The MBA Admissions Studio

NYT, March 7, By Robbie Brown (extract) — Last year, Mr. Yankson (UV Darden) was turned down for summer internships by about 15 recession-plagued banks and ended up working for an education nonprofit organization. This year, as he sought a full-time job, Wells Fargo quickly gave him the response he wanted: When can you start?

“The banks this year kept saying, ‘It’s a good year,’ ‘We just approved a lot of hiring,’ ‘The market is clearing up,’ ” Mr. Yankson said. “It was a completely different experience.”

With banks climbing out of the recession, more business students across the country are finding banking jobs and internships, enrolling in finance clubs and going on class trips to Wall Street, universities say.

… On a recent interview day at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, students in pinstriped suits and polished shoes waited anxiously for meetings with representatives from J. P. Morgan and BB&T Capital Markets.

The competition would be steep — with dozens of students applying for each internship — but less selective than in 2009. The number of banks interviewing at Darden this year increased 20 percent, and the number of job offers so far has risen 33 percent, the school said.

“There’s reason for students to be optimistic,” said Tracy Handler, a spokeswoman for the M.B.A. Career Services Council, an association of business school career advisers. “Any signs of recovery are modest. But business schools are looking ahead and seeing a light at the end of what is now a pretty short tunnel.”

Full Story in the New York Times.
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Tags: BB&T, Darden, J.P. Morgan, MBA Career Services Council, MBA internships, mba interview, mba recruitment, New York Times, UV Darden

There’s a heartwarming story for MBAs and MBAs-to-be in yesterday’s Financial Times by Herminia Ibarra, Urs Peyer and Morten T. Hansen, professors at INSEAD. (I must say, surely only among academics does it take three (3) people to write one short Op-Ed piece in the FT, but I digress.)

They say: “The global recession may be almost over but the debate rumbles on. How much were MBA-trained executives really to blame? As MBA professors, we heard arguments that we had been teaching the wrong models, neglecting ethics, forgetting common sense, sitting in ivory towers made of spreadsheets and generally nurturing greed. We listened to the charge that business schools were guilty of short-term thinking, especially when evaluating leadership. MBA graduates, so the argument went, were looking for quick riches.

“So, when we came up with the idea of a ranking of chief executives based on performance over an entire career, we also decided to check the myth of the value -destroying MBA against a large and meticulously compiled data set.

“When you rank the top chief executives in the world, based on return on shareholder investment and change in market capitalisation over their entire time in the job… four of our top 10 have the letters M, B and A after their names. Could it be possible that this much-criticised degree helps a business leader to add long-term value after all?

“Our analysis of 1,109 chief executives from 1995 to 2009 found that those with MBAs performed, on average, better than those without. The difference was not large but it was statistically significant. When we drilled down one more level, we discovered that those who had reached the position of chief executive before the age of 50 benefited particularly from a business school education. In fact, on average, having an MBA sends such individuals a full 100 places higher on our list.

“Of course, the term average is important. There are many high-performing chief executives without an MBA. But the overall tendency among the business leaders we analysed is for an MBA to correlate with a higher position in the ranking, especially for those who get the top job at a comparatively young age.

“Our data set does not explain why this should be the case but there are some obvious benefits to going to business school: an MBA gives you better all-round skills; it buys you credibility and it allows you to build a personal power alumni network.”

Full text here.

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Tags: alumni network, Financial Times, FT, global recession, INSEAD, mba, ranking

Today I thought I’d share the extended journey of an MBA Studio client, as reported here and here. Not only is it a worthy and heartwarming success story in which I’m most gratified to have been able to play a part — helping this applicant with a 640 GMAT get into a top European school — but it is also instructive as to the ups and downs of elite MBA applications…

“Hard work certainly goes a long way. These days a lot of people work hard, so you have to make sure you work even harder and really dedicate yourself to what you are doing and setting out to achieve.” — Lakshmi Mittal

“The above quote by the great Mittal is really my matra and this is what i believed in when i started on this journey. There were a great deal of challenges and difficulties that i faced but what kept me going was the ultimate goal! MBA is what i wanted to do, this would take me to my destination and i wanted to give in my 100 percent to get there!

