Review: Applying to a Top MBA Program

I just finished Applying to a Top MBA Program, which offers a unique look at the admissions process. Rather than focusing on the schools or the applications, it provides insights into the students themselves through twenty different interviews with first-year students at top programs. The students talk about their application strategies, their school choices, how they prepared for the GMAT, and what kind of plans they had once they graduated. The diversity of the interviewees is impressive. There are of course students with a number of different ethnic backgrounds, but there is also a wide range in the age of the students, as well as significant variety in their professional backgrounds and undergraduate experiences.

Although I couldn't help but compare myself to the students as I read their profiles (and in general, they are extremely impressive), I was also reassured by some of their comments. For instance, one of my concerns is whether or not the significant financial investment I plan to make in getting my MBA will pay adequate returns. My opportunity cost pales though in comparison to one of the students who took a two year hiatus from her job as a founding partner of a law firm to get her degree. It was also interesting to see how different people decided which schools to apply to. Some chose based on geography, some based on the schools' personalities or academic strengths, and a couple applied to H/W/S just "because they were the top three."

If you're still not sure about whether or not business school is right for you, or which ones to apply to, this book could give you some new perspectives on your decision. It also provides a look at the type of people who attend business school, and it's likely that you'll identify with at least one or two of the students in the book.

If you're looking for a book that's actually enjoyable to read while providing a different perspective on the application process, I can strongly recommend Applying to a Top MBA Program.

Career Options for MBAs: Leave it on the shelf

A couple weeks ago, I ordered three books from Barnes & Noble: ABCs of Getting the MBA Admissions Edge (reviewed in a previous post), Applying to a Top MBA Program, and Career Options for MBAs. After covering Applying to a Top MBA Program, let me warn you away from the Career Options book. This book, which retails for about $15.00 despite its mere 124 pages, supposedly offers a look at the different career options that MBA graduates have. In actuality, it only looks at three different areas: management consulting, VC/private equity, and investment banking. Each section contains a few paragraphs by two or three leaders in that field. I believe the head of IBM's consulting practice was one, and a Sequioa Capital partner was another. Despite the ostensibly interesting careers that these people have, the writing is possibly the most vapid I've ever come across. One of the first passages talks about 'retaining and leveraging key assets'; another talks about trying to 'find new overlaps in your circles.'
Now I don't think of myself as the kind of person that dislikes the phrasing that some people refer to as 'business speak' per se. If I was, I probably wouldn't be interested in getting an MBA in the first place. But there are certain words that are so vague as to be almost meaningless. I understand what a 'paradigm shift' is. But the word 'asset' can refer to almost anything that a business has, from intellectual assets to human assets to financial assets. Some people even refer to a revenue stream as an asset. Of the three books I ordered, this was the only one that I didn't purchase, If you're looking for a small, expensive, but still useful book, try Frank Singer's How to Value a Business. At around 28 pages and $20.00, it's possibly the most expensive book per page that I own, but it provides interesting insights in valuing new ventures that are worth the reading time and money.

Coming soon...

Coming soon, a review of Applying to a Top MBA Program

CareerLeader: Almost worth the money, but not for the reasons you might expect

When the GMAC mailed me my GMAT score report, the envelope contained not just my scores but also an advertisement for a service called CareerLeader. CareerLeader is a multi-part online test put together by a pair of Harvard psychologists that attempts to match your self-reported interests, skills, and values with a list of potential MBA-related careers.

First, let's talk about the cost involved. CareerLeader is $50 for five years of access and a maximum of two full tests (i.e., two tests each comprising a multipart test) if you buy it through MBA.com, or $75 for as many tests as you want to take during a 60-day period. This is a little confusing though, because CareerLeader also says that "We will grant free extensions to your 60-day subscription if you request one."

Once you purchase access to the service (I decided to buy through MBA.com), you need to take three different tests: the Business Career Interest Inventory, the Management and Professional Rewards Profile, and the the Management and Professional Abilities Profile. Each one attempts to assess you in a different way.

