Clear Admit
New Startup Marketplace Matches Haas MBA Students, Scientists Via Speed Dates
MBA students at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business have been taking part in speed dating of sorts with faculty and scientists at the University of California San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy. Have no fear—this is not a story about anti-fraternization policy violations or scandal. Instead, it’s a tale of creative matchmaking that gives Haas students valuable experience with early-stage science startups that need their business know-how. The idea was born out of a conversation last year between Haas Dean Rich Lyons and UCSF School of Pharmacy Dean Joseph Guglielmo. Abby Scott, associate director of Emerging Initiatives at Haas, took... Read more »
Tops for Tech: The Best Business Schools for Careers in Technology
Here’s a fact you may not have known: Several of today’s leading technology innovators share one thing in common—a Montessori education. Yep, Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and SimCity creator Will Wright were all educated as children using the self-directed, hands-on, collaborative teaching model developed by Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori. Alas, though, not a single one has an MBA—so perhaps not a very useful factoid when you’re trying to determine the best business schools for a career in technology. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Michael Dell,... Read more »
Business School Deposit Deadlines: Decisions? Dilemmas? Do Tell!
The time has come for many Round 1 applicants to make a decision about where they will attend business school in the fall. Monday was the Round 1 deposit deadline at Harvard Business School (HBS), and tomorrow deposits are due at Chicago Booth, Duke’s Fuqua School, Northwestern’s Kellogg School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Yale School of Management. For many, plunking down the cash to indicate to a school that you can’t wait to join their MBA class is as straightforward as it can be. No doubt there are quite a few triumphant applicants to HBS who sent... Read more »
Beyoncé, Red Lobster and Harvard Business School: Unlikely Bedfellows?
What do mega star Beyoncé, seafood chain Red Lobster and Harvard Business School (HBS) have in common? For a brief stint earlier today, a little more than usual. An enterprising reporter at Boston.com stumbled upon a quirky little tidbit of not-quite news—namely, that typing “Red Lobster Boston” into Google Maps returned a result suggesting that a branch of the chain restaurant glorified in Bey’s latest song could be found on the HBS campus. It’s not true. “I had no knowledge of this and don’t understand how it could happen, because there’s no Red Lobster on this campus,” Jim Aisner, HBS... Read more »
Approaching the MBA Team-Based Discussion or Group Interview: Advice for Wharton & Ross Interviewees
Did you receive an invitation to interview as part of Round 2 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School? Are you gearing up for an interview at the University of Michigan’s Ross School? In either or both cases, congratulations! Now, it’s time to prepare for the MBA team-based discussion (TBD) or group interview, as the schools refer to their unique group evaluations. What Is the Team-Based Discussion? A few years ago, the admissions office at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School partnered with the Wharton Innovation group to launch a new evaluation method, the team-based discussion (TBD). As its name... Read more »
Kellogg Marketing Students Award Super Bowl Win to Toyota’s Prius
You may have heard that the Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl on Sunday—and even that the team’s star Peyton Manning became the winningest quarterback in National Football League (NFL) history. But according to marketing students at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, bragging rights go to Toyota for its ad promoting the Prius, which ran during the game. Super Bowl advertising is big business. According to Ad Week, advertisers paid as much as $5 million per 30-second spot as part of Sunday’s game, which aired on CBS and drew 111.9 million viewers. The Prius commercial, entitled “The Longest Chase,” clocked... Read more »
Wharton Round 2 Interview Invitations Roll Out Today
With the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania scheduled to send out Round 2 interview invitations today, we know many of you are probably anxiously awaiting word. We’re sending you all good luck. According to school representatives, all invitations will go out at once—at 12 p.m. EST—and applicants will receive an email alerting them to check their online account. To help you bide the time as you wait, we thought we’d share some of what LiveWire data told us about Wharton’s Round 1 applicants. In Round 1, 30 percent of applicants who shared their results via LiveWire were accepted... Read more »
It’s D Day at Harvard Business School for Round 2 Applicants
Today’s the day that Round 2 applicants at Harvard Business School who haven’t already received an interview invitation will learn their fate. With just minutes to go until the scheduled 12 noon notification, we know anxiety is high! HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Dee Leopold is on record saying that the timing of an interview invitation—whether as part of last week’s first wave or today’s second wave—is not a reflection of your candidacy. That said, she didn’t address applicant speculation about the significance of interview invite timing head on this year. Last year, she was a little... Read more »
Innovative Fund Gives Columbia Business School MBA Students Hands-On Value Investing Experience
Where should you go to business school if you want to pursue value investing? A new student-led fund at Columbia Business School (CBS)—established with a $1.25 million donation by investment guru Thomas Russo—makes the New York City MBA program a good bet. Value investing—the philosophy favored by Warren Buffett, among others, of buying undervalued assets and then exercising patience as their long-term fundamentals reveal greater value—can be hard for MBA students to grasp in a tangible way in the two short years they spend in business school. Indeed, most academic research suggests that value investing works best over the long... Read more »
$10 Million Alumni Gift to Expand, Rename Wharton Leadership Program
Believing firmly that leadership can be both taught and learned, Wharton alumna Anne Welsh McNulty (MBA ’79) has pledged $10 million to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to expand its efforts to train leaders who impact the world. In recognition of this generous gift, the Wharton Leadership Program, launched 20 years ago, will be renamed the Anne and John McNulty Leadership Program. McNulty met her late husband John (MBA ’79) well before they were classmates at Wharton. They both grew up in Philadelphia and were sweethearts at Cardinal O’Hara High School. But it was Wharton that would... Read more »
HBS Launches New Competition to Improve Precision Medicine Clinical Trials
