MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Career Services Director Q&A: Cynthia Saunders-Cheatham of Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management
In our continuing series of interviews with career services directors at leading business schools, we connected earlier this month with Cynthia Saunders-Cheathem, who heads the Career Management Center (CMC) at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Business. Saunders-Cheathem joined the CMC eight years ago and was promoted to executive director in 2014. Before Johnson, she worked in corporate marketing for 15 years at a range of companies including Hanes Underwear, Valvoline and United Technology. Saunders-Cheatham was generous with her time and went into great detail regarding Johnson’s career management offerings, trends in hiring and student career goals and how
Read more
Friday from the Frontline: First-Year Project for PayPal France
This week’s post comes to us from Tuck rising second-year Ashley Cahill, a Connecticut native who spent the five years before business school working in Shanghai, China, in public relations roles for the American Chamber of Commerce, Weber Shandwick and a sustainable agriculture startup. As you’ll read, her international experiences have extended right into the MBA program thanks to Tuck’s First-Year Project, which Cahill completed in Paris as part of an assignment for PayPal France. Our thanks to her for agreeing to share her experience with Clear Admit’s audience. This post has been republished in its entirety from its
Read more
MBA Hiring Going Up, Up Up, Survey Results Reveal
Things just keep getting better when it comes to MBA hiring, according to the most recent survey of corporate recruiters, released today by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). Some 88 percent of recruiters surveyed plan to hire MBA graduates in 2016. That’s an eight percentage point jump over last year and a whopping 33 percentage points higher than in 2010, the lowest point of the recession.
Corporate Recruiter Hiring Projections Source: GMAC 2016 Corporate Recruiters Survey Report
In fact, appetite for MBA grads shows growth in every industry category measured. The products and services industry saw the greatest jump, from 76 percent actually hired last year to 86 percent projected for this year. In consulting, companies intending to hire MBAs worldwide rose to 92 percent, up from 83. Finance and accounting saw an increase from 76 to 84 percent. Technology saw the smallest jump but still increased, from 82 to 84 percent.
Read more
6 Things That Make Being an MBA Dad the Best
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, and especially to those who have decided to bite the bullet and tackle the MBA and fatherhood simultaneously. It can be done, albeit with some sacrifices, and students both male and female seem to be pairing parenthood with the rigors of business school more and more these days. We caught up with a few MBA dads to learn what works, what doesn’t and what they wouldn’t change for the world. 6 Things That Make Being an MBA Dad the Best Matching Backpacks “Every morning I put on my backpack and
Read more
Friday from the Frontlines: How to Be an Ally After the Orlando Tragedy
The devastating attack on an Orlando nightclub earlier this week drew responses of support and unity from MBA students and professionals around the globe, as showcased in yesterday’s Top MBA Tweets of the Week. We also took note of this insightful piece on LinkedIn posted by NYU Stern alumna Rachel Hurnyak (MBA ’15), who now works as a project manager for Tesla. We first connected with Hurnyak last May, just after she was honored by Stern Dean Peter Henry for her work to promote inclusion and diversity within Stern’s MBA class. Hurnyak was instrumental in helping lead Stern’s
Read more
Bain & Company and MBAs: A Love Story
There’s no doubt that a career in consulting is a top draw for many MBA grads. The median pay for a management consultant in 2015 was $81,320 and for an MBA grad from a top school, that median pay jumps up to $120,000 or more.
Let’s face it; With six-figure median starting salaries and sign-on bonuses of another $25,000, it’s an attractive field.
