// Pros - Excellent source of GMAT questions. Very well organized with real test like questions.
Cons - No review of any math content or test-taking strategies. Not very good explanations of practice questions.
Overall, the Official Guide is a must have for all test-takers. It will give you a good idea about the type of questions to expect on the GMAT; however, if you need more than just a bank of questions, you need to look at some other source.Kaplan:
Pros - Good for additional practice questions as a supplement.Publish Post
Cons - Review of math content is not thorough but just the very basics. Not enough explanation of test taking strategies. Full of guessing techniques with no real mathematical solutions. Not good enough explanations of practice questions. Unrealistic questions.Princeton:
Pros - Good for learning how to make educated guess and process of elimination.
Cons - Review of math content is not thorough but just the very basics. Not enough explanation of test taking strategies. Full of guessing techniques with no real mathematical solutions. Not good enough explanations of practice questions. Weird sense of humor of Joe Blogs.Barrons:
Pros - Good math review. Big list of questions. Good test taking strategies. Very well organized. This is by far the best of the all-in-one kinds of books.
Cons - Although the book has a good math review, it doesn't go deep enough into each concept. Does not have a good section for logical reasoning (permutation, combