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Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand, 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 profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we profile Kristin Forbes from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Kristin Forbes (“Applied Macro and International Economics” and “Global Economic Challenges and Opportunities”) was chosen by students to receive the Teacher of the Year award in 2009 (as she also was in 2001); she also received the Excellence in Teaching award in 2010, 2007 and 2006 and the Jamieson Prize for History of Excellence in Teaching at MIT in 2008. Forbes rotates her career between academia and the government, which, according to those we interviewed, gives her “endless credibility” in students’ eyes. Other comments students made to mbaMission about Forbes included “[she has] high levels of enthusiasm and knowledge,” “she makes every class an interesting class” and “[she] made one of my not-so favorite topics extremely interesting and rewarding.” Forbes also garners praise for how rigorous her classes are and her ability to make class discussions inspiring. Claimed one second-year student in particular, “Whenever I walked out [of her class], all I could say was, ‘Wow, this was awesome.’”

For more information about the MIT Sloan School of Management and 15 other top-ranked MBA schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

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

With deadlines looming for many candidates, we thought we would share a piece of advice that might help alleviate some deadline-related stress. After you have completed (but not yet submitted!) your application(s), find one individual you trust—whether a professional consultant or someone with insight into the application process—to read your essays one last time and give you feedback. We strongly suggest that you limit yourself to requesting feedback from just one or two individuals, however.

Because the application process is subjective, you will discover that as you add readers, you will also add new and different opinions. Soon, a multitude of alternatives might appear, and although none of these varying ideas will necessarily be “right” or “wrong”—considering that  a single candidate’s stories can be marketed in almost countless ways—they can create unnecessary uncertainty.

We are not suggesting that you ignore critical feedback, but rather that you not complicate your final days and create doubt where it may not be due. If one or two readers support your ideas and emphasize that your application needs minimal work, you are probably best off ending your feedback loop there and submitting your application.

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.

Along with the highly qualified tenured faculty members at Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell, some of the visiting professors provided the out-of-the-box sounding board I needed. When I looked at my abilities and passion to do something real and meaningful with my life, I realized that the opportunity was right in my backyard! I owned about 200 acres of private forest land at my home in Elmira, New York, but had been ignoring its rich resources. I didn’t need to make a sojourn to India or Nepal or Patagonia to find my bliss. I had a ready-made opportunity in a small town in Upstate New York. Most people wouldn’t think twice about this place, but I saw great potential there. I wanted to try something that I had heard was happening in other parts of the country: small, private sustainable farming.

Like all successful businesses, a farm needs great products plus an amazing marketing plan to make it profitable, which ultimately allows it to be sustainable. The growing trend of consumers wanting real food from local resources matched my desire to produce a real product for a better world. The countless hours reading case studies and running Excel spreadsheets at Johnson taught me to evaluate everything with an analytical eye. And that’s exactly what I did when I finally decided to focus my gaze on the land. Instead of growing something, which was nearly impossible in a dense forest, I wanted to raise animals. But exactly what I wanted to raise wasn’t clear until I reached out to more professors at Cornell.

Expressing my intentions out loud was the first step I needed to take. Thankfully, I wasn’t shy, and having a few years of sales experience under my belt helped me get others excited about my venture. Through word of mouth, I soon found the department I needed to kick-start my plan at the Agriculture School at Cornell, which initiated the first Goats in the Woods Program. Getting involved in this school opened up a whole new world for me. I began to work with the New York Organic Farmers Association, the Cornell Cooperative Extensions and fellow goat farmers around the United States. I shared my knowledge on creating business plans and establishing a structure for business development with these fellow farmers, and through the Cooperative Extension, I conducted a Business 101 Workshop for them. I explained what a P&L sheet looks like, the importance of meticulously tracking expenses and revenue, how to look at equipment as assets and to depreciate them over a period of time, to look at sales projections. It was a great learning experience for me to “teach” this group, and in exchange, I learned the animal husbandry skills of running a farm and raising animals. A very fair exchange!

It was important for me to build this initiative as a business, and I looked into the steps of approaching this hybrid entrepreneurship and agriculture venture—called agripreneurship—with a business mind-set. It was certainly a customized practicum that most MBA candidates do not experience.

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.

True entrepreneurs—however that is appropriate to define—follow the mantra of “do” instead of “talk.” There is a bit of irony in systematically applying to and enrolling in a structured and carefully orchestrated two-year MBA program to study and pursue entrepreneurship. Earning an MBA is supposed to be a safe investment, especially at an Ivy League institution—and entrepreneurship is not safe.

To be honest, I never approached the MBA with an entrepreneur’s heart or spirit. I wanted to climb the corporate ladder with a beautiful printed sheepskin that served as my career trampoline. The program at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell is a carefully calibrated program, and that’s what an MBA candidate pays for: organization, structure and support. For those of us who either couldn’t make up our minds or simply wanted some time and space to think about it all, the school offered the option of being independent with guidance. The Johnson School’s customized immersion program allows students to practice being an entrepreneur in many ways—taking initiative, assessing the benefits and risks of tailoring a semester with specific classes, being the true architect of one’s career and life. Instead of allowing others to dictate the educational investment strategy for a potentially positive future payout, customization satisfies every entrepreneur’s desire to take more control of their current happiness and future payout.

An adjunct to the Career Development Office at Johnson exists with the purpose of connecting students with live projects and internship programs, offering another structured platform to garner access to campus and regional resources. I personally worked with Candace Maxian at the adjunct office to consider my options for taking projects beyond traditional internships, or even to find interesting projects to participate in. I also became connected with the Tech Center as well as the Cooperative Extension. By talking about my needs out loud to anyone in the area, I found connections at Cornell’s Hotel School and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to jump-start my quirky plans to start a business that left the traditional MBA route completely.

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 Arthur Middlebrooks from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

A 1988 Chicago Booth alumnus, Arthur Middlebrooks (“Marketing of Services” and “Developing New Products and Services”) is also a management consultant who has helped multiple companies—including the Bank of America, IBM Consulting and BP/Amoco—develop new products and services. With these experiences in hand, Middlebrooks is prepared to take students in his “Developing New Products and Services” class through the product development process, starting from scratch. In his class, rather than being instructed to dream up a product, students are given raw data and hold focus groups as they strive to identify a consumer need. Recently, students in this course conceptualized new bag products for Ziploc and presented their findings to a panel of entrepreneurs. Students with whom mbaMission spoke described Middlebrooks as innovative and gushed about his passion and energy. Plus, several were impressed that he knew each student’s name on day one of class.

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