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Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school to attend, but the educational experience itself is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we highlight a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we profile Nicolaj Siggelkow from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Known for being a protégé of the strategy guru Michael Porter, Nicolaj Siggelkow (“Strategy and Competitive Advantage,” “Managing Established Enterprises” and “Career Planning”) is just as well known at Wharton for pushing students to clarify their answers in his class—using buzzwords such as “added value” and “frameworks” can earn a cold-called student 30 minutes or so of additional questioning. A second year called Siggelkow simply “the best professor at Wharton for leading a case,” and another remarked, “He will whip your ass into shape, so you must prepare for class—or don’t bother coming!”

Siggelkow expects his students to come prepared to class, and students in the Wagat guide (Wharton’s ode to the Zagat guide, but for courses rather than restaurants) have said that the workload for each session of his “Strategy and Competitive Advantage” course is far heavier than the norm, to say the least. (In course evaluations from a prior academic year, the workload required for his classes was rated 3.78, whereas the average at the time was 3.13.) Still, students appear to respect him for this toughness, and he has earned six teaching awards (eight, if we include undergrad business awards) in his 16 years at Wharton.

Chair of the management department, Siggelkow received the Class of 1984 Award for being the faculty member with the highest teaching rating in 2006, was the student-selected Faculty Marshal in 2010 and even made a guest appearance in the Wharton Follies in 2006. Siggelkow is also a co-director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, a Wharton research center that coordinates multidisciplinary learning between business leaders, academic researchers and students.

For more information on other defining characteristics of the MBA program at UPenn Wharton or one of 15 other top business schools, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

mbaMission celebrated its fifth annual consultant conference this past weekend in New York City, flying in the entire staff from around the world for two days of intense discussions about best practices and superior client engagement techniques. We are the only MBA admissions consulting firm in the industry to host such a conference and to invest so heavily in developing a skilled, cohesive, full-time team. We hire consultants for whom MBA consulting is more than simply a job or a part-time gig—it is a professional calling. For this reason, we feel that regularly convening to share our collective expertise and find ways to grow together to best serve our clients is an important part of our business.

Highlights from this year’s conference included a number of insightful presentations and teach-ins from various members of our consultant team, such as a mock client (essay topic) brainstorming exercise, a “Think Like the AdCom” business school application review, a deep dive into the implications of an increasingly prominent GRE (with our friends from Manhattan GRE), a best practices session focusing on recommendations and a session devoted to helping candidates define their career strategies. Through these events, we affirm our commitment each year to providing superior MBA admissions guidance, led by the highest-caliber team of dedicated professionals.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school, but the educational experience itself is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we highlight a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we profile Nejat Seyhun from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Known for his work in breaking the story on backdating options for corporate executives in 2006, Nejat Seyhun (“Options and Futures in Corporate Decision Making”) was praised by a second-year student with whom we spoke not only for his technical expertise but also for his willingness to regularly share his thoughts on current events with students. In fact, Seyhun takes the first ten minutes of each class to engage in a dialogue on what is making news in finance and how it could affect his students—from government bailout packages to new regulations. Added the second year, these thoughts “make the class interesting and relevant.”

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

In our “What I Learned at…” series, MBAs discuss the tools and skills their business schools provided as they launched their careers.

Sandi Lin is the CEO and founder of Skilljar, which provides businesses with online course software. Before founding Skilljar, Sandi was a senior manager at Amazon.com in Seattle. She earned her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In the final part of this three-part series, Sandi discusses her path from MBA to CEO, highlighting the aspects of her MBA experience that have proven the most valuable to her as an entrepreneur. (Click here to read Part 1 and here to read Part 2.)

Starting a company is an incredibly messy process, the details of which are often forgotten later. Within my first year as a CEO, I fired two team members for cause, changed the company name three times and made one complete pivot. I also launched two different products, taught myself to code well enough to launch a minimally viable product, participated in an intense three-month accelerator program called TechStars Seattle and raised over $1M from investors, including from fellow GSB alumni. All of this is normal in early-stage companies.

I used to joke that being a CEO was the easiest thing in the world—all you had to do was quit your job. In reality, one of the hardest parts of being CEO is that I am constantly changing job functions and taking on roles in which I have had very little experience, from fundraising to coding to sales.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that business comes down to relationships. The Stanford GSB excels at building those relationships among students, as well as providing the tools to strengthen those networks post-graduation.

What is particularly great about Stanford is its emphasis on experiential learning. Applying many of the principles learned in “Touchy Feely” (see Part 2 of this series) to the workplace, I learned much more about team dynamics, my own management style and how to have difficult conversations (e.g., firing) in such courses as “High Performance Leadership.” Another class that stands out in my mind is “Leadership Laboratories,” which places first-year students in small groups to role-play business scenarios, and culminates in various leadership challenges against GSB alumni during the Executive Challenge.

