MBA’S CHOOSE JOBS: MONEY VS. WORK-LIFE BALANCE AND SOCIAL IMPACT: DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THEY SAY OR WHAT THEY DO?

THIS EXIT POLLING– WHICH REVEALS IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE $$$$- BY THE ALWAYS-CHEERY ASPEN INSTITUTE NEEDS TO BE CONTRASTED W. STORY BELOW THE FOLD OF THIS POST WHICH REVEALS THAT WHEN MBA’S ACTUALLY CHOOSE JOBS, INSTEAD OF TALKING ABOUT THEM, WELL, IT IS, AU CONTRAIRE,  ’SHOW ME THE MONEY’ SINCE FINANCE JOBS, WHICH ARE NOT WORK-BALANCE FRIENDLY, OR POSITIVELY SOCIALLY IMPACTFUL ETC. ETC ARE ON THE INCREASE. M.B.A. Students: They’re Not All Business

By PHYLLIS KORKKI

Published: April 27, 2008

Corporate recruiters take note: money isn’t everything. In a recent survey of M.B.A. students at 15 major business schools, respondents listed the factors most important to them in choosing a job. The No. 1 factor was “challenging and diverse job responsibilities.” Compensation came in second, followed by work-life balance.

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In keeping with not making money the be-all and end-all, the fourth-most-important factor in a job was “potential to make a contribution to society.” About a quarter of the respondents named this as a priority in 2007, compared with just 15 percent in 2002, the last time the survey was conducted.

Apparently, many of these soon-to-be-minted business people have embraced a future of uncertainty. In the survey, by the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education, “job security” came in a very distant 10th on the students’ list of priorities.

but consider this: about stampede to Wall St. for MBA grads, even this year:

The call of Wall Street [cont] (more…)

HRH LEOPOLD, the HBS adcom dean,  IS BLOGGING AGAIN: THIS FROM HER MAJESTY’S LATEST ENTRY:

Here’s some more advice. As you explore websites, chatrooms, books and information sessions held by MBA consulting services, be mindful of claims of “inside information” from former members of admissions boards. I’ve been on the HBS Board for a (very!) long time and I can’t begin to tell you how much has changed . Applicants are certainly smart to explore the admissions processes at different schools but, speaking for HBS, be careful about very specific advice that may not reflect current practices. This includes application advice from our own loyal and well-meaning alumni/ae!

I actually feel for Dee Dee on this one, she is running a very professional organization of smart and hard working staff members who take their jobs seriously and  take great pride in being associated with a world class institution. But as they say at the clerical union over there at Harvard, “You cannot eat prestige” [well, for too long anyway]. HBS itself, and every other b school, has to make a decison about how many resources to put into admissions versus faculty hiring, new dorms, etc., etc. and admissions usually is not a large priority, esp. the nuts and bolts of staffing an adcom. That is why Stanford and Wharton do it on the ‘cheap’ so to speak, using students (at Wharton, who are paid some nominal amount) and alums [who do almost all interviewing at S] while for the most part HBS has a large, fully professional staff, who read ALL the files and do 90 percent of the interviewing. But it is impossible to maintain a staff like that, given salaries and limited room at the top, and normal geo movements of young-ish and successful people, many w. mbas, sooooooooooo, you do get a bunch of staff members, esp. staff members fr. years ago, thinking that becoming a admissions consultant and playing off the old connection, is an easy new career. Nothing is going to change that, and it is WAY worse at other schools. As noted, Wharton should think about having Admissions Consulting as part of its regular MBA course offerings. ;-) 

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News

Riding the College-to-Business School Express

Applying to HBS as a college senior is a path largely untaken­—as is getting accepted

Published On 4/21/2008 12:03:35 AM

By PRATEEK KUMAR

Crimson Staff Writer

High school seniors weren’t the only ones waiting by their computers and telephones over spring break for their admissions results: the undergraduates who applied to Harvard Business School’s second-round admissions found themselves in the same situation.

The Business School received approximately 8,500 applications in total for all three rounds this year, according to HBS admissions director Deirdre C. Leopold—roughly a 14.5 percent increase over last year’s total of 7,424 applicants.

