will see that when there are 7 black marbles and 3 white marbles, the probability of choosing one of each is 7/15.  However, it would also be true in reverse: If there were 7 white marbles and 3 black marbles, the probability would also be 7/15.  Therefore, this is not enough information.

Combining them does give us enough information.  From statement 2 we know that there must be 7 of one color and 3 of the other, and from statement 1 we know that there must be more black than white, so we know there must be 7 black marbles and 3 white marbles.

Integrated Learning provides professional, experienced GMAT tutors throughout the United States.

Each week Integrated Learning posts a 700 level GMAT question on our blog and follows up with the answer the next day. Are you up for the challenge?

A jar has 10 marbles, either black or white.  2 marbles are randomly chosen simultaneously from the jar.  If q is the probability that both will be black , is q > 1/3?

1)  Less than ½ of the marbles in the jar are white.
2)  The probability that 1 white marble and 1 black marble will be chosen together is 7/15.

Integrated Learning  provides professional, experienced GMAT tutors throughout the United States.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Duke Professor Dan Ariely discusses his research on the effects of bonuses, revealing a somewhat counter-intuitive result: large bonuses lead to poor results with regard to cognitive tasks. Ariely mentions that he offered to test this hypothesis in an investment bank but, intuitively, could not find any takers.

If you were to read a skilled writer’s work (in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or New Yorker, for example), you would find articles that are characterized by “connectivity.” Simply put, a skilled writer ensures that each sentence is part of a chain—each sentence is dependent on the previous one and necessitates the next. With this linkage in place, the central idea is constantly moving forward, giving the story a natural flow and making it easy to follow. While you need not write at the same level as a professional journalist, you should still embrace this concept, as it is central to excellent essay writing. With a “connected” essay, you will grab and hold the reader’s attention.

You can test your essay’s connectivity by removing a sentence from one of your paragraphs. If the central idea in the paragraph still makes complete sense, then odds are you have superfluous language, are not advancing the story and should revise your draft.

Try this exercise with a random selection from the New York Times:

“For many grocery shoppers, the feeling is familiar: that slight swell of virtue that comes from dropping a seemingly healthful product into a shopping cart. But at one New England grocery chain, choosing some of those products may induce guilt instead. The chain, Hannaford Brothers, developed a system called Guiding Stars that rated the nutritional value of nearly all the food and drinks at its stores from zero to three stars. Of the 27,000 products that were plugged into Hannaford’s formula, 77 percent received no stars, including many, if not most, of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you. These included V8 vegetable juice (too much sodium), Campbell’s Healthy Request Tomato soup (ditto), most Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners (ditto) and nearly all yogurt with fruit (too much sugar).”

If you were to delete any of these sentences, you would create complete confusion for the reader, proving that each sentence is connected and vital!

In an article published yesterday, the New York Times (“Why Should Recession Stop the Recruiters?”) explores the employment situation on campus (again!), noting that MIT Sloan has seen a few companies delay or cancel recruiting visits and that Kellogg anticipates that some firms will ultimately rescind offers. This sobering news serves as a backdrop to a larger discussion of whether a “slash and burn” approach to headcount is the way to go. The article reminds readers of past recessions wherein employers have cut too deep and then found it quite difficult to ramp up when the economy later improved. Still, the question remains…. is anyone listening?