Fridays from the Frontline
Keep abreast of the latest happenings in the business school blogosphere! This weekly column summarizes recent posts from MBA student and applicant blogs.
Published: August 3, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: How Yale SOM’s MAM Program Prepared Me to Lead in a Humanitarian Disaster
Victor Padilla Taylor, a 2015 graduate of Yale School of Management (SOM)’s Master of Advanced Management (MAM) program, reveals in this week’s Fridays from the Frontline how his time at SOM helped prepare him to confront humanitarian disasters in his current role as a project lead supporting the Logistics Emergency Teams (LET) at the World Economic Forum. Yale SOM’s unique MAM program is a one-year, post-MBA opportunity open to exceptional graduates of business schools within the Global Network for Advanced Management (GNAM) who aspire to become global leaders for business and
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Fridays from the Frontline: HBS Alumna on Why the MBA Is Still Relevant Regardless of Industry
Newly minted Harvard Business School (HBS) graduate Ellen DaSilva (MBA ’17) opted to take two years out of the workforce—in Silicon Valley—to pursue her MBA despite the fact that some in the technology industry give “sideways glances at the mention of an MBA.” In this week’s Fridays from the Frontline, DaSilva argues clearly and persuasively for why she believes the MBA is still relevant regardless of industry because of the leadership skills it hones, the authenticity it encourages, and the network of people it helps establish. Our thanks to DaSilva and to HBS for allowing us
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Fridays From the Frontline: A Foster MBA Grad’s Journey from Appalachia to Accenture
This week’s Fridays from the Frontline first appeared on the MBA blog of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Its protagonist, Steve Tomick, is a recent MBA graduate of the program headed off to a management consultant role at Accenture in Seattle in the firm’s communications, media, and technology group. But as you’ll read, his background couldn’t have been more different. An undergraduate dual major in history and education at Wake Forest, Tomick spent six years working with the Appalachia Service Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to improve substandard housing for low-income families
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Fridays from the Frontline: A Wharton MBA Techie Shares Six Strategies for Recruiting
Recent Wharton/Lauder graduate Victoria Cheng left Philadelphia for Hangzhou, China, where she’ll complete a one-year rotational program at e-commerce giant Alibaba. She came to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School MBA program and Lauder Institute East Asia program with the goal of working in China upon graduation. But that doesn’t mean this MBA techie hasn’t lost sight of her longer-term interest in self-driving cars. In a recent “Wharton Stories” feature on the school’s website, writer Kelly Andrews shares more of Cheng’s story, as well as Cheng’s own astute strategies for recruiting—which seem to have served her
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Fridays from the Frontline: So You Want to Be a Social Entrepreneur at Kellogg
Today’s Friday from the Frontline post comes to us from Saumya, a recent graduate of the two-year MBA program at Kellogg School of Management. With her MBA degree, Saumya’s plans are to return to India, where she worked as a social entrepreneur before coming to Kellogg for business school. Prior to Kellogg, Saumya ran a startup called YellowLeaf in her native India, whose mission is to save migrant blue-collar workers from exploitation. While at Kellogg, she had the opportunity to incubate a second social enterprise, an agri-tech venture called Kheyti, whose low-cost,
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Fridays from the Frontline: Two UCLA Anderson MBA Alums Discuss Running a Company
Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing career choices; Forbes estimates that approximately 543,000 new businesses are started each month. That said, the truth is that 90 percent of startups eventually fail, which makes it vital for budding entrepreneurs to learn from their predecessors.
Recently, Erik Basu, a UCLA Anderson School of Management MBA alum and founder/CEO of Sentek Global, and John Tabis, Anderson MBA ’06 and co-founder of the Bouqs Company, shared their advice about running a company. And while both company founders offered different perspectives, their advice is valuable for any potential entrepreneur. We thought it made perfect fodder for today's Friday from the Frontline.
