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Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they select 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 profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we profile Robert A. Howell from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Robert Howell (“Financial Statement Interpretation and Analysis”) has been teaching for more than 40 years and is quite accomplished in the field of accounting and financial management, having served as chief financial officer of two publicly traded consumer product companies earlier in his career. In addition to teaching the “Financial Statement Interpretation and Analysis” course, Howell is the faculty advisor for the Tuck Investment Club. A recent graduate told mbaMission, “Everyone takes his class.” For one of the course’s major projects, which occurs near the end of the term, students work in teams to analyze a company and present their recommendation on whether to buy, hold or sell its stock. “Professor Howell has a sense of humor, and he told students that ‘it’s better to be directionally right and not precisely wrong,’” shared another alumnus.

A second year described Howell to mbaMission as “a character, and a really, really great professor,” adding, “His classes are very entertaining, and he is strongly opinionated. He makes even diagnosing financial statements fun; he operates on the assumption that these don’t tell you much unless you can unwind them, so it’s a very valuable class. I sometimes see him in the Tuck gym; he’s a really down-to-earth, approachable guy.” Another second-year student likewise spoke highly of Howell, saying, “He is a fantastic professor. The consummate practitioner-scholar, Professor Howell has an unsurpassed ability to simplify and explain complex financial concepts. More importantly, Professor Howell teaches a coherent investment philosophy regarding how to make investment decisions. I believe that the framework he provides will prove useful long into my career in finance. … [He] peppers his class discussions with pertinent anecdotes and examples underlying investment principles borne from his deep real-world experience and through his work teaching executives investment concepts.”

For more information about Dartmouth Tuck and 15 other top-ranked MBA schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

When MBA admissions officers read your application, they want feel inspired by your personal statement; they want to feel that you have a strong sense of purpose and that you will aggressively work toward your goals. So, you need to ensure that you are not presenting generic or shallow goals. Although this problem is not industry specific, it occurs most often with candidates who propose careers in investment banking or consulting but do not have a true understanding of what these positions entail.

For example,  a candidate cannot merely state,

“In the short term, when I graduate from Wharton, I want to become an investment banking associate. After three years, I will be promoted to vice president, and then in the long term, I will become a managing director.”

This hypothetical candidate does not express any passion for his/her proposed course, does not show any understanding of the demands of the positions and does not explain the value he could bring to the firm. We suggest that to avoid these kinds of shortcomings, you conduct this simple test when writing your personal statement: if you can easily substitute another job title into your career goals (“In the short term, when I graduate from Wharton, I want to become a consultant. After three years, I will be promoted to vice president and then in the long term, I will become a managing director.”), you know you have a serious problem on your hands and need to put more work into your essay.

To effectively convey your goals, you need to own your goals. This means personalizing them, determining and presenting why you expect to be a success in the proposed position and explaining why an opportunity exists for you to contribute. For example, a former forestry engineer could make a strong argument for joining an environmental impact consulting firm (Note: This candidate would still need to explain why he/she would want to join one.); similarly, a financial analyst in the corporate finance department at Yahoo! could connect his/her goals to tech investment banking. Although the connection need not be so direct (especially for candidates seeking to change careers), relating your past experiences and/or your skills to your future path is still extremely important. This approach will add depth to your essay and ensure that the admissions committee takes you seriously.

Update: Christine E. Sneva left Cornell University in 2017.

Recently, mbaMission had a truly fun and fascinating conversation with Christine Sneva, director of admissions and financial aid at Cornell Johnson. We covered a range of topics, from how Johnson reads applications to what changes have occurred in its admissions office recently, to what type of students Johnson attracts and exactly how much the interview counts. Here we offer some highlights from the interview, followed by a full transcript:

• Johnson recently hired its first full-time international recruiter
• The school focuses its recruiting on 55 “impact cities” around the world
• Johnson sees the students it accepts as “professionals with recognition and achievement, but they also have a lot of humility” and reports that recruiters see them the same way

mbaMission: You’ve been admissions director at Cornell Johnson for a little more than a year now. What do you think has changed in that time?

Christine Sneva: I’ve actually been in the admissions office for five years, but I’ve been admissions director for almost exactly one year. I think it might be exactly one year today that I was offered to be director of admissions, and I couldn’t be happier. I put a three-year strategic plan in place, and now in year two of this strategic plan, I’m thrilled with how far we have come. When I became the director last year, I knew we needed to focus on our foundation, especially in the office, in two ways. And those were understaffing and operations. For staffing, I hired an international recruiter based in London. It’s a first for Johnson and for Cornell. Anyone else who’s outside of Ithaca and working for Cornell is an independent contractor, basically on a short-term contract, and this is a full-time employee, as if she was here in Ithaca, so we are so thrilled to have Charli Taylor as part of the admissions team.

mbaMission: And she is just recruiting for Johnson?

CS: She is just recruiting for Johnson. It’s going to really allow us to have a bigger impact, particularly in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India. She will literally be on the road for over four months, and then she comes to Ithaca three times during the year. It’s great to have so much new energy here, and we have another new hire, Eddie Asbie. He has the kind of energy and presence that we want for people who are representing Johnson and our brand, and he is doing a phenomenal job. So, having the right people out there is certainly a big piece of what I wanted to accomplish in year one.

Also, I’ve taken the recruiting staff, and there are only four of us, and split everyone into important regions where we believe we could have a significant impact in attracting high-caliber students to Johnson. Certainly, I think everybody wants to cover the entire world, but we’re looking at particular cities that we are dedicated to traveling to several times in the year to showcase the strength of our alumni network in the areas of our key initiatives. We really want to make an impact when it comes to our recruiting, and that’s through current students, alumni, corporate development and support with our academic programs, including our faculty. There are a lot of Cornell connections, and we are strategizing around this.

mbaMission: Can you share what those focus cities are?

