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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 is what 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 Harry Kraemer from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

A 2008 winner of the Lavengood Award for Outstanding Professor of the Year at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Harry Kraemer (“Managerial Leadership”) is a Kellogg alumnus (MBA ’79) and was CEO and president of Baxter International (a $9B health care firm) before becoming an adjunct professor at the school. Kraemer remains active in the business community as an executive partner at Madison Dearborn, a Chicago-based private equity firm. Students we interviewed described how Kraemer fuses theory and practice, bringing CEOs from some of the biggest companies in the United States to his class, but outsiders need not worry that such a successful individual would be out of touch with the common student—Kraemer is known for offering students one-on-one career guidance, even if they are not enrolled in his class.

For more information about Kellogg 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.

Moran Amir, commonly referred to as “Mo” by her peers, is a second year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of ADORNIA Fine Jewelry, the online destination to learn about and shop for fine jewelry. By applying innovative editorial content and fashion merchandising to the fine jewelry segment, ADORNIA reintroduces the art and tradition of jewelry to a modern generation of women. In Part 3 of this series, Mo describes to mbaMission how she met her ADORNIA business partner, Bex Aronson, and the importance of the Wharton network in growing her business.

Trite, albeit true: I chose the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to connect with its 80,000+ alumni network scattered all over the globe and encompassing leaders in every industry. I had entered my undergraduate school, New York University (NYU), a semester later than my peers because of visa issues and so lost the key networking opportunity of those first few months. I departed NYU with strong yet disparate sets of friends who ended up in career paths that did not confer immediate benefits on mine.

The fashion industry gave me a significant network, but early on, I knew that I was never going to fit into the culture of the archetypal fashion girls. Though embodying the fashion world’s gestalt—5’10’’, international and well-heeled—I was still much too righteous to limit my calorie intake and much too cerebral to remember to reapply my lipstick. More than I loved my Balenciaga bag, I loved learning about the business model behind it. I ascended professional ranks very quickly and left many of my peers behind both mentally and physically.

Through my Wharton peers, I found my cheerleading squad and much of the confidence I needed to found ADORNIA Fine Jewelry. My Wharton classmates are an impressive group of people, and I didn’t have to look that hard within and outside my cohort to find outstanding individuals. They are international hotel entrepreneurs, marketing geniuses, private equity stars, medical doctors and classical pianists. Some like cheesesteaks, while others prefer arugula. They hail from Beverly Hills and Bombay. This is an incredible group comprising Jews and Arabs, fashion girls and rugby players, the gay and the allied.

And then there is Bex, my talented business partner in ADORNIA. I caught her attention at a loud bar the first week of school by recounting to her the exact outfit she had worn at the Welcome Weekend for admitted Wharton applicants four months earlier. At that moment, we knew instantly that we’d be good friends. Prior to Wharton, Bex had been an accessories editor for Lucky magazine and a fashion editor for Redbook magazine. Given our fashion backgrounds, we both were involved in the Wharton Graduate Retail Club and the school’s annual Charity Fashion Show. She founded Wharton’s first-ever fashion blog, The Whartorialist, and hired me as one of her editors.

We fetishized leopard prints, organized Shabbat dinners, vacationed in Europe and talked serious business—the jewelry business. I found an amazing friend and business partner for life, and we forged a connection so strong that our unit requires just one word: bexandmo. And a highly complementary business pairing we are! Bex handles most of the creative facets of ADORNIA, whereas I manage most of the operational aspects. Only at a place like Wharton can such synergistic skill sets come together and formidable friendships be created that help drive business. ADORNIA is a natural extension of our labor, our passion and our friendship.

Launching the business a few weeks before starting the second year of the MBA program at Wharton, I did not know what to expect coming back to campus. Needless to say, my close friends and the larger class have proved to be an endless source of enthusiasm for ADORNIA. I utilized my industry contacts to land a spot on the roster of Philadelphia’s first-ever Fashion’s Night Out at an esteemed boutique, Plage Tahiti, in the city’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. Bex and I sent invites to our Wharton peers, and the turnout from them was incredible. We have managed to attract sales from Internet strangers through our promotional efforts, but we can’t help but smile bigger every time a Wharton friend’s name pops up on our new orders log. Building the business in the company of our peers at school has been a boon for ADORNIA. It has allowed us to nurture ADORNIA’s growth in these early stages by tapping into a natural support network and captive audience of women. This Wharton bootstrap will help ADORNIA go far.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school to attend, but the educational experience itself 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 profile Gary B. Gorton from the Yale School of Management.

Gary B. Gorton (“Capital Markets”) has been the Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Management and Finance at the Yale School of Management (SOM) since 2008, before which he taught at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Gorton is formerly a director of the research program on banks and the economy for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and a senior economist at the Federal Reserve in Philadelphia, and his research focuses on such topics as the role of stock markets, banks and bank regulation. His book Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007 (Oxford University Press, USA, 2010) offers an in-depth analysis and discussion of the recent financial crisis. Gorton, who studied bank crises as part of his PhD work at the University of Rochester, notes on his Web site, “When I wrote it [the book], I never dreamed I would live through one.” The “Capital Markets” course Gorton teaches likewise focuses on the 2007 financial crisis, particularly as it related to capital markets. In it, he uses a mixture of case studies and lectures that touch on current financial events, and he expects students to keep up with the latest developments on the finance scene by reading the business sections of the New York Times, the Financial Times, Bloomberg News, and the Wall Street Journal.