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Fridays from the Frontline: Why David Washer Pursued a Dartmouth Tuck Joint MBA/MPH Degree
For David Washer, who knew he wanted to pursue a career serving the social sector and striving for social justice, a joint MBA/MPH (Master of Public Health) degree seemed like just the ticket. In the post that follows, he shares why the Dartmouth Tuck Joint MBA/MPH degree made the most sense for him—as well as why he believes adding the MBA is a valuable option for social justice advocates considering graduate study. This following post has been republished in its entirety from its original source, the Tuck 360: MBA Blog. Why I Pursued
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Fridays from the Frontline: Darden MBA Student Molly Deale Shifts from Making Hats to Managing Finances
It’s Friday—which means it’s time for some perspective from the MBA community. Today it comes from Molly Deale, a rising second-year MBA student at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Deale’s pre–business school work experience is pretty unique: She managed a New York City millinery studio, creating hats for film, TV, and Broadway clients including Hamilton and Wicked. In the interview that follows, she reveals how she took that experience and married it with Darden’s case-based MBA curriculum, the strong Darden alumni network, and the resources provided through the school’s career services offices to land a summer
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Fridays from the Frontline: Johnson Student’s Summer MBA Internship Building a Veterinary Hospital in Mumbai
Some MBA students choose to intern at investment banks in New York or London, others at tech firms in Silicon Valley, others at big multinational consulting firms. But it’s not every day you hear of someone packing up for a summer internship building a veterinary hospital in Mumbai. And yet, that is precisely how Shantanu Naidu, a “half MBA” at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, will spend his summer. In the post that follows, Naidu shares his family’s ties to India’s Tata Group—which span four generations. He also describes how his first year as an
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Fridays from the Frontline: UCLA Anderson FEMBA Student on Why the Future Must Be More Female
This week’s post comes to us from sunny Southern California and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Its author, Sana Rahim, is a student in UCLA Anderson’s fully employed MBA (FEMBA) program while also working as a sales manager at McMaster Carr. Despite the competing demands of work and school, she also finds time to serve as a strategic consultant for social impact at the Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. And this summer she will be on fellowship at the United Nations in Istanbul to work toward sustainable development goals. The preceding sentences alone suggest that Rahim
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Fridays from the Frontline: Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone at HBS
Today we are pleased to share a recent post from the Harvard Business School (HBS) “MBA Voices” student blog, written by newly minted HBS MBA LaToya Marc. She walked across stage this week to receive her degree, culminating a busy two years in which she balanced the pressures of coursework, recruiting, and extensive involvement in student clubs with motherhood.
Marc served as co-president of the Student Association, which she says was her most rewarding experience while at HBS. (Click here to see her addressing her fellow classmates on Class Day with Libby L. Hoaglin, her Student Association co-president.) She also pushed through plenty of anxiety—like many of her fellow classmates, she confesses to worrying that she was an “admissions mistake”—to speak up in class and defend her points of view as part of HBS’s signature case method of learning.
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Fridays from the Frontline: Johnson MBA Immersion Program Helps Build Confidence Through Skill Acquisition
A hallmark of the Johnson Graduate School of Management, which is part of the larger Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, is its intensive immersion program. In the spring of their first year, Johnson MBA students take part in a hands-on semester of integrated course and field work focused on a particular industry or functional role. Johnson currently offers seven immersions—in Capital Markets and Asset Management, Investment Banking, Managerial Finance, Strategic Operations, Strategic Marketing, Digital Technology, and Sustainable Global Enterprise—as well as a Customized Immersion that allows students to create their own intensive courses of study.
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Fridays from the Frontline: 5 Things I Learned About Succeeding in Silicon Valley as a Woman
Today’s post comes to us from Nancy Hoque, an evening & weekend MBA student at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. A former solutions architect designing mission-critical communications for the U.S. military, Hoque is also founder of a modest scarf fashion startup for Muslim women. At Haas, she’s played an active role, serving as vice president of Haas Tech Club and the Women in Leadership Club, as well as a Haas Lean-In Ambassador. She’ll spend her summer working in product marketing management for next-generation cyber security at Symantec. Longer term, she hopes her MBA will prepare her for a leadership role
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Published: April 27, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: A Sufi Poet at INSEAD
Today’s post comes to us from INSEAD MBA student Sabrina Lakhani, a Chicago native whose pre-MBA career took her from Babson College in Boston to a small Connecticut marketing consultancy for a couple of years to volunteering as a full-time project coordinator at a hospital for children in Kabul. From there it was on to East Africa, working first on a network of hospitals and later on a network of schools. She then returned to work for her family’s businesses in Chicago before joining a decision heuristics science‒based marketing firm as director of client services. In an earlier post, she
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Published: April 20, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: An HBS Alum’s Answer to Should Entrepreneurs Get an MBA?