Read more
Stress Around Standardized Tests, Tuition Costs Looms Large for Current MBA Applicants
Entrance exams generate more angst than any other part of the MBA admissions process for the majority of applicants to business schools, according to a survey released today by the Association of Independent Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC). Sixty-one percent of respondents cited standardized tests as the most challenging application component, while 46 percent pointed to written essays and 20 percent indicated interviews. Interestingly, newer additions to the application process—such as videos and group exercises implemented in recent years by schools like Kellogg and Wharton—seem to incite less anxiety, with only 19 percent of applicants saying these were especially challenging. In fact,
Read more
A Look at MBA DecisionWire Data for NYU Stern, Yale SOM, Cornell’s Johnson School
Welcome back for the sixth in our series of posts offering analysis of the data we are receiving on MBA DecisionWire. MBA DecisionWire is a resource that allows candidates to share where they’ve decided to attend business school based on the offers they received. If you have made your final decision in terms of where you will attend, please share on MBA DecisionWire. You can also use the filter options to see how other candidates have made their choices. In this installment of our ongoing series, we’re exploring a New York/Metro-North theme by examining three schools in
Read more
MBAs and Google: How to Get an Inside Track
We all know about Google. We use it in our everyday lives to accomplish all sorts of tasks. Finding out what time the NBA Finals are on tonight, discovering a new recipe to cook or learning more about an interview subject all are made possible thanks to the world’s most powerful and user-friendly search engine.
But what about all the time, effort and business-savvy that goes into a company like Google? Plenty of that comes from new MBAs hired by Google each year.
Read more
Two Rotman MBAs Named as Canada’s Top Female Entrepreneurs
The PROFIT/Chatelaine W100 ranking of Canada’s Top Female Entrepreneurs has recognized two Rotman School of Management MBA graduates. A third Rotman MBA was ranked as a rising entrepreneur to watch and a fourth company, co-founded by a Rotman MBA, placed #1 in the ranking. The PROFIT/Chatelaine W100 ranking and awards program is Canada’s largest celebration of women entrepreneurs. Each year, it ranks the top 100 female entrepreneurs by a score that takes into account the size, growth rate and profitability of the companies they own and manage. Winners are honored in the June 2016 issue of Canadian Business magazine, as well as throughout the year on
Read more
Friday from the Frontlines: Pride@Kellogg Celebrates LGBT Ally Week
It’s June, and that means it’s also LGBT Pride Month. June was chosen to celebrate the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan considered to be a pivotal moment in the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In honor of LGBT Pride month, we’re pleased as this week’s Friday from the Frontlines to feature a piece about student group Pride@Kellogg and its second annual LGBT Ally Week, which took place last month when students were all still on campus. The piece was written by Kyle Burr, a second-year student in Kellogg’s full-time two-year MBA program.
Read more
Consortium Alumna’s Parents Establish $1 Million Endowment in Daughter’s Memory
It takes a special family to turn tragedy into hope and opportunity for others, but that’s exactly the kind of family Leslie Elise Adkins had. Adkins, an MBA student at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and a fellow of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, died on May 5, 2015, due to complications from chronic diabetes. Last week, her parents, Lynette and Kedrick Adkins, established a $1 million scholarship endowment through the Consortium in her memory.
Read more
How These Haasies Landed Jobs at McKinsey, BCG, Apple, Facebook and Google
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business hasn’t yet released employment statistics on its Class of 2016 graduates, which makes sense since barely a week has passed since they walked across the stage to collect their diplomas. Like most peer schools, Haas’s Career Management Group will share those details in the fall when they have complete data.
Source: UC Berkeley Haas, Class of 2015 Employment Statistics
In the meantime, we’ve got something perhaps even more valuable than a long list of statistics. Namely, personal stories from actual Haas students who have landed jobs at some of the hottest hiring firms around—and how they did it.