The Career Interest test is similar to the kind of career test that might have taken in high school or college. It asks you to rate how much you would like different careers or activities, assuming that you didn't have to worry about pay, job security, etc. These include activities like "designing a magazine cover" and jobs like "Athletic Coach" as well as more MBA-related positions like "Chief Financial Officer."

The Rewards profile tries to measure what kinds of career-related values you have by asking you to make choices between different kinds of positive job attibutes. For instance, you're asked if you would rather have a job that has the potential for excellent financial compensation, or one that allows you more time to spend with your family and friends. Would you prefer one that allows a great deal of personal autonomy, or one that positions you well for your next career jump? Obviously we want our jobs to offer all of these to some degree, but being forced to make a choice between them attempts to clarify what we really value when push comes to shove.

Finally, the Professional Abilities Profile attempts to assess your skill level in general areas like "Political skill," "creativity," and "Quantitative Analysis." This test is by far the weakest of the three, since it's based primarily on your self-reported assessment of your skill levels. In terms of quantitative thinking, are you in the top 5%, top 20%, about average, etc. I think that just as 80% of people believe that they're above-average drivers, individuals are going to tend to overrate themselves in each of these categories. To balance this out, CareerLeader also offer an anonymous 360-feedback which allows you to send a URL to people who are familiar with your abilities so that they can rate you on the same scale. I haven't tried this yet, primarily because the URL includes "mba1.html" and I haven't yet fully discussed my graduate school plans with my coworkers.

Once you've completed the test, you're offered a variety of reports based on the results. I won't go too deeply into the reports themselves, since you can see samples here. Honestly, I wasn't too impressed with the reports. Since everything is self-reported, I didn't learn much about myself that I didn't already know.

I was much more interested in the detailed industry sketches and career overviews that CareerLeader offered. They provide overviews of 27 different career areas, from Accounting to Venture Capital, with about a page of information on each. The info includes the typical background of the kind of person who enters each career area ("Product managers often have a background in marketing or identify themselves with the marketing function") as well as the kind of day-to-day duties you might expect in this career. If you know that you're getting your MBA specifically so that you can (for example) move ahead in you management consulting career, this probably isn't for you. On the other hand, if like me you're trying to decide between entrepreneurship and the dozen different kinds of financial specialties, CareerLeader might give you some additional insight.

Finally, CareerLeader also provides a summary of the different "Achilles' Heel" weaknesses that the CareerLeader developers summarize in their book The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back. In addition, they provide the kinds of results that indicate that you might have a particular weakness (e.g., 'The Rebel' "Usually [has] Low or Very Low interests in Managing People and Relationships and Influence Through Language and Ideas"). If you had any interest in the book, this is probably more useful since it helps you identify your potential weaknesses more accurately.

Although the test wasn't as insightful as I had hoped, and it didn't give me any stunning new insights into my inner self, it was interesting to see what I might expect of the different career options that I could have coming out of business school. The Achilles' Heel information was also useful, and I'm glad that I got it with the test score indicators via CareerLeader rather than from the book.

Total actual cost: $50
What I should have been willing to pay in retrospect: $30

GMAT 770

A few days ago, I finally received my official GMAT score, including AWA (i.e., essay) score. Of course, when you take the GMAT, you'll receive an unofficial printout immediately after completing the exam that lists your verbal and quantitative scores, although not your AWA score. I'm going to give a recap of how I prepared for the GMAT, in the hopes that it will help others who are facing the same challenge.

First, my scores themselves, so you'll know that my preparation actually yielded something:
Verbal: 48 (99th percentile)
Math: 49 (90th percentile)
Total: 770 (99th percentile)
AWA: 6.0 (96th percentile)

As you may have guessed from my scores, the math section was the hardest for me. Even though in the professional world I use fairly advanced math on a daily basis, I was unable to translate those skills as much as I would have liked. Knowing how to do binomial approximations or Bayesian probability calculations isn't going to help a bit on the GMAT.