Of those 8,500 applicants, 320 of them were current undergraduates applying to become members of the MBA Class of 2010.

Sanford Kreisberg, an independent consultant who runs the business school admissions blog HBSGURU.com, speculated that the increase may be tied to falling financial markets.

“Applications are up this year because of the worsening economy,” Kreisberg said, “but they’ll be up even more next year as the economy continues to weaken.”

Harvard MBA figures seem to support Kreisberg’s statements. Applications peaked at 10,382 for the class of 2004; candidates for that class submitted their forms around late 2001, when the U.S. economy suffered two quarters of negative GDP growth.

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS

So what makes college seniors who apply to HBS stand out from the rest of the pack?

“We look for very strong academic performance, but there’s more than that. What do these applicants bring to the case-method classroom if they choose to come right away?” Leopold said. “We want…to measure maturity, agility, and the ability to think on your feet.”

Kreisberg and Leopold both noted the importance of diverse interests in an MBA applicant.

“The admissions committee is looking for students that have an impact beyond themselves,” Kreisberg said.“Many successful applicants participate in political and ethnic-identity clubs. Helping your own ethnic group [and] political campaigning are well-regarded activities. Health-related organizations are also popular—organize breast cancer walks, or help bring awareness to some specific disease.”

But Kreisberg said that for younger applicants with less work experience, statistics like GPA and GMAT scores become more important.

“To its credit, HBS will blink at a lower GMAT score, as they feel that the GPA is more important,” Kreisberg said. “They will rarely blink twice, however. They won’t blink at both.”

full story below

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ahem,

A Shrewd Undergraduate’s Guide to HBS Admissions

Published, THE HARVARD CRIMSON,  On 4/20/2008 10:35:49 PM

Sanford Kreisberg is the founder of hbsguru.com, a business school admissions consultancy. He has advised scores of Harvard graduates about applying to HBS over the past 10 years, and he reports “Admission to HBS is half beauty contest and half science, and as we know, science can be in the eye of the beholder.”

1. Try to have a high GPA and do not fall for the canard that the admissions committee is aware of hard courses, and will give you a break. They are aware of A, B, and C. They have no idea if Post-Modern Feminist Approaches to Derivative Trading is a hard course or a gut. Take a lot of guts, and use the extra time to explore extra activities. Do not innocently engage in learning for ‘learning sake’ –although certainly say you do. Do not take introductory Arabic or Chinese because they sound contemporary and important, especially when most kids in those classes will be native speakers looking for guts. Do not take some super-duper math course because it sounds ‘interesting.’

2. Try to have a high GMAT, but HBS is not obsessed with this; they are more concerned with your GPA, and will not get too shook up with a 680 or even a 660 GMAT if they ‘otherwise love you’ and that can apply to even non-minorities. A 720 GMAT is normative, a 750 won’t help you as much as you think, and a jumbo 770+ is a nice touch, especially if a keystone of your application is that you are smart or quanty.

3. Be strategic about extracurriculars: try to be a leader. Try to find an issue where you can lead based on interests or identity politics. Think about Miss America, where each finalist has some ’signature’ issue like overcoming learning disabilities or improving inner-city education. Get a signature issue of your own. Leading a club based on your ethnicity, personal concerns, diseases, or political ideas is good. Try to be innovative and expand the organization’s programs and membership.

4. Be a work in progress. HBS is obsessed with ‘transforming’ its students, so the persona you should present in your application is someone who is both focused and accomplished, yet open to change. You don’t need to be overly interested in business per se; rather, you need to be interested in the intersection of your personal passion, signature issue, or academic interest with the potential social impact. Thus, if you have a passion for biology, you would do better presenting yourself as someone interested in how biology can cure disease among groups a, b, or c, rather than someone obsessed with Biotech companies and their relative stock values. HBS will “transform” you into the latter.