What I also valued about my MBA experience was the ability to gain exposure to a lot of different topics, from sales and operations to finance, marketing and more. As CEO, I switch between these functions every single day. As my company grows (as I hope it will!), I will eventually be able to delegate some of these tasks. But much of a start-up’s success in the early days is doing more with less, and even a basic grasp of the fundamentals has put me ahead of my peers.

The bottom line is that start-ups are all about rapid learning, flexibility and giving yourself an extra edge to stand out from the crowd. Personally, I believe going to Stanford GSB provided me with the best foundation to become the entrepreneur I am today.

Update: Dustin Cornwell left Southern Methodist University’s (SMU’s) Cox School of Business in September 2014. 

We had the pleasure of chatting with Dustin Cornwell, who is the director of admissions at Southern Methodist University’s (SMU’s) Cox School of Business and who provided us with some interesting insights on various aspects of the MBA program it offers. In addition to addressing Cox’s identity as a business school, Dustin shared his thoughts on the following:

• What drew him, as a veteran of the admissions world with more than a decade of experience, to want to be a part of SMU Cox
• The unique nature of the school’s primary mentoring program
• Cox’s new business analytics concentration and one-year master’s degree
• The program’s compelling dual degree and specialty programs, including its MA in arts administration and exciting CFA Fast Track offering
• What makes an applicant stand out in a positive way and what he sees as red flags
• What alumni tell him was their “favorite and most memorable” part of the Cox experience

mbaMission: Thanks so much for joining me today, Dustin.

Dustin Cornwell: You’re welcome. I’m happy to be taking part in this.

mbaMission: We’ve been trying to for a couple years now to interview admissions directors to get beyond the surface-level questions and the things you can basically pick up on a school’s Web site. We want to get people learning more about different aspects of the experiences the programs have to offer.

DC:  That’s great. I think that is key for candidates, too, standing out with their story, because part of what the admissions committee does is looking beyond the stats and seeing what’s really there. Somebody with the same metrics as somebody else might get admitted and the other person might not, you know? And it’s because of other things in their background, their goals, their work experience, that kind of stuff.

mbaMission:  True. So when I think of the Cox MBA, I think of small class size, I think of Dallas—and I’ve heard from a variety of people that Dallas has a tremendous trajectory for the next couple decades. And I was surprised when I looked through the employment stats and saw that the percentage of graduates entering the financial industry is just slightly higher than the percentage entering the energy industry. So, do you feel that you’re an energy school, or a financial school, or basically, what you feel your professional identity should be?

DC:  Sure. Well, about half of our students are interested in some aspect of finance. That tends to be our largest area of concentration. And within finance, we have four tracks. So within a concentration, sometimes there are different tracks. Energy finance is one of those. So energy is kind of a subspecialty within our finance concentration, and we see some overlap there with students looking at working in the financial aspects of the energy industry. We see a lot of students who are going into other roles in energy as well, things like consulting opportunities, project management opportunities, things like that, particularly for our students who come from an engineering undergrad background. Primarily, though, when students are interested in the energy industry, it tends to be more on the financial side, the investing side—investing in the growth of that industry, because it is booming right now in the United States—or working with wealth management, working with corporate finance with one of the energy companies, something along those lines. So they are kind of intertwined within our program.

mbaMission: Sure. So how would you describe Cox’s identity as a school?

DC:  That’s a tough question. It’s interesting talking with alumni and talking with students. I think it means different things to different people. The thing that really attracted me to come work here at SMU Cox was the strength of the alumni. I’ve worked at three other MBA programs in the past, and I’ve been in the industry for over ten years, and I think every school’s going to have a core of dedicated alumni. That’s going to be true just about anywhere. You’re going to have people who really enjoyed their experience and want to give back. I think what’s really distinctive here is how large that group is, how many alumni want to stay involved. And you see that in so many ways.

For example, when we have events for admitted students on campus or for prospective students, we often invite alumni to come and mix and mingle and talk with students about their experience. And I always have more volunteers than I need when I send out an invite to alumni, and I haven’t had that experience in other places. So that’s something that kind of struck me right away when I first started here over two years ago. And also, alumni join us for a number of events we have on campus, whether it’s as guest speakers, on panels or to talk to our current students, even tailgating events for football games in the fall. Typically, that’s associated with undergraduate alumni at most schools. You really have that affiliation very strongly with your undergraduate school, and here we get a lot of MBA alumni who come to those events and hang out with current students and have that sense of identity as part of SMU Cox. I think that really strengthens it.

So to get back to your question, I think in the Dallas–Fort Worth area and across Texas, SMU really enjoys a very strong reputation. It’s well known in the area. It’s something everybody’s familiar with, and it has the identity of a high-quality program. Students are well qualified for their positions, regardless of whether it’s marketing or finance or any other area, and they give back, you know? They really have that affiliation and affinity for the school and want to stay involved. So all those types of things are what come to mind when you’re talking about the identity of Cox.

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