So what did help me? I used a number of resources to prepare:

• Princeton's Cracking the GMAT
• Kaplan's GMAT 2006, Premier Program
• Rapid Math Tricks & Tips
• The Official Guide, colloquially known as the "OG" among GMAT test takers
• The Official Guide for the GMAT Quantitative Review
• The GMATPrep software, which is free to download and use

I started preparing around 12 weeks or so prior to the test. My first purchase was the Kaplan book. At first I couldn't decide between the Kaplan and Princeton books, but I was finally convinced by Kaplan's "mobile prep" software: An application that installs on your Palm-compatible phone and lets you do quantitative questions on the go. Unfortunately, this software was a huge disappointment. I was able to get it installed, but when I tried to run the application, the display was so corrupted as to be unreadable. Emails to Kaplan and to the makers of the software only resulted in them redirecting me to each other.

The Kaplan book itself was reasonable, but nothing special. Like the Princeton book, it covers the basics of the GMAT test itself, and the fundamentals of the quantitative and verbal sections. It also offers a number of tests on the accompanying CD-ROM. I only took one of these tests, since the Princeton ones were, in my opinion, much better.

The Princeton Review's Cracking the GMAT was my primary guide for test-taking skills. I found their "Joe Bloggs" approach to be insightful, and their writing was more entertaining than Kaplan's while covering the same material. If I had to pick just one resource among all of the ones I used, it would be this one.

As I started taking practice tests, a clear pattern emerged: I would consistently score incredibly well on the verbal section, but comparatively poorly on the quantitative questions. My problem was that even though I knew how to do the questions, I couldn't do them fast enough. After I identified this weakness, I picked up a copy of the Rapid Math Tricks & Tips book. The book is divided into two sections: one section on rapid multiplication and division, and one section on rapid addition and subtraction. I only made it about three fourths of the way through the multiplication and division section before test day, but even so I learned a couple tricks that came in handy. Perhaps equally important, the ability to do calculations more quickly (even if it was only certain kinds of calculations) boosted my confidence.

My confidence really needed boosting after it go destroyed by the Princeton and Kaplan practice exams. The exams included with the books were consistently significantly harder than the GMATPrep ones. At one point, about halfway through my preparation, I got as low as a 620 from the Kaplan test. I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that Princeton and Kaplan do this on purpose. Anyone who gets a GMAT score that's 50-100 points more than what they were getting on the practice exams is naturally elated. Since the Princeton and Kaplan tools were probably their main guides when preparing, the test-taker naturally credits their "improved" score to the guides. Now I don't deny that the Princeton guide helped me, and as I said if I had to pick just one book it would be theirs. However, once I understood their strategies, took a couple of their tests, and understood my weaknesses, it was consistent, nightly practice with the Official Guide and the Quantitative Supplement that I felt helped me the most.

In addition to working through the books, I also took one test using the GMATPrep software each weekend before the test including the timed AWA sections, as suggested by the folks at the TestMagic Forums (another great resource). In general, although there was one bug in the software (some questions in one of the test referred to a portion of a reading passage that was missing), I thought that the GMATPrep tests were excellent. There were only two improvements I would have made: more tests, and the option to send my essays in for grading. I even would have been willing to pay a nominal fee to have the essays graded as they would have been in a real GMAT test.

Test day, a Tuesday, arrived too soon for me. I had taken both Monday and Tuesday of the week off so that I was mentally relaxed and not worrying about work-related matters. On Monday I drove to the test site and took a look around the lobby, although the VUE folks wouldn't let me see the actual testing area. On Tuesday I arrived about an hour early to give me time to pick up some coffee. I know the some people say that caffeine impairs your mental performance, but personally I feel that I work much better after a Starbucks sugar-and-caffeine blend. If my biggest challenge, the quantitative section, wasn't the first one immediately following the AWA the Starbucks strategy migh have backfired on me since sugar only gives a short-term energy boost followed by a lull in energy.

Once I was at the testing center, I took a number and waited for it to be called. When it was my turn, the test administrator took a digital image of my fingerprint (no ink involved), and a photograph of me. These two were crosschecked each time I entered and exited the testing area. After the ten or so other test-takers and I had been photographed and fingerprinted, they called us two by two to start the test on the computers. Even though we all had numbers, each time they were ready for two new people they just asked for volunteers. If you feel that you want to start the test immediately rather than waiting around for another 20 minutes, be assertive! On the other hand, if you want some time to relax and steady your nerves, you can just wait for everyone else to go ahead of you.