“I started this blog back in February, 2009 and at that time I had no idea what was ahead of me. I still remember my first post on 9th February 2009. That was the day when I first laid my hands on the “Official Guide for GMAT Review”. That was the day I promised myself that I’ll put in my sole(sic) into the GMAT preparation and give-in my best shot towards my business school application.

“So without further ado here is a timeline representation of some of the important events that followed that day:

August 15, 2009 – Prepared an outline for essays. First stop – INSEAD! Quite a bold move eh!

Sep 29, 2009 – Submitted my application to University of Hong Kong (I still haven’t heard back from them )

Jan 1 to 15, 2010 – Applied to Tsinghua University in China, Interviewed and Waitlisted

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“Like World cup is to soccer, Wimbledon is to Tennis, an acceptance is to an applicant blog. I waited 12 months for such a post and I can’t be happier. I couldn’t have done any of this without the love, support, and encouragement of my parents and my girl friend. I would like to dedicate this admission to them. Amma, Appa and Vrush – this one is for you!

“I also want to thank many people who have played an important part in my journey:

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“My apologies for making this post so long. If there is one take-away from my MBA application journey (apart from persistence) that I’d cherish life long is this acquired addiction of Blogging. So I’ll be back here soon with another post. Till then, hang in there and have fun! Muchas Gracias!”
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Tags: ESADE, GMAT, HKUST, IESE, INSEAD, NUS, Tsinghua

It’s Super Bowl time. For me this mostly means Augusta (and Spring!) is just around the corner. But the football is always watchable and, as everyone knows, it’s as much all about the half-time show and of course the ads – which I believe for Super Bowl XLIV cost more that $2.5m for a 30-second slot.

Anyway, all this reminds me to share one of the profiling tools that I use with MBA admissions clients when required. The issue is always the same: to get an applicant to identify their core message, focus it sharply, and tell it in a compelling way.

So I tell applicants: ‘craft your own Super Bowl ad.’ If you were given the opportunity to advertise yourself in a 30-second slot on TV, what would you do and say? Let’s say Adcom members from HBS or Wharton or whichever is your dream b-school are watching. How would your ad go? What would it say? Remember it is appearing in ultra-competitive company, with other ads that are funny and wicked and purposeful and memorable in various ways. So how would yours stand out?

The time limit forces a focus on what’s essential, and the advertisement format demands an ‘angle,’ a point of unique interest. You wouldn’t just go ‘my name is Sam and I was born in Reno, and blah, blah, blah.’

I ask MBA applicants to ’storyboard’ it as if it were a real advertisement (it doesn’t take long, it’s only a 30-second slot after all.) Start with the first image, then the next. What is happening onscreen? What music is playing (why?), is there a voiceover and what is it saying, what text is on the screen? And so on, moving through the ad to its close.

You have seconds to pitch yourself. It’s costing you a fortune to be there so you can’t waste a word. You don’t need to (you could never) capture everything important about yourself. But you must capture and entice the viewers, and leave them with some unforgettable images and a message sandblasted on their brain.

Then if you can transfer the essence of your Super Bowl ad to your MBA essays and interviews (elaborating stories, and adding proof) your communication will pack the punch it needs.

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Tags: b-school, HBS, profile development, profiling, Wharton

It’s common to get a ‘waitlist’ notice in a competitive admissions process for a top MBA program. What’s going on and how should you handle it? First, interpret it correctly. By waitlisting, Adcoms are giving themselves an “option” on you while they wait to see who else is coming to the party. They like you, they are just not ready to commit.

How should you manage this? Remember, you do have some status. They have looked at you and liked you enough to keep you interested. This is reason to be optimistic, not to panic, and not to get needy or whiney.

Your waitlist notice probably came with instructions and these need to be followed scrupulously. If they don’t accept additional information, that’s that. If they do, then you can consider your options. If you didn’t get any guidance to the contrary, there is no harm in asking politely if there is anything you can add, or if there is any particular issue (that may be holding you back) that you might address.

In doing this, please remember that every last scrap of your interaction with Adcom is printed out and goes in your file, so ask politely once and don’t make a nuisance of yourself. If they offer you the opportunity to add something, do so promptly and stick scrupulously to the topic. You wouldn’t believe how highly touchy most schools are about being bugged by waitlistees.

