Blog

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

mbaMission connected with Chris Brusznicki, founder of Gameday Housing, the leader in the sports vacation rental market.  In Part 2 of this four-part series, Chris explains how his classes at Kellogg helped him make important changes in his business model.

In 2007, while still a student at the Kellogg School of Management, I saw the real estate bubble coming, just as we were building our own portfolio of rental houses at Gameday Housing. I began to question what the bursting of the bubble would mean for us and figured that there might be a lot of empty units in South Bend, where we had our homes. It occurred to me that we might be better off if we were not landlords renting our places, but were brokers renting others’ places on game days. We started to build a portfolio of rental homes that we did not own in 2008, and every weekend of the season, we rented them out through a centralized booking system on our Web site.

This transition seemed easy in hindsight, but at Kellogg, I was taking strategy courses, particularly “Management & Strategy” with Tom Hubbard, which helped me really contemplate the changes that we were making to our model. My core marketing curriculum seemed to constantly challenge our emerging needs—such as, what rate should our commission be for our brokerage? I remember taking a class on couponing, and soon after, we were considering whether we should use a coupon to help bring new renters on board. In fact, Hershey’s came and did a marketing “lunch and learn,” at which they discussed coupon theory and pricing, and it helped me feel certain of my decisions. The whole thing was organic—it seems staged in hindsight, but when you are at business school running a business, it is inevitable that the choices you are facing will appear in one way or another in your studies. I had the benefit of being able to learn and apply learning in real time during my (full-time) MBA, which made my experience all the more meaningful.

Is Darden trying to keep aspiring consultants at bay? Does the school just not have the resources to read a large number of essays? We have no real way of knowing, of course, but we have a hard time imagining that the admissions committee can get a full and accurate impression of a candidate from a single 500-word essay. Nonetheless, our analysis of this standalone essay prompt follows…

Share your thought process as you encountered a challenging work situation or complex problem. How did this experience change your perspective? (500 words maximum)

Darden wants to know about your thought process, so choosing a situation to discuss that required clear and measured consideration on your part is imperative. In other words, simply explaining the nature of the situation is not enough for this essay—you need to reveal the process of contemplation that ultimately led you to action in your efforts to resolve the issue. Interestingly, you do not necessarily need to show that you achieved your desired results, and the type of challenge you describe is not of primary importance (though it does need to be one from the professional sphere). The key to a successful essay here is showing not only that you invested an appropriate amount of thought for the problem or situation at hand, but also the progression and development of your thinking. Another important element of this essay is demonstrating that you learned from the experience. Further, what you say you have learned will need to clearly be impactful, because it needs to fulfill the essay prompt’s requirement of having been significant enough to have “changed your perspective.” You will therefore need to show a contrast between how you thought of things before the situation and how you considered them after, showing how you now approach similar encounters (or, for that sake, different encounters) in a new way.

Just a note: make sure that your resume is in stellar condition, because you will need to rely on it to reveal other important accomplishments to the Darden admissions team. However, be careful not to overstuff it. Do not mistake quantity for quality.

If you feel you could benefit from more guidance on your resume, we suggest checking out our mbaMission Resume Guide.  This guide discusses how to write a strong admissions committee–focused and results-driven resume; explains how to approach spacing, formatting, special sections and descriptions of consulting work; and includes three sample resumes with notes, plus more than 300 action-oriented verbs that demonstrate accomplishments rather than responsibilities.

For a thorough exploration of Darden’s academic program/merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to the Darden School of Business Administration.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when choosing a business school, 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 Joel Greenblatt from Columbia Business School (CBS).

An adjunct professor in finance and economics, Joel Greenblatt (“Value and Special Situation Investment”) is also the founder of and a managing partner with the hedge fund Gotham Capital. In addition, Greenblatt founded Value Investors Club (www.valueinvestorsclub.com), a members-only, online investment community where the top experts in the industry share ideas. The author of several books, including You Can Be A Stock Market Genius Even If You’re Not Too Smart: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and The Little Book That Beats the Market (Wiley, 2005), Greenblatt is also chairman of a network of charter schools in New York City called the Success Charter Network.

A 2006 New York magazine article titled “How Is a Hedge Fund Like a School?” details Greenblatt’s early work with P.S. 65Q. Using a system comparable to the one Greenblatt employs in his Value Investors Club, the school collects data on its students and develops benchmarks for success. The article notes that if Greenblatt can “produce excellence at one school—and another and another—with the same money the city uses to produce mediocrity, the public, he believes, will realize that there is a better way and begin insisting on it.”

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

These days, many in the financial industry pursue the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation to bolster their credentials and become more attractive to employers. Some candidates with the CFA designation subsequently worry that it undermines their need for an MBA and that the admissions committee will question their candidacy. Well, worry not.

One thing to keep in mind is that the CFA is a narrowly focused program. It teaches finance, accounting and economics, but it does not teach marketing, strategy, entrepreneurship and other such areas typically included in an MBA curriculum. So, your need for a broad general management education should still be evident if you were to move outside the financial field. Further, even if you were to return to finance, you could still benefit from specialized academic courses that the CFA does not offer (for example, a class in “Emerging Market Private Equity”). In addition, the CFA does not offer experiential opportunities that add value, such as speakers and internships. So, in short, the MBA admissions committees understand that candidates with their CFA have more to learn and experience after earning their charter.

In fact, far from being a negative, the CFA is actually a positive—the designation suggests that you are independently motivated and dedicated to learning, and that you have core competencies that will allow you to manage the MBA curriculum. Further, especially during an economic downturn, your CFA designation shows that you have achieved a certain standard, one that gives you an edge with many employers. So, is the CFA a help or a hindrance? We would say it definitely helps…

Kellogg’s essays have barely changed over the past decade—but everything is different now! This application season, Kellogg candidates will be working with four completely new essay prompts, and one of the required essays is a mere 25 words long. We suspect this should make for some entertaining reading for the school’s admissions committee! This mini essay is not the only quirk, though—check out our analysis to learn more…

1. Discuss moments or influences in your personal life that have defined who you are today. (500 word limit)

Personal. Personal. Not professional. Personal.

In 500 words, you can tell someone an awful lot about yourself and the moments that have defined you as an individual. Resist the urge, though, to use this space to try to “say it all” by writing a 500-word chronology of your entire life to date—no one asked for a biographical statement! As the school notes, pick and choose specific significant events and influences that tie most directly and intensely to who you are as an individual. Most likely, these will be situations and forces that are important to you in some way or for which you have affection, but keep in mind that such influential factors can also be unexpected and even undesired occurrences (e.g., the sudden death or illness of a friend, a financial loss, a missed opportunity). Give appropriate emphasis to these standout events and influences, recognizing that you are trying to paint a picture of yourself and your values, not brag about how well (or how much) you have done. Do not shy away from discussing the bumps and bruises you have experienced along the way, if these have played a part in developing your character, and especially if you can reflect on them now with humor and wisdom. Sometimes, acknowledging a tough path can implicitly demonstrate a certain level of humility and an aptitude for learning, and these are appealing traits to an admissions team.

To make the most of the broad opportunity Kellogg is offering you with this essay question, make sure that the story you tell reveals not only crucial events, but also your personality.

Read the rest of this entry