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

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.

Recently, a new student asked me what he could do to get the most out of our class at Manhattan GMAT and his study time over the next several months, and I decided to write a short blog post to share what I told him.

Much of what we discussed boiled down to avoiding these two mistakes that many GMAT studiers make:

1. “Doing” rather than “Analyzing”

The GMAT is not a math test or a grammar test—really, it is not! It is a reasoning test, and I am not just referring to critical reasoning. The GMAT is really a test of how we think. If that is not your primary focus when studying, you will not get the best score you could get.

Do NOT make the mistake of equating “doing” hundreds of problems with learning. You learn when you analyze problems—the actual problem text, your thought processes and solution, alternate solutions and so on. All of this analysis takes place after you have answered the question.

2. Prioritizing “Correct” over “Efficient”

Clearly, we do want to answer questions correctly; if we get everything wrong, we are not going to get a very good score. The issue here, though, is one of priorities. Timing is just as important as accuracy, yet everyone starts off prioritizing accuracy over time (and many, if not most, people never change that mind-set).

Do NOT tell yourself that you are going to master all of the content first and then you will figure out that timing stuff “later.” Unless you have unlimited time to spend studying, you need to deal with timing right from the start.

You can find the full original blog post on this topic here, including links to a few follow-on articles for various concepts, such as how to analyze practice problems. You do not need to read the original post, though, to understand the two main ideas: timing is critically important, and you learn when you analyze problems after you have finished answering them.

Happy studying!

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

Moran Amir, commonly referred to as “Mo” by her peers, is a second year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of ADORNIA Fine Jewelry, the online destination to learn about and shop for fine jewelry. By applying innovative editorial content and fashion merchandising to the fine jewelry segment, ADORNIA reintroduces the art and tradition of jewelry to a modern generation of women.  In Part 2 of this series, Mo describes to mbaMission how her learnings in the first year at Wharton complemented her retail industry knowledge and helped her conceive of ADORNIA.

In March 2012, the second semester of my first year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, my business partner and classmate, Becca Aronson (aka, Bex), and I conceived of ADORNIA Fine Jewelry, the online destination to learn about and shop for fine jewelry. Many of our classmates came to Wharton already knowing their career goals for the summer and had successfully secured their internships by the end of January. For Bex and I, both seasoned fashion industry professionals, the answers were less clear. After pondering our internship options for the summer between our first and second years at Wharton, we decided in April to make building ADORNIA our internship and top priority.

We closed our eyes and believed ADORNIA was an educated bet. After years of working in the fashion industry, Bex and I had paid our dues with significant sweat equity that could be poured into a successful new fashion concept. The summer months presented a less risky trial period in which to found and start to grow the company. Herein lies the benefit of a full-time MBA program: a place to experiment with your career, to challenge and heighten your prior business experience and to legitimize it all under the mantle of being a student. The opportunity costs of not interning over the summer for both Bex and I did not outweigh the learning experience and career potential that bringing ADORNIA to fruition offered.

We had first started to flesh out our idea for the business during the early days of meeting at Wharton but pivoted the concept significantly before putting pen to paper on ADORNIA by mid-March of our second semester. In between, we undertook quite a bit of learning in Huntsman Hall that helped us take the business idea from its half-formed, nascent stage to an operating and quickly growing start-up. I can certainly speak for my academic experience in this essay. My first-year coursework at Wharton coalesced with my industry background and allowed ADORNIA to happen.

In an introductory-level entrepreneurship class I took in the second quarter of the first semester—“Entrepreneurship” with Professor Ethan Mollick—our final project required us to conceptualize a business and concretize it with a business plan. Though ADORNIA was not the final project I submitted, the search for a plausible business idea to satisfy the course requirements prompted me to further research the apparel and accessories markets. I grew interested in fine jewelry after months of reading about the jewelry trade in publications such as eMarketer and Women’s Wear Daily, provided as part of Wharton’s extensive business resources at Lippincott Library.

I learned that the online jewelry segment had experienced consistent double-digit growth over the past several years—including 17% between 2010 and 2011. Online jewelry sales also represented the third fastest-growing e-commerce category and the first fastest-growing e-commerce fashion category. By applying a market-sizing approach I learned in my introductory-level entrepreneurship course, I gleaned that fine jewelry represented a $42 billion market, but only 8% of that market—$4.3 billion—was transacted in the online setting. Men’s acquisitions of unfinished diamonds for bridal purposes comprised the vast majority of that $4.3 billion market.

A huge prospect appeared to me to bring a non-bridal perspective to fine jewelry sales online. To further support my nascent business vision, I applied the lessons I learned in Professor Dan Levinthal’s core “Competitive Strategy” course to analyze the competitive landscape in the online jewelry market and to carve out a strategic position. By plotting those companies on a two-by-two matrix chart, I could see that this burgeoning market needed a fine jewelry destination with a fashion approach and discovery-driven content model to effectively compete with the existing jewelry players. Enter ADORNIA.