Aside from any issue the school raises, it is legitimate to add something to your file if you have retaken the GMAT (and scored higher,) or if there is a significant change (of advantage to you) in your professional life. If you have been given an award or a promotion or a clear new professional opportunity that suggests you will bring in new skills and experiences, it is fair to want to add that while you fate hangs in the balance. But do not assume they will take it. Call or email to explain what the new factor will be and ask if they will allow it to be added. Unless it contravenes policy, usually they will say ‘yes’ because their motivation is to make the right decision not just to be ogres for the fun of it.

Further, if you have an offer from another school, particularly a top school, tell them. They will recognize that you will have to make a decision about School B and put down a deposit. This is likely to light a fire under them to clarify their decision one way or the other. Also it is human nature to want people that other people want. It deeply works in your favor.

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Tags: GMAT, waitlist

Part of the holy grail of a good application to business school is to show why the particular nature of the b-school you are applying to fits with you and what you want out of your MBA. That is, each program has a slightly different ’signature’ in terms of curriculum, type of students, faculty interest, clubs and extramurals, internship-recruitment opportunities, alumni network and so on, and the task is to show that you understand what that signature is and why it fits with you.

You won’t get a lot of help from looking at the glossy brochure or the school’s glamor Website. That won’t make you enough of an ‘insider.’ The only way to know enough about a program is to get inside it for a while — by interacting with people who are there, or visiting the campus and talking to people who are there.

Social media networking forums have created new options for doing this. You can connect with or ‘follow’ current students or clubs via their blogs or tweets, or their identities Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. If there is a Stanford club entertaining Steve Jobs, it will be on someone’s blog. If Wharton students are on a trek, someone will have uploaded video to YouTube, and so on. Following this assiduously and interacting (politely) where appropriate will give you a window into the nature and culture of the program you are targeting in a way that just was impossible to imagine a few years ago. Beware, quality is mixed to say the least. You will get many perspectives from parties with vested interests that are not aligned with yours. Use them wisely. But overall this is the way to go.

Some admissions officers blog too, and currently Adcoms in general are rapidly revamping their own marketing (seeking to find and attract great applicants) to include social media. More and more authentic and useful insight in each school from the school itself is being offered in this way. See, for example, Chicago Booth Adcom director Rose Martinelli’s very personable blog, The Rose Report. You can follow, interact, and absorb the school’s culture in this way. (Again, be appropriate. Don’t, for example, use a blog comment facility to ask about your own personal application…)

But the downside of social media is this: If you can find and know them in this way, they can find you. Be careful about what you say online and what you have said. I’m not saying that Adcoms “google” an applicant or routinely look them up on identity sites to find out more about them or corroborate what they put down on the forms. They probably don’t. But they very well might.

Expect Adcom to treat you in some ways like a potential employee or client. It’s well known that these days prospective employers or prospective clients, or anyone who wants to look you up on the Web, can and will do so. And when they do they may find that beery and not-altogether-clean bachelor party photo on MySpace. Or they may find a Doostang profile that doesn’t adequately match what you’ve told them. And it’s quite hard, once something is out there on the Web, to take it back.

So be smart about it. Use social networking to get inside a program to research and develop your ‘fit’ argument. Be scrupulous about what is out there under your name, make it consistent with your application platform, and try to take down unprofessional material where you can.

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Tags: Adcom, Chicago-Booth GSB, Doostang, FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace, social media, Stanford, Steve Jobs, YouTube

The “goals” question remains the core of any MBA admissions application. Continuing on past posts I’ve put up here on how to manage it — beyond the usual blah of clearly enunciating your short-term and long-term goals and connecting that to why you need an MBA — here’s something worth considering on the HBS site: the Harvard Business School Portrait Project.

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http://www.hbs.edu/mba/profiles/PortraitProject/2009portrait/

Harvard Business School (not HBS Adcom) says: “Each year we ask our classmates [this year class of 2009] a straightforward, simple question taken from the last lines of a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Mary Oliver. It seems such an easy question on the surface, but sometimes the easy questions are the hardest to answer. Indeed, although we ask for only 200 words or less, most people grapple with the question a long time. We share with you intimate and candid responses from the Class of 2009 to this question,”What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See what the students plan to do.

Now, consider the HBS goals essay: “What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?”

What is “career vision?” In their terms, what does “vision” mean? What does “meaningful” really mean? What do they expect of you? What will, as they say, ‘cut the mustard’ in this essay?