$1.5 billion and more than a decade of trials—that’s what it takes for a typical precision medical therapy to gain FDA approval. The Health Care Initiative at Harvard Business School (HBS), an alliance of MBA students, alumni, faculty and practitioners, is hoping to drastically reduce both the time and expense of getting innovative therapies to market with a new competition designed to reimagine the clinical trials process. Precision medicine, a growing movement in patient care, allows scientists and physicians to use genomic and other information to understand diseases based on their biological mechanisms, enabling them to precisely diagnose and develop... Read more »
HBS Round 2 Interview Invitations to Begin Rolling Out
As most anyone who applied to Harvard Business School (HBS) in Round 2 is likely aware, the first wave of interview invitations is scheduled to go out tomorrow. HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Dee Leopold took to her Direct from the Director blog yesterday to assure those anxiously awaiting word that things are on track. “This post is, quite frankly, not a news flash, but more like a reminder of what we’ve said before,” she wrote, reiterating that interview invites will begin rolling out from Dillon House tomorrow at 12 noon Boston time. The second wave will... Read more »
Choosing a Business School for Entrepreneurship
Typing “startups are hard” into Google returns approximately 32 million results—ranging from “Startups Are Hard in 100 Different Ways” to “15 Reasons Startups Are [email protected]#$ing Hard.” Perhaps that has a little something to do with why more and more savvy entrepreneurs are choosing top business schools as their training ground. With expanding entrepreneurship curricula, cool campus startup accelerators and ever increasing numbers of business plan competitions—to say nothing of the all-important access to powerful networks of potential investors—the MBA is becoming the preferred path for many would-be founders. It stands to reason that business schools would become startup hotbeds, especially... Read more »
INSEAD Knocks HBS from Top Spot in Financial Times 2016 Global MBA Rankings
INSEAD jumped three spots to claim No. 1 in the Financial Times 2016 Global MBA rankings, released today, knocking reigning Harvard Business School (HBS) to No. 2. The global business school—which features campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi—has been on an upward trajectory over the past few years, sidling from sixth to fifth to fourth, but this year marks the first time it has claimed the top spot. Incidentally, it’s also the first one-year MBA program to ever do so. HBS, for its part, held steady at No. 1 each of the past three years and has taken top... Read more »
Wharton Adds Online Specializations in Entrepreneurship, Financial Modeling
Touting its pioneering role in the massive online education space, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania this week announced that it will add two new online specializations to its series of Coursera offerings, one in entrepreneurship and another in business and financial modeling. This brings the school’s total to 16 individual online courses making up four distinct specializations, more specializations than any other business school on the Coursera platform, the school notes. Wharton Marketing Professor Peter Fader teaching a course in the “Business Foundations” specialization Wharton blazed a trail in 2012 as the first business school to offer a massive... Read more »
Darden Partners with Bunker Labs DC to Support Veteran-Led Companies
Making up between seven and nine percent of the MBA class each year, military veterans are a significant part of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business fabric. “Veterans enrich our learning community,” wrote Darden Professor and Dean Emeritus Bob Bruner in a Veteran’s Day blog post a few years back. “We actively seek excellent students from the ranks of the military.” That’s because like other leading business schools, Darden recognizes that many skills honed in the military—such as leadership, discipline, teamwork and decision-making—transfer seamlessly to the MBA classroom. But why stop at the MBA classroom? As part of a pilot... Read more »
Clear Admit’s Interview Archive: Your Go-To Resource as Round 2 Interview Invitations Roll Out
We’re seeing them from Yale School of Management, UNC Kenan-Flagler, Tuck, Kellogg, UCLA Anderson and Columbia Business School, to name more than a handful. Round 2 interview invitations are wending their way to anxious applicants. With many more to come in the next few weeks, now’s the time to take advantage of the Clear Admit Interview Archive. We’ve received more than 80 new submissions already this application season, bringing the total to more than 1,600 in-depth interview reports in all. For those of you not familiar with Clear Admit’s Interview Archive, it’s a repository of first-hand accounts shared directly by... Read more »
Best Bets for Banking: Business Schools That Help Land Jobs at Prestige Firms
Admittedly, the percentage of MBA students clamoring for jobs in investment banking is not what it once was. Thanks, 2008 global financial crisis. Nevertheless, the allure of exciting, highly compensated work that provides an opportunity to advance at break-neck speed in terms of both responsibility and pay still makes many a job-seeking MBA student weak in the knees. With annual starting salaries around $125,000—to say nothing of standard bonuses and other compensation—investment banking draws a significant portion of graduating MBAs at many top schools. And it’s not just about the money. Heading into investment banking also lets you work with... Read more »
GMAC Reveals Strong Employer Projections for MBA Hiring in 2016
Less than two weeks in, and already 2016 is coming up roses for current MBA grads—at least according to a just-released poll of employers conducted by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). Strong 2015 hiring numbers combined with even stronger 2016 hiring projections suggest that it’s a very promising time to graduate with a master’s-level business degree—particularly an MBA. “Recent graduates from business and management programs should see high demand for their skills because employers understand that they are valuable assets to their organizations,” Bob Alig, GMAC’s executive vice president for school products, said in a statement. Indeed, results of... Read more »
Choose Your Own GMAT Adventure? GMAC Pilots New “Select Section Order” Option for Exam
For many, feeling like you’re in the driver’s seat can make almost any experience better. But even the GMAT? The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns and administers the GMAT exam, plans to find out as part of a new pilot program that will give a select group of test takers the ability to choose the order of the exam sections they complete. Clear Admit has obtained a copy of an email sent by GMAC to recent test takers inviting them to participate in the “exclusive, invitation only opportunity.” The testing period of the pilot is limited and expected to... Read more »
