MBA admissions consultants

When you select an MBA program, you are not just choosing your learning environment, but are also making a commitment to a community. Each Thursday, we offer a window into life “beyond the MBA classroom” at a top business school.

Each Wednesday night, UCLA Anderson students get together at a different bar near campus for drinks and student performances as part of “Lit Club,” short for “Literary Club.” The name is ironic, because the student performances are not actually literary, but rather are short, tongue-in-cheek readings. According to an Anderson alumnus, the readings, written and delivered by students known as “librarians,” usually cover funny events that took place at Anderson during the week and are sometimes accompanied by a slide show.

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.

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

For positive integer m, the m-th heptagonal number is given by the formula (5m2 – 3m)/2. For positive integer n, the n-th triangular number is the sum of the first n positive integers. Which of the following is true for k, the smallest triangular number that is also heptagonal?

(A) 33 ? k ? 40
(B) 41 ? k ? 48
(C) 49 ? k ? 56
(D) 57 ? k ? 64
(E) 65 ? k ? 72

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose an MBA program, but the educational experience at business school is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we focus on James Schrager from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Although he has a PhD from the University of Chicago in Organizational Behavior and Policy, James E. Schrager (“New Venture Strategy”) is not just an academic, but also a practitioner, able to claim that he helped take the first private American company public on the Tokyo stock exchange and helped turn around aspects of the Pritzker family holdings, which were ultimately sold to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Students we interviewed noted that Schrager brings his high-level experiences to class but remains entirely in touch with students’ more modest perspectives, adapting his anecdotes accordingly and creating practical learning points that pertain to what students will face early in their post-MBA careers. One second-year student told mbaMission, “He is not up in the sky, but very practical, and by the way, his class is always full.” Students’ grades in Schrager’s “New Venture Strategy” class are based in part on the success of a business idea the students present to their peers—the other students act as venture capitalists and give feedback on the idea.

For more information about Chicago Booth and 15 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.

On our blog and in public presentations, we have tried to persuade candidates to eschew rankings, which fluctuate frequently (and sometimes wildly), and instead pay attention to fit, which is enduring. Now, as the admissions season is on the verge of beginning at top business schools, we recommend that you accelerate your evaluative process.

One way to get beyond rankings is to speak with students. Even if you don’t have direct access to students, reaching out to them in a targeted way can be quite easy, via club Web sites. You should not feel “pushy” when emailing or contacting a student this way, because most students take pride in their school and are open to speaking with candidates. They are a de facto part of the school’s marketing arm. So, if you are interested in a certain school for its marketing program, for example, you can reach out to the individual (or individuals) leading the marketing club to learn more about the program (and the club!). Of course, you should be respectful of each individual’s time and be well prepared for your conversation. If you are conscientious, you will be able to learn more about the academic environment and then have time to find out more about the atmosphere on campus. Networking now should allow you to begin narrowing your search and more effectively focus your limited “free” time over the next few months.

A group of 21 business schools from around the world, including the Yale School of Management (SOM), INSEAD, IE Business School in Spain and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, will join forces to form a Global Network, allowing the academics at the participating schools to engage in deeper levels of collaborative work and even create degree programs together. Spearheaded by Yale SOM’s Dean Edward Snyder, the network aims to expand the business schools’ partnerships beyond just student/faculty exchanges and joint degree programs. Last week, all the participating schools met to design an agenda, set up contacts at each school and organize an annual conference. The first initiative that the network will undertake is creating a jointly administered Master of Advanced Management program at Yale SOM, which will accept 12-15 Global Network students for a one-year program.  Each school also hopes its faculty will take part in joint research and case writing, in addition to expanding knowledge about other markets and job prospects for graduates. If this collaboration is successful, other top business schools just might be looking to form similar relationships around the globe or join this group.