5. For the “2+2” program, which is new, it is better to pretend to be ‘out of it’ about business than someone who has been obsessed with business ever since your grandfather gave you 100 shares of General Electric for your 10th birthday. HBS is looking for science and artsy kids who otherwise, without HBS’s wonderful “2+2” program, never would have thought about business, and would have gone to (gasp) law school. So, be a techie who was happy being a nerd until, poof, “2+2” came along, and then you discovered you could be a business nerd. Think transformation.

6. In your essays, show what makes you tick; the essays are not brag sheets. Don’t list what you did so much as account for how you were effective getting others, like professors and other students, to help you. Think Tom Sawyer. Get the others to help you paint the fence. Don’t brag about raising money for charity, but explain how you convinced 20 other kids to help you raise money for charity.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=523161

Bear Stearns?s New Hires Become Job Seekers –New York Times, April 19th.

silver lining??? Yes, if you manage to snag another job!!!!! For the others, welcome to the NFL, a.k.a Life.

Bear Stearns ? one of the most prestigious employers in campus career offices ? signed on about 300 undergraduates and M.B.A.?s for full-time positions and about 300 interns for the summer. But those offers were thrown into question in March,

but  JPMorgan is offering the student recruits consolation prizes, provided they play by its rules. They can keep hefty signing bonuses that Bear promised them ? $10,000 for college seniors, and about $50,000 for M.B.A. students ? if they sign contracts in which they agree not to sue the bank over their rescinded jobs. If they do not sign, JPMorgan says, they cannot keep the money, which many of the students received last fall.

[read full story below]

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Euro MBA’s: several interesting points about longish and midly unclear story below [Europe MBAs Gain Ground With Recruiters] (more…)

ANTI-APRIL FOOL STORY: EILEEN CHANG ACTUALLY SPILLS SOME REAL DATA, THANK YOU. THIS IS A GOOD EXAMPLE OF HOW TRANSPARENCY COMES TO STODGY ORGANIZATIONS. FIRST H.R.H DEE DEE LEOPOLD BECOMES A DUFFER BLOGGER, AND PUTTS OUT SOME FACTS, LIKE HOW MANY KIDS GOT OFF WL LAST YEAR [26] AND NOW MS. CHANG, WHO IS SORTA H.R.H JR OVER THERE, POSTS THIS [BTW FOR THOSE KEEPING SCORE, TOTAL WL NUMBER OF 350 WAS PRETTY DARN CLOSE TO SK PREDICITONS KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK GIRLS!!!! SOON WE MAY GET SOME REAL DATA ON HOW YOUNG THE NEW CLASS IS! ONCE YOU LIVE ON THE INTERNET, THERE IS NO GOING BACK.

Hello Everyone:

It’s Eileen Chang from the MBA Admissions Board at HBS with another monthly update on our Admissions process.

I’d like to welcome those candidates receiving this correspondence for the first time. This is a regular update I send out at the beginning of each month to give all of you an update on our Admissions process.

Round 2 decision notifications were released last Wednesday. Since my March email, we admitted approximately 40 first-round wait list candidates. With the addition of wait list candidates from Round 2, our wait list is currently at 295 candidates.

Our final Round 3 submission deadline has also passed and we have begun reviewing Round 3 applications.

At this point, we have received all applications that will be considered for the Class of 2010. Over the next few weeks, we will begin actively reviewing our wait list candidates and will likely make decisions on many of these wait list applications. We anticipate that these decisions will occur on a rolling basis, rather than batches of decisions at specific set points in time. We will contact you if there is any change to your status–if you do not hear from us, you can assume that you remain on our wait list.

Although we do not want to make guarantees as to the exact date when you will likely hear a decision from us on your application, we do want to emphasize that we will keep a wait list as long as there is a reasonable expectation that space may be available in the class. We realize that many of you are considering other options at this time and we continue to be very sensitive to the feeling of uncertainty you are experiencing of being on the wait list. We will make every effort to have a decision on your application as soon as we are able.

Finally, it is very important that you keep your contact information updated through the Apply Yourself system. If at any time you would like to withdraw from the wait list, please email me and let me know.

Again, thank you for your continued patience. Please contact me if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Eileen Chang
MBA Admissions
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field Road
Dillon House
Boston, MA 02163