Blog

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school. However, the educational experience you will have is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Today, we focus on Julie Hennessy from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Before students even began describing the quality of their educational experiences with Julie Hennessy to mbaMission, they noted that she “cares a lot” and “makes herself available to chat and talk about recruiting.” In addition to teaching Kellogg MBA students as a clinical professor of marketing, Hennessy teaches executive education at leading firms, and she previously served as associate chair of Kellogg’s Marketing Department. Students we interviewed reported that she draws on her firm experiences in class but does not just tell stories. Instead, Hennessy challenges students and teases out the responses that facilitate learning. Students with whom we spoke also referred to her as “funny and energetic.”

Not surprisingly, then, Hennessy won the school’s L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award—which is voted on by Kellogg students—in both 2007 and 2017. In addition, she has won seven student impact awards and five Chair’s Core Course Teaching Awards—most recently in 2018 and 2010–2011, respectively. And in 2016, Hennessy received the school’s Certificate for Impact Teaching Award.

Kellogg’s website notes that Hennessy focuses her writing on producing new cases for class discussion; she has completed cases on such brands as TiVo, Apple iPod, Invisalign Orthodontics, and (as separate cases) the antibiotics Biaxin and Zithromax. Her recent cases have focused on such topics as “Stella Artois in South Africa: Cause Marketing and the Building of a Global Brand” and “With a Little Help from ‘Nuestros Amigos’: Hispanics and Kidney Transplants.”

For more information about Northwestern Kellogg and 16 other top-ranked business schools, check out our free mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Cox School of Business

Corporate connections are a major selling point at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Cox School of Business. Located in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, the school offers its MBA students access to a large network of corporate representatives and recruiters—from the 22 Fortune 500 companies with headquarters in the area to a global university alumni base of nearly 127,000. One highlight of the networking resources Cox provides is its Alumni Association, which has members in more than 40 countries. The Economist ranked Cox’s small, collaborative program sixth for “potential to network” in 2019 (the latest such ranking). In addition, Entrepreneur magazine has ranked business-friendly Dallas second among U.S. cities for entrepreneurs.

With 18 Fortune 500 companies located nearby—including UnitedHealth Group, Target, and U.S. Bancorp—the University of Minnesota (UMN) Carlson School of Management also boasts a robust network of corporate ties and high-profile recruiting opportunities. In addition, Carlson prepares its students with a pronounced hands-on approach to building leadership, management, and problem-solving skills.

Among the school’s more distinctive offerings, Carlson’s four Enterprise programs expose students to the areas of brand, consulting, funds, and ventures. The Enterprise learning experience is rather unique insofar as it operates as a full professional services firm, serving multiple clients and allowing students to work through real-world business challenges with senior management at major companies. In the Brand Enterprise program, for example, Carlson students have developed key marketing strategies for such brands as Cargill, Boston Scientific, Target, 3M, General Mills, and Land O’Lakes. Students in the Consulting Enterprise program have offered services to such companies as Best Buy, Northwest Airlines Cargo, Medtronic CRM Division, and Polaris. With approximately $35M in managed assets, the Carlson Funds Enterprise program ranks among the three largest student-managed funds in the world. Finally, the Carlson Ventures Enterprise program puts aspiring entrepreneurs in contact with experts, professionals, and investors.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school. However, the educational experience you will have is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Today, we profile Rawi Abdelal from Harvard Business School (HBS).

Rawi Abdelal is the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management and the director of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. In addition to teaching, he serves as a faculty associate for such groups as Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

His first book, National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective (Cornell University Press, 2001), won the 2002 Shulman Prize for outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision making of any former Soviet Union or Eastern European state. In 2016, Abdelal was granted the HBS One Harvard Faculty Fellowship, and in 2013, he received the Robert F. Greenhill Award, given to outstanding members of the HBS community who are making significant contributions to the school. Moreover, in 2004, he was awarded the Student Association’s Faculty Award for outstanding teaching in the required curriculum.

Abdelal is a student favorite, we were told by those we interviewed, because of his willingness to spend time with students outside the classroom (even those who are not in his section), explaining macroeconomic concepts that can be difficult to grasp. He is also known for incorporating unusual references from literature and popular culture into his class discussions. He has made allusions to Shakespeare, the movie Fight Club, and even rapper Jay-Z’s song “Blue Magic” to help explain complex topics.

For more information about HBS and 16 other top-ranked business schools, check out our free mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school. However, the educational experience you will have is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Today, we profile Robert Pindyck from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Robert Pindyck, who is the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd Professor in Finance and Economics and a professor of applied economics at MIT Sloan, has won multiple teaching awards going back more than 25 years, including an MIT Sloan Outstanding Teaching Award, the MIT Sloan Excellence in Teaching Award, and the school’s Teacher of the Year Award. More recently, Pindyck and a fellow faculty member received the 2018 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, described on the MIT Sloan site as “the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the School.”

Students and alumni with whom we spoke made note of Pindyck’s intense passion, which inspires his students to involve themselves ever more deeply into the material they are studying. A Sloan graduate described Pindyck’s “tremendous authority,” which the professor balanced with “immense accessibility,” and a second-year teaching assistant in Pindyck’s “Industrial Economics [for Strategic Decisions]” course once noted in an MIT Sloan Students Speak blog post that working with him was “a great learning experience.”

For more information about the MIT Sloan School of Management and 16 other top-ranked MBA schools, check out our free mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school. However, the educational experience you will have is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Today, we focus on Youngme Moon from Harvard Business School (HBS).

In addition to receiving the HBS Student Association Faculty Award seven times, Youngme Moon was also the inaugural recipient of the Hellman Faculty Fellowship in 2002–2003 for distinction in research. Moon is currently the Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration and has served as the senior associate dean for strategy and innovation and as the senior associate dean for the MBA program at the school. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Students described Moon to mbaMission as being extremely friendly and accessible, even going out for casual dinners with students.

Moon’s bestselling 2010 book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (Crown Business), is described by the publisher as showing “how to succeed in a world where conformity reigns… but exceptions rule.” Moon co-hosts a weekly podcast, After Hours, which is presented by the Harvard Business Review. The podcast features Moon and two other HBS professors discussing “news at the crossroads of business and culture,” according to the podcast’s description on the Harvard Business Review website.

For more information about HBS and 16 other top-ranked business schools, check out our free mbaMission Insider’s Guides.