Which MBA program is right for you? How can you find the best fit? Jeremy Shinewald, founder and president of mbaMission, will help prospective MBAs understand the differences between the top MBA programs. Jeremy will elaborate on areas that will profoundly affect your academic and social lives in business school, including the flexibility of a program’s curriculum, the breadth of core courses, different methods of instruction, varying sizes of the cohorts and more. Start preparing now so you can be sure to make an educated decision when you apply!
A Q&A session will follow the presentation, after which Jeremy will remain on site to respond to any additional inquiries.
Date: Thursday, May 19, 2011 Time: 6:30-8:00 p.m. EST Location: 138 West 25th Street (b/w 6th and 7th: to enter, press Call then dial 132), New York, NY 10001 Price: Free!
Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.
We at mbaMission try to encourage candidates to get as much “noise” out of the way as possible before schools release their essay questions. We want our candidates to have the freedom to reflect on their experiences, formally and thoroughly brainstorm, choose ideas, prepare outlines and then truly focus on crafting powerful essays. Essentially, we want our candidates to be unfettered as they engage in what is, for many, one of the most significant creative challenges they will ever face.
So, a simple step such as preparing your resume now will help you remain focused in the future. By working on your resume now, a process that can require several rounds of revisions, you can dedicate the required time to do so at a more leisurely pace, before “crunch time” hits. Further, you will lay the foundation for your later brainstorming for your essays, by reminding yourself of your most significant accomplishments.
If you prepare your resume now, you won’t even feel the effects later (except in a good way), and you will definitely thank yourself for having gotten this task out of the way early on.
Note: We recognize that you may achieve additional accomplishments in the next few months. We suggest that you still update your resume now, however, and then revisit and amend your most recent entry one to two weeks before your application deadlines.
The 2011–2012 MBA application season is officially afoot. Harvard Business School (HBS) has just released its essay questions, maintaining its tradition of being the first school to do so each year. HBS usually strikes first in early May, and the other top 15 schools follow suit shortly after, throughout May and even into early June.
The HBS watchers among you will notice two significant changes this year, the first of which is that the school has released almost all new questions. Of the six essay prompts that HBS offered last year, only one remains—the school’s famed “three accomplishments” essay. The second major change is to a streamlined application that offers candidates few options. For the past few years, HBS has required MBA candidates to respond to two essay questions, allowing them to choose from among four. Now applicants face four mandatory questions, leaving them nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. So, this change could limit your ability to play to your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses. Our analysis of HBS’s essay questions follows:
1. Tell us about three of your accomplishments. (600 words)
This mainstay of the Harvard MBA application challenges the applicant to quickly “wow” the reader by recounting three individual accomplishments that, together, reveal a true depth of experience. Generally, candidates should showcase different dimensions of themselves within the three subsections of this essay. Applicants can select from their professional, community, personal, academic (must be truly outstanding), athletic, interpersonal, experiential and entrepreneurial accomplishments, but certainly, no formula for the right mix of stories exists.
Virtually every week, as part of our Monday Morning Essay Tip, we offer a “how to” and a “how not to” example. This week, we cannot offer a simple illustration, because we are focusing on the issue of humor, which is nuanced and can be deemed appropriate only with a full understanding of the context in which it is presented.
So, instead of a rule, we offer a strong suggestion: be very careful when using humor in your essays. The line between being funny and showing yourself to be immature, inappropriate or even careless is a very fine one.
In our view, writers who use humor best are those who possess the skill to come across as clever or witty and are not striving to reveal themselves as stand-up comics. Your essays are not the venue to showcase your latest routine, but can be used to reveal your personality through a mildly self-deprecating anecdote with humorous undertones.
Remember, humor is not itself the goal in your essay, but part of a broader story and message to your reader. If you have a strong voice and can use humor with subtlety, then proceed, but even then, do so with caution and ensure that you get a solid critique before you submit your final draft.
An often unsung program at Kellogg is the school’s Health Enterprise Management (HEMA) program, and a “star” within HEMA is the Global Health Initiative (GHI)—co-founded by Kellogg professor Daniel Diermeier, with several students in leadership and advisory roles—in which academics, students, corporations and nonprofits create products that solve medical problems around the world. As evidence of the program’s profile, in 2006, the GHI received a $4.9M grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop diagnostic devices capable of identifying the HIV virus. Another impressive experiential offering is the multidisciplinary “Medical Innovation” class, which brings together industry leaders, top faculty members and students from several of Northwestern’s graduate schools (Law, Engineering, Medicine and Business). During this two-term course, students experience the “entire innovation life cycle” from a variety of perspectives: scientific, legal and entrepreneurial/managerial. Students even shadow surgeons and observe clinicians to facilitate their own brainstorming sessions for an innovative product—an actual product is created and presented to potential investors. Clearly, Kellogg provides students interested in health care with an opportunity to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty (and sanitize them as well.)
A first-of-its-kind, on-demand MBA application experience that delivers a personalized curriculum for you and leverages interactive tools to guide you through the entire MBA application process.