Read more
Why McKinsey and Company Loves to Hire MBAs
When it comes to careers MBAs are likely to land, working for a management consulting firm like tops the list. McKinsey and Company is one such firm that conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis for companies around the world in order to evaluate management decisions across the public and private sectors. McKinsey is considered one of the most prestigious management consultancy firms globally and the firm’s clientele includes 80 percent of the world’s largest corporations, along with an extensive list of governments and non-profit organisations. More current and former Fortune 500 CEOs are actually alumni of McKinsey than of any
Read more
Cornell’s Johnson School Becomes Latest Leading Business School to Name a New Dean
The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management today announced that its next dean will be accounting scholar Mark Nelson, who has been teaching accounting at the school since 1990 and also spent three years as associate dean for academic affairs. Nelson will begin his five-year term on July 1st, becoming the school’s 12th dean. He will succeed Soumitra Dutta, who will step down from the post June 30th. On March 22nd, Dutta was appointed to serve as dean of the nascent College of Business, which will bring together Cornell University’s three accredited business schools: the School
Read more
LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman Donates $1M, Expertise to Support Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, yesterday announced that he will give $1 million to support entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School and across the University of Oxford. In addition to the generous monetary gift, Hoffman will also serve as senior advisor at “The Oxford Foundry,” a new dramatically increased space for entrepreneurship designed to serve not only Saïd but the larger university and the local community. In this role, Hoffman will give his time and advice to help start and scale new ventures.
Read more
Friday from the Frontlines: Tuck’s Global First-Year Project
This week’s Friday from the Frontlines comes to us from Nicholas Ritter, a second-year MBA student at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business who is spending the summer interning with IBM Watson’s Life Sciences team in New York. Prior to business school he worked as an electrical and product engineer for Nabsys, a biotech startup developing genomic sequencing technology. In his free time he is a Tripod Hockey Captain, a Revers Energy Fellow, an admissions associate and hard at work to form a Tuck Toboggan Club. In the post that follows, Ritter shares about his global first-year project with scaffolding manufacturing firm
Read more
UC Berkeley’s Haas School Appoints New Assistant Dean of Full-Time MBA Program and Admissions
Changes in the MBA admissions office are not unique to Harvard Business School (HBS), where last month longtime reigning managing director Dee Leopold departed, replaced by HBS alumnus Chad Losee. This week, the news comes out of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where Peter Johnson has been appointed the new assistant dean of the full-time MBA program and admissions. “Love when we lure a former member of the team back to Haas,” Dean Rich Lyons tweeted out yesterday. “Pete Johnson is back to head our full-time MBA program.” Indeed, Johnson knows Haas well, having
Read more
Clear Admit Launches New Strategic Partnership with MBA Mama
Clear Admit’s own roots stretch back to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—where co-founders Graham Richmond and Eliot Ingram both received their MBAs and Richmond went on to work in the Wharton Admissions Office. Continuing to hone their expertise in the MBA admissions process at top-tier schools, the two Wharton MBAs would soon launch Clear Admit, the leading independent resource for top-tier MBA candidates.
MBA Mama Co-Founder and CEO Divinity Matovu (Wharton MBA 2017)
Meanwhile, another Wharton MBA student has been hard at work on her own business concept. Wharton rising second-year MBA student Divinity Matovu is co-founder and CEO of MBA Mama, an online platform providing ambitious women with tools and resources to leverage an MBA and strategically navigate family/career planning. Together with co-founder Nicole Pontón, an MBA student at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, the two have been making the MBA Mama name known far and wide. The things the duo had been working on caught our eye, and we reached out to Matovu last fall to ask if she would share some of her experiences as an MBA mom in our Fridays from the Frontline column. She graciously agreed.
Read more
MBA DecisionWire Data Analysis Examines Yields for HBS, Chicago Booth and Fuqua
Welcome back for the fifth in our series of posts offering analysis of the data we are receiving on MBA DecisionWire. MBA DecisionWire is a resource that allows candidates to share where they’ve decided to attend business school based on the offers they received.
If you have made your final decision in terms of where you will attend, please share on MBA DecisionWire. You can also use the filter options to see how other candidates have made their choices.
Read more
Darden Invites Reapplicants to Sign Up for Feedback Sessions
The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business has long stood out for the resources it devotes to helping unsuccessful applicants understand how they can strengthen their candidacy and reapply. This year is no exception.
In a blog post late last week, Darden announced that its admissions committee is currently offering 15-minute phone sessions with candidates who are seeking to reapply to the school in the fall and would like feedback on their applications.
Read more
