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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 1 of this four-part series, Chris discusses how guest speakers at Kellogg inspired him to consider different business models and roll up his sleeves. 

When I decided to leave the U.S. Army to go to the Kellogg School of Management in 2006, I decided to sell my rental property, because I did not want to manage it from afar. I wanted to invest in real estate in Chicago or in Evanston (where Kellogg is located), but everything was so expensive, as the bubble continued to inflate, so I started to look “afar” anyway. I had gone to college at Notre Dame in nearby South Bend, Indiana, and a friend of mine from college who was studying at Northwestern Law School was looking at property in a town we knew well. We decided that we would buy a place in South Bend, hoping that we could rent it out on game days and make our payments via the rent, as the price of the property appreciated. As it turns out, in only three game weekends, we made enough money renting our place to cover our mortgage for the year and to also pay for our furnishings. It was pretty clear to us that we were on to something, so we started to pay for more houses using our rental cash flow. As we purchased more and more homes, we started to develop a centralized rental business, which would ultimately evolve into GamedayHousing.com.

As we grew Gameday Housing, I was in a perfect place, through Kellogg, to live the experiences of other entrepreneurs and see other business models. There was a constant stream of entrepreneurs coming through, and it didn’t really matter to me whether their business models were anything like ours or not—I just enjoyed listening to those who built interesting companies that endured. I loved listening to the bootstrappers—the guys who had no financing and had unsexy ideas. Wayne Huizenga spoke at the school and told us about how when he was growing Waste Management, he would pick up trash during the day and then get into a suit and sell his firm’s services at night. We had “lunch and learns” with CEOs of all sorts of different companies—like a retailer who was trying to carry very few items and had no checkout line, in order to cut down on rental costs and create a certain feel in the store. I went to as many entrepreneurial events as I could and kept thinking, “How can I apply this?”

I graduated and took a job with Goldman Sachs, while keeping our rental business alive. As the financial crisis came, I saw the lack of professional security and realized that with my rental business taking off, leaving Goldman was fairly low risk. In 2009, Gameday became my everyday focus.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a 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 Michael Porter from Harvard Business School (HBS).

“Generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field,” according to the HBS Web site, Michael E. Porter (MBA ’71) (“Microeconomics of Competitiveness: Firms, Clusters and Economic Development”) is director of the school’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. Porter’s “Microeconomics of Competitiveness” course is offered through the institute and is open to all graduate students at Harvard, Tufts, and MIT. The course reportedly differs from most MBA offerings in that it focuses on economic development rather than management, involves longer sessions, requires more reading assignments, and concludes with a team project rather than a final exam.

Porter, who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1973, has studied competition in the health care system and coauthored the book Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results (Harvard Business Review Press, 2006). Other titles by Porter include Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (Free Press, 1998), Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (Free Press, 1998) and On Competition, Updated and Expanded Edition (Harvard Business School Press, 2008). In 2000, Porter received the highest recognition awarded to a Harvard faculty member when he was appointed the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, and in 2008, the U.S. Department of Commerce granted him its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Chicago Booth continues to stand out thanks to its quirks—and we write that affectionately. So many applications are boring to construct, but never Chicago Booth’s, with its PowerPoint slides and its short, 200-word essays.  In breaking the mold, Chicago Booth truly gives applicants the chance to make an impression. Use the school’s prompts wisely…

1. Essay: What are your short- and long-term goals, and how will an MBA from Chicago Booth help you reach them? (500 words)

Because Personal Statements are similar from one application to the next, we have produced the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge. Please feel free to download your copy today.

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

2. Short Answer Essays:
a. What has been your biggest challenge, and what have you learned from it? (200 words maximum)

Even though you are allowed only 200 words for this essay, you can still effectively discuss a challenge as broad as a personal issue (e.g., overcoming family expectations) or as narrow as difficulty developing a skill (e.g., because of dyslexia). The challenge you choose to highlight in your essay is not nearly as important as your ownership of it. You need to make your challenge personal and offer a quick narrative about the way in which it has befuddled you and how you have sought to overcome it. Despite such a short space, you still need to offer a story with a proper “arc.”

Note that when we say “ownership” in this case, we mean that the situation or event you discuss needs to clearly be unique to you. For example, consider the following statement: “My biggest challenge has been overcoming family pressure in my quest to become a consultant rather than a doctor. My family has long pressured me, but I have ultimately been able to resist their insistence that…” This opening is not truly unique to any one person’s experience and could in fact be applicable to (and therefore written by) many candidates who have faced similar family pressure, though perhaps in favor of a different cause or objective (e.g., becoming a banker rather than a lawyer, or attending school X rather than school Y). By including the details of your particular story, revealed through a narrative, you will ensure that you alone own your story—the challenge you present will be incontrovertibly yours, and thus you will reveal distinct elements of your character.

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The trend toward fewer application essays this season continues with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, which has dropped one full essay from last year and is now down to three required, and very straightforward, essay questions: one about career goals and Tuck, one about leadership and one about failure. As always, take the time to brainstorm thoroughly before beginning to write, and be sure that you keep your reader learning throughout your essays. These essays provide three opportunities to reveal yourself, so make sure that you are offering three distinct statements about your skills—and indeed about yourself.

Please respond fully but concisely to the following essay questions. Compose each of your answers offline in separate document files and upload them individually in the appropriate spaces. We encourage applicants to limit the length of their responses to 500 words for each essay. There are no right or wrong answers. Please double-space your responses.

1. Why is an MBA a critical next step toward your short- and long-term career goals? Why is Tuck the best MBA program for you, and what will you uniquely contribute to the community? (If you are applying for a joint or dual degree, please explain how the additional degree will contribute to those goals.)

Tuck’s first essay prompt is like many other classic “Why an MBA? Why our school?” questions, only it also asks what you will contribute in return, so be sure to address this issue as well. If you are in the (ill-advised) habit of copying and pasting the same essays for multiple schools, you could easily overlook this element of Tuck’s Essay 1 question. When discussing your planned contribution to the school’s community, you must reveal that you truly know and understand the nature of the Tuck community for your statements to carry any real weight—do not make the mistake of discussing your abilities in a vacuum. For example, explaining that you are an extreme sports enthusiast and would bring that passion to Tuck would clearly not be as effective or compelling as tying that love of extreme sports to an active role in planning and running events for the Tuck Winter Carnival. This important distinction should not be lost.

As for the rest of Tuck’s essay prompt here, because Personal Statements are similar from one application to the next, we have produced the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge. Please feel free to download your copy today.

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

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Several top business schools explicitly ask candidates about the steps they have taken to learn about their MBA program. Via such questions, the schools are testing you: they want to know that you have a sincere desire to gain a place in their next entering class specifically, and so they want to know that you have made a concerted and genuine effort to get to know them. So, when answering such questions, you absolutely must demonstrate your profound interest in the school.

Explaining that you have read the business school’s Web site is not sufficient, considering that this resource is available to anyone, and frankly, the admissions committee would expect you to do this. Although you could mention your Web research as a starting point if something very particular or unusual caught your attention, you are better off sharing your a priori experiences with the school instead. By discussing the details of your class visits and particularly of your interactions with admissions officers, students, professors and/or alumni, you will “prove” to the admissions committee that you have truly been striving to learn more and understand your fit with the school. In essence, if you are showing the committee that you have extended yourself to learn, you have surpassed a minimum requirement.