In fact, “What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?” is effectively asking the same thing, that is: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” You may say you want to be a hospitality logistics manager or an aviation entrepreneur … or anything. There’s no right or wrong answer. The point is why is it worth spending your one wild and precious life on? You have to justify it in those terms. That’s how you make it into a right answer.

This is true of the goals essay to any top school, not just Harvard.

For the Portrait Project HBS students get 200 words. For the HBS admissions essay you get 400 because you need to spend time nailing down how ‘what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life’ makes sense in terms of your past, the Harvard MBA specifically, and recruitment.

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Tags: career vision, goals, Harvard, HBS, HBS Portrait Project, MBA go, MBA goals essay

I wrote this GMAT article last year on the Business Week b-school forum. It’s probably still up there somewhere, along with a firestorm of comments — gratifyingly mostly ‘agrees.’ (Speaking of gratifying, readers are still popping up on Amazon.com to say nice things about ‘MBA Admissions Strategy‘. I don’t know who you are, but thank you!)

Anyway, it’s been a year, and nothing has changed. I get the should-I-retake GMAT question from clients and prospective clients with healthy scores, so here is the article reposted:

I had a MBA admissions client recently who I’ll call Tim, and when Tim and I got talking about his admissions profile he told me he’d scored 720 on the GMAT, and then retaken the test (and scored the same again). I nearly dropped the phone. “Why would anyone ever want to retake a 720 GMAT?” I gasped.

The truth is, I know why. Candidates think the higher they score, the better their chances of admission. It seems obvious but is it right?

Yes, of course the GMAT is crucial. It tells Adcom about an applicant’s intellectual and cognitive skills, and is particularly useful in allowing easy comparison across institutions and undergraduate majors, and to some extent across cultures. Furthermore, every 10-point gain adds to candidates’ admissions prospects, and a move of 30 or so fundamentally changes which b-schools they can legitimately hope to get into. All true.

But this is true only up to a certain level, about the 700-750 range. A higher score has diminishing returns and can even – believe it or not – harm one’s chances.

Why? As I told Tim, there are two reasons. First, although the MBA is a post-graduate university degree, it is primarily professional education. Its fundamental task is to prepare and place people in business management positions, not academic positions. Managers need to be smart but, as everyone knows, the cleverest people don’t necessarily make the best managers, nor best entrepreneurs, or bankers, or consultants. Jack Welch, Herb Kelleher, George Soros, Ted Turner, etc., are smart enough. But they are not Einsteins. MBA Adcoms are not looking for brainiacs.

This explains why an ultra-high GMAT can be harmful. Scoring in the super bracket (750+) means that you are, by definition, in the 99th percentile. People who score like that are often better pure scientists or philosophers, than managers. It’s a stereotype, and perhaps a poor one, but the absent-minded professor is commonly associated with being a poor people-person and a poor manager. If you get a very high score, Adcom will be absolutely sure to thoroughly check and almost disbelieve that you are also a leader and team player and can manage adversity and do all the practical things you need to get done in a business day.

Maybe you can and do. But an extra burden of proof falls on you in this regard if you are in the GMAT super-bracket.

The second, related, problem is it takes a mix of talents to get admitted to a competitive school. The operative term here is “mix”. Academic ability is just one of many items considered, along with career potential, leadership potential, team player profile, work experience, volunteer experience, profile diversity, and so on. Academic ability is definitely a requirement, but so are many other attributes. This reflects the multifaceted demands of a real business career.

People who obsess with improving an already 700+ GMAT are, almost certainly, taking time and effort away from improving the rest of their admissions profile.

This is how it works: a threshold is reached at around (depending on GPA results and other  variables) the 700 level, where Adcom can safely put a check mark next to your academic ability, and move on to see what else you offer. If you are too far below the school’s average GMAT, yes, nothing else you are, do, or say will count. But once you hit the threshold, it’s pointless to keep knocking in that nail. A higher GMAT won’t check any other box than “cognitively capable” and chances are it’s already checked at 700. A super-score is not going to help you if your recommendations are so-so, your essays are undeveloped, and you stumble in your interview. Adcom greatly prefers “balanced good” to “unbalanced excellent.”