Candidates often worry about exceeding schools’ requested word limits, even by a mere word or two. Although we certainly believe that staying within the stated limits is best and advise candidates to do so, we also feel that admissions directors are rational individuals who are not unnecessarily punitive. We have a difficult time imagining that an admissions director would ever say, “We think this candidate will be the next great CEO, but he exceeded the limit by 20 words, so we don’t want him.” Basically, we recommend that candidates not exceed word limits by more than 5%, but we also suggest that applicants use good judgment and avoid exceeding them on every essay. Although again, we advise applicants to stick as closely to stated limits as possible, we have certainly seen candidates get into Harvard Business School with one or two 420-word essays, even though the school’s word limits are set at 400.

We invite candidates to make case-by-case judgment calls with word limits, but we view page limits differently. We strongly insist that our candidates stay within established page limits. When one exceeds a set word limit, this is not immediately clear, but this is certainly not the case when one exceeds a set page limit! Adding an additional page, even if only to include an extra sentence or two, sends a clear message to the admissions committee that you are disregarding the rules—something you obviously do not want to do!

When it comes to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this weekly blog series, Manhattan GMAT’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.

(Part 3 in a series; read Part 1 and Part 2.)

In previous posts, we’ve talked about what Integrated Reasoning (IR) is, when the new test is going to launch and what the questions will look like. We’ve also talked briefly about the scoring and implications for b-school applications.

Probably the single biggest challenge we face with IR is the sheer volume of information we’re given. For some prompts, it doesn’t seem possible that we can even read through all of the information in 2.5 minutes, let alone answer the questions. One major difference between IR and the quant section is that we are given a lot of extraneous information. Part of our task is to figure out what we do need and what we can ignore.

Fully reading and analyzing every last piece of information in all of the prompts is therefore not going to be possible—in fact, we’re going to have to be even more aggressive about reading selectively than we have to be when reading Reading Comprehension (RC) passages. Multi-Source Reasoning (MSR) prompts tend to be the most text heavy; luckily, these include three separate questions, so we have a total of 7.5 minutes (on average) to read the prompt and answer all the questions. Two-Part Analysis prompts that are more like verbal questions tend to be the length of long Critical Reasoning (CR) passages; those that are more like quant questions aren’t all that different, though they do tend to be on the long-and-wordy side, like a math story problem. Both of these types benefit from a complete read through, though, as with RC, you’ll have to recognize which things are just details and skim over those more (you can come back to the details later).

Table Analysis prompts can often be the most intimidating at first glance—a table might include 15 or 20 rows of data! Read the text that describes what’s in the table, but don’t even bother looking at the data itself until after you’ve read the question and know what you need to do. On one of the Table questions, I had a chart with 17 rows of data, but I only needed four of the rows to answer the questions. I was able to literally ignore the rest.

Graphical Interpretation prompts will often include graph types with which you may not be very familiar right now.  Familiarizing yourself with the different types of graphs you might see is important; this will make the Graph questions a lot easier to answer. Again, go straight for the graph description text first. There’s a good chance you’ll need to look at the graph to help yourself understand what the description is saying. I found that I had to do this on all three of my Graph prompts on my first GMATPrep.

Want to try some out? You can download GMATPrep 2.0 at www.mba.com. There are also sample questions available on that same Web site. Have fun!

With the job market mixed for new MBAs these days, Harvard Business School (HBS) has put together an arsenal of resources to help students in their job search. Students begin by completing an online self-assessment program before they even arrive on campus. The CareerLadder tool, developed by a member of the HBS faculty, helps incoming students identify their life interests, professional skills and “work/reward” values.  When they arrive on campus, first-year students participate in a class that helps them interpret their CareerLadder results while discussing cases on the careers of HBS alumni. Later in the semester, but before official recruiting begins, students can attend Industry Weeks, which are on-campus programs and panels that provide overviews of a variety of industries and address how to plan a successful industry-specific job search. These are taught by career coaches, alumni, Career Services staff and company representatives. First years can also join Career Teams, which are small groups of other first-year students who use exercises, facilitated by trained second-year leaders, to help identify and advance their professional goals. Students may also arrange to meet with one of 35 career coaches for one-on-one coaching or take advantage of one of the many student clubs that help prepare their members for interviews.  Clearly, HBS takes nothing for granted and is committed to not just finding jobs, but to finding the “right” jobs for its students.