CS: I could, but there are about 55 of them.

mbaMission: The impact cities? There are 55 of them? Wow!

CS: There are 55. That’s why we’re splitting them up. Our senior associate director, Ann Richards, is covering Latin America and East and Southeast Asia. We’ve already recruited in East and Southeast Asia, and she’s going back in September, and then we have a student trip focused on new applicants in December in that area alone. Charli will be in the Middle East twice—actually, three times—one time she’s going with the MBA tour, and she’s also doing two cities with our new dean, and then we’re also traveling with a few of our peer schools in the Middle East. So, these are different examples that I can certainly share of where we’re going to be and how we’re looking at recruiting. We’re looking at faculty that are going to be giving specific talks in North America, in Europe and in Seoul. It is our job to showcase who we are at Johnson as well as answer admissions questions

The second thing I was talking about with the strategic plan is operations, and that’s a real foundation, not only for how we function with applications here behind the scenes, but it also has a large impact on the applicant-facing side as well. And so last year, I was about a month in from being named the director, and I hired a consultant to walk through a reengineering process that changed many of our assumptions from “this is how we always did it” to making what we considered a wish list into a reality.

Read the rest of this entry  

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

Every once in a while, a concerned business school candidate calls us and says something like “Star491 wrote that Wharton won’t read past the 500-word limit, but IndianaHoops09 wrote that 10% over the limit is fine. Meanwhile, WannabeTuckie says….” Some of you may be guffawing as you read this, but the truth is that many people have difficulty not reading the various message boards, and some have even more difficulty not believing everything they read there. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, message boards are completely unregulated, and the opinions expressed by the anonymous posters should be viewed skeptically. For every individual who claims to know something authoritatively, there is always another individual who claims to know that the opposite is true. Round and round we go…

So, our message is to ignore anonymous posters. Although this should be valuable advice for you now, as you complete your first-round applications (ideally with your sanity intact), it will become even more valuable to you as the year progresses and many posters begin to make unsubstantiated claims about admissions statistics (offers given, GMAT scores of accepted candidates, etc.). If you tune out such noise now and put your energy instead into creating your best possible application(s), you will be far better off.

Of course, if you do have any questions, you can always ask us on the message boards over at Manhattan GMAT, Beat the GMAT or GMAT Club. Or sign up for a free one-on-one consultation!

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

Sandra Persing is the founder and farmer of Persing Woods LLC, a holistic wellness company that includes a working goat farm and apiary and that provides business development support for local farmers and other wellness professionals. Sandra believes that wellness is fundamental in living a good life. In this four-part series, Sandra reflects on how her business acumen and MBA education from the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University helped her turn this belief into a solution that future MBAs can embrace as part of their own life journey.

The most surprising moment for me at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell was when my entrepreneurship professor kindly requested that I come to his office to have a chat about my post-graduation plans. I expected a lively brainstorming conversation about my proposed venture and solid advice on how to make sure it would be a success. Instead, I felt as though my father had sat me down for a talking to. He was concerned about my future, because he thought I was wasting my MBA prospects by going into farming. In a gentle, encouraging tone, he advised me to push my farm plans aside for several years, while I gained real, meaningful experience with a major consulting firm—which he suggested would be a great outlet for my energy, smarts and passion. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t quite figure out why it was folly to apply my learning and knowledge in organization, operations, financial management and presentation skills to raising and providing food and cultivating truly sustainable natural resources. And if my entrepreneurship professor, whom I deeply respected, was pointing this mistake out to me, maybe I was a naïve girl who needed to be set straight.

Doubt plagued me for weeks, and I reviewed my options again. I submitted my resume for traditional internships, hoping that I still had time to land a “proper job,” although it was nearly summer. I had the good fortune of finding an opening right in Elmira, where I lived, with the Cornell Cooperative Extension office. They needed someone to help them compile a resource database for entrepreneurs and small business owners in the Southern Tier District. The pay was near nothing, but I found this to be a great compromise between a proper office job and a way for me to continue to develop my own scheme. It was also a great way for me to do my own research and scout local resources.

For three months, I focused on filling out paperwork to establish the farm as a proper LLC and talked to goat breeders in the region to learn as much as I could about raising a herd. After deciding to include bees and raw honey as products to offer from the land, I procured equipment and found a local large animal veterinarian (which is unfortunately a dying profession), and tinkered with getting a business plan together for a bank loan. Persing Woods LLC was in business! Now I needed to get the marketing in place.

When I returned to school to complete my second year with an established LLC, it was easier to push aside the doubts and embrace my decision to apply my MBA in agripreneurship. I also believe that having the actual documents in hand, more than just talk, helped me to move forward. I knew that to market my business, products and ethos, I had to expand my network yet again outside the business school. I saw immense opportunity within the university, especially at Cornell’s Hotel School, across the street from the Johnson School. For me, farming is not just about the land and animals, but also about promoting holistic wellness for the community. Another industry that I was familiar with and saw true collaborative opportunities in was spa. I took a “Management in Spa” class that required me to work on a live consulting project for a major spa in Upstate New York. As a result, I got two major accounts to sell products to directly in Ithaca for the farm’s first two seasons.

Later on, in 2011, personal matters brought me to Hong Kong. The farm has therefore been in standby mode for a year now, managed by my parents, who originally regarded my venture with dread. They have since embraced it as a healthy lifestyle for retirees, and recently, we have been advising other local families and have even helped regional farms with dairy goat management by simply sharing our experience of being first-time farmers. I now look forward to returning to the farm to continue to develop this potential opportunity and to provide an farm start-up service for others wishing to do what I first dreamed of in 2009.