Today’s post comes to us from recent Harvard Business School (HBS) alumnus Jon Staff (MBA ’16), who is now CEO and founder of a company that offers rural escapes to stressed-out city dwellers. Called Getaway, his startup designs tiny houses and places them in picturesque rural locations, where they can be rented out starting at $99 night. In the following piece, Staff takes on the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who have gone on record as suggesting that entrepreneurs should not seek MBAs. Even though that sentiment gave him pause as he decided
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Published: April 13, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: MBA Student Finds Support to Be Out at Wharton
For some MBA students, business school presents an entire new community with whom they can choose whether or not to share their sexual orientation. For Rafael de la Rosa, a second-year MBA student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the decision to be out to his classmates was one he arrived at only after careful consideration. Connecting to Wharton’s Out4Biz LGBT student group before coming to campus helped him feel confident that he could be his full self. In the post that follows, you’ll learn that not only did he come out to everyone at Wharton, de
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Fridays from the Frontline: Tuck Net Impact Education Trek
The Net Impact Club at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business recently organized an Education Trek to tour a range of educational organizations in Boston, and this week’s Fridays from the Frontline provides a thoughtful reflection on that experience by one of its participants. Erica Toews, MBA ’18, (pictured above, far left) details the trek’s four stops, which included a Boston public school, a charter school, an education technology company and a nonprofit education organization. Toews’s pre-MBA career included working as a librarian at Stanford Law School, a legal assistant at Google, a teacher with the Fulbright Commission
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Published: March 30, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: February 2017 MBA Mama of the Month Charanya Kannan
To close out Women’s History Month, we are delighted to feature another amazing woman balancing the demands of pursuing her MBA with the demands of raising a family. Harvard Business School (HBS) second-year MBA student Charanya Kannan was named MBA Mama of the Month for February 2017 by our content partner, MBA Mama. A wife and mother of one, Kannan began her career as a TV anchor in her native India. She went on to earn an engineering degree and a diploma in management from Bombay and to join the Tata Group’s leadership program. Tata sent her to
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Published: March 23, 2017
Friday from the Frontlines: Why We Need More Women in Business School
This week’s Friday from the Frontlines comes to us from the London Business School’s MBA recruitment and admissions team and addresses the need for—and value of—having more women in business school. Before recently becoming senior director of MBA recruitment and admissions at LBS, Stephanie Kernwein Thrane oversaw the school’s MBA exchange program, which gave her insight into the goings on not only at the London school but also at 34 partner schools around the globe. She is committed to helping promote women in business school and in business and has been actively involved both at LBS and through
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Published: March 16, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: MBA Mama and Stanford GSB Student Valerie Rivera
This week's Friday from the Frontline comes to us via our content partner, MBA Mama, an online platform designed to share the stories of women successfully navigating both motherhood and the MBA. As its January Mama of the Month (MotM), MBA Mama featured second-year Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) MBA student Valerie Rivera. Mom to 11-year-old twin boys, Rivera is also a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, where she held various leadership positions.
Don't miss MBA Mama's exclusive interview with Rivera, below, in which she talks about why she chose Stanford for her MBA and what she's liked most about her time there, some of the time management strategies she employs to keep up with family, school and career, and her plans to open a consulting firm after she graduates. Our thanks to MBA Mama for allowing us to share this interview with the Clear Admit audience.
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Fridays from the Frontline: NYU Stern Student Shares a Recruiting Road Less Taken
Are you considering the luxury retail industry after business school? If so, don’t miss this week’s Fridays from the Frontline, which comes to us from NYU Stern School of Business second-year MBA student Nina Dudhale. New Jersey-native Dudhale worked in digital acquisition marketing at American Express OPEN before coming to Stern, where she has chosen to specialize in luxury marketing and finance. Nina Dudhale, Stern MBA ’17 As she shares in the post below, folks at Stern warned her at the get-go that recruiting in the luxury retail space is less structured than industries like consulting or
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Fridays from the Frontline: HBS Student Offers Advice for Prospective Latino Students
Today’s Fridays from the Frontline contribution comes to us from Karla Mendez, a first-year MBA student at Harvard Business School (HBS). Born in Mexico, Mendez moved to Fresno, California, when she was five with parents who wanted to build a better life for her family. In the thoughtful post below, Mendez shares some of her experiences as a Latina American, including the tension between wanting to maintain a strong connection to her Mexican American roots while not having them define her completely. She also describes the pressure so often felt by immigrants, and sometimes even more so their
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Published: February 23, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: A Day in the Life of an INSEAD MBA Student
INSEAD is definitely riding high these days, having topped the Financial Times’ annual ranking of leading global MBA programs for the second year running. Calling itself “the business school for the world,” it features campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi and more than 90 nationalities represented in its student body. Students complete an accelerated 10-month program, which has helped the school rank especially high in terms of return on investment, since both tuition and the opportunity cost of being out of the workforce is lower for INSEAD students than those in two-year MBA programs.
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Published: February 16, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: MIT Sloan’s Israel Lab
Israel is in the news this week following President Donald Trump’s first official meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which took place on Wednesday. Our Fridays from the Frontline also centers on Israel, but without touching on the incredibly fraught subject of a one- versus two-state solution for the conflict-ridden region. Instead, we focus on a series of fascinating blog posts written by MIT Sloan School of Management students who spent their winter break taking part in MIT Sloan’s Israel Lab. Now in its second year, Israel Lab takes Sloan students on a journey to one
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Published: February 9, 2017
Fridays from the Frontline: From Herat to Haas, An Afghan Student’s Journey
Today’s Friday from the Frontline is a bit of a departure from our usual practice of sharing first-person accounts—but the story of Sal Parsa on the Berkeley Haas blog so captivated us that we wanted to make sure the Clear Admit audience didn’t miss it. Below, learn how Parsa went from sewing clothes in a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to serving as president of the Haas Data Science Club while also working to get a career guidance platform startup off the ground. It’s inspiring, to say the least. Our thanks to Haas and Parsa for allowing us to share the story here.
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