This also explains why there is more malleability in the GMAT rating than most candidates realize. If the rest of your application is good, and your undergraduate record is in the right range, you can be up to 40 or 50 points below the school’s published GMAT average (providing not too lopsidedly in Math or Verbal.)

Obviously, the published average means that half of accepted applicant’s scores are below that mark.

Bottom line: It makes sense to be very concerned with the GMAT until it is within the guidelines of your target program. Then forget about it and spend time on other aspects of your application.

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Tags: GMAT, GPA, Leadership, MBA Admissions, post-graduate, volunteering, work experience

Last week Warren Buffett told 700 Columbia Business School students: “Right now, I would pay $100,000 for 10 percent of the future earnings of any of you.”

Seven hundred Columbia GSB students had crammed into the Roone Arledge Auditorium to hear the Sage of Omaha, accompanied by Bill Gates. Buffett (Columbia class of ‘51) helped, if you couldn’t do the math: “Many of you are a million-dollar asset right now.”

There’s nothing unique about Columbia in top-tier MBA company. Buffett would make the equivalent offer to graduates of other top-tier MBA programs.

And I’m sure Buffett’s offer is dead serious — if any top-tier MBA graduate were fool enough to sell at that price! Warren didn’t become the world’s greatest investor by overpaying for his stock, therefore of course he assesses the average future value of Columbia business students at far greater than $1m. (He champions “value investing” — analyzing a company’s real long-term value and buying securities priced well below that.)

Effectively the careful, savvy Buffett is saying he commercially “values” anyone picked by Columbia (or equivalent) Adcom as, at minimum, a million-dollar asset even though he has never met him or her. He trusts Adcoms to have picked the right people, top faculty to have adequately prepared them, and the careers office to be able to place them into high-return jobs, so that his investment would soon show returns.

What this tells you is that the brand value of a top-tier MBA holds up exceedingly well in the eyes of the smartest people, despite the recession, despite alleged MBA complicity in the Credit Crunch, and so on.

There was another lesson for those who would like to be one of the 700 (or equivalent) next year. As reported in Columbia University’s The Record, David Lin, 26, a second-year MBA student from Los Angeles said Buffett’s success “proves you don’t have to be a jerk or have a huge ego to get ahead in this world. He’s a role model for everyone, not just investors.”

As a normal ego, non-jerk, Buffett is an important role model for MBA applicants too.

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Tags: Bill Gates, billionaire, Buffett, Business School, Columbia GSB, mba

As a follower of many blogs in the MBA admissions ’space’ I know, as you probably know, that they are of mixed quality. But the musings of AIGAC-accredited MBA admissions consultants is generally good, and I find we are of one mind on most important matters. So no surprise that today’s post is a hearty agreement with Linda who recently recommended the book Made to Stick (Random House, New York, 2007) by Chip and Dan Heath, on her Accepted blog.

I read the Made to Stick hot-off-the-press two years ago, and have integrated every aspect of it into MBA Studio’s client offerings ever since. It’s not the only resource I use of course (and my own MBA Admissions Strategy, which predates it, has many of the same principles.) But Made to Stick is unsurpassed in focusing on one single thing: getting a message across. Formulating it so that the reader reads it, understands it, remembers it.

So, as I have said consistently to MBA Studio clients and whomever else would listen: this is the single best “non-MBA” guidebook for MBA applicants. Be aware that it won’t help with the key aspects of determining who you are and what your key value points and application platform are — what you want to communicate in the first place (as revealed and coached through MBA Studio’s signature “Profiling” process.) Nor will it help with the specifics of how to manage and beat business-school-specific expectations in essays and interviews and reco’s. But as a book about how to communicate a message, it can’t be beaten, and is justifiably a worldwide bestseller.

The Heath brothers have distilled what makes a message “stick” into six principles, which they communicate in a (sticky) acronym, SUCCESs (sic). That is Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories. Chapter by chapter they show how to simplify a message to its essence; grab attention via its unexpected elements, use concrete rather than abstract intelligence; enhance credibility via various proof channels; and achieve emotional connections with the reader. Telling stories that matter, and telling them well, is the key to much of this.

Made to Stick has a blog by the way. Unfortunately two years and counting after the book was published, it’s only occasionally active.

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Tags: AIGAC, Business School, communication, MBA Admissions Consulting, message, messaging, profiling, stories