When I sat down at the computer I was given an "erasable notepad". In reality, this was just three spiral-bound pieces of laminated cardstock and a fine-tipped marker. It is in no way "erasable" unless you wipe it with something wet. It is, however, very smearable if your hands are sweaty. I cannot imagine the difficulty that people who are left-handed must have.

After completing the preliminaries like confirming my GPA, undergraduate school, etc (which were all helpfully populated from my mba.com profile), I selected five schools to send my scores to and started the test! I finished each essay with a few minutes to spare, which I used to do some quick spelling and structural edits. My biggest advice for the AWA section would be to practice your typing speed--I would have been grateful for another few minutes on the essays, and both Princeton and Kaplan say that essay length is highly correlated with good AWA scores.

After the essays was the quantitative section. I'm not going to front--I seriously freaked out on the first question, and probably spent a solid five minutes on it even though in retrospect it was only a moderately difficult question. I was continually nervous throughout the quantitative section. Since the test is adaptive, if I got a question that I answered easily I would think to myself, "I must be doing really bad to get such an easy question." If I got a question that was hard, it was just as bad because I had difficulty answering it. I am not joking when I say that I seriously thought about cancelling my scores both after the quantitative section and at the end of the test.

After finishing the quantitative section (an accomplishment in itself--I often had trouble answering all the questions in time during my practice tests), I took a break and breezed through the verbal section in about 25 minutes. After I finished the test and had a brief internal debate about whether or not to just cancel the score, a combination of curiosity and dread at the prospect of having to do it all again convinced me to have the exam scored. When I saw that I got a 770, my first thought was confusion--I thought it must have been a bug in the program since I was sure I had scored in the mid-600s. For a split second, I wondered if I should notify one of the administrators that the software had a problem. As the realization gradually dawned on me that I had in fact achieved a great score, I became ecstatic. I grabbed my phone and keys from my locker, jumped into my car and cranked up the stereo as loud as I could stand as I drove home with a huge grin on my face and rekindled MBA ambitions in my heart.

Flexible Image Rides Again

So after a nearly year-long hiatus, I'm going to try this again. Today's topic: A review of ABC of Getting the MBA Admissions Edge: International. Why, as a United States citizen who plans on attending a United States business school, am I reading the International Edition? Because Barnes and Noble ordered the wrong version for me and I didn't find out until I started reading it. However, that won't stop me from criticizing it. :-)

From the start, I had a negative impression of the book: Of the first 15 pages, 12 are advertisements, including an advertisement on the inside front cover by Goldman Sachs. Ads aside, my main complaint with this book is its horrible, horrible editing. A particularly egregious example from the GMAT Quantitative section:

...Clearly, we have to add five to each answer choice before we move any further. This gives you:
(A) 9+15=4
(B) 15+5=50
(C) 19=5=24
(D) 21+5=26
(E) 49+5=5


As Dave Barry would say: I am not making this up. Those are the exact characters from page 115 of the book. Of course, they could have saved themselves the embarassment of making errors like those by simply omitting the GMAT/TOEFL section entirely, and instead providing references to much better books like the Princeton and Kaplan reviews.

The Admissions Edge authors should instead have stuck to the book's strength: Its reviews of the top business schools. The book provides in-depth looks at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, INSEAD, Kellogg, LBS, MIT, NYU, Stanford, and Wharton. Each review is written by an alum of the school in question and is about 20 pages long. It includes the basic stats (Tuition, GMAT average, exiting salary, etc) and also more interesting data, like an interview with the school's Dean, advice on how to target your essay, and the results of student surveys on how well the quality of the classes met their expectations, broken down by academic area (e.g., finance, marketing, entrepreneurship). They also offer information from on the kind of interview to expect, straight from an individual at each school who is actually conducting interviews. Of course, due to the book's age (it was published in 2002) this information has to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, I would be surprised if the non-statistical data of each school changed significantly from year to year.

Summary recommendation: 3/5. Buy it used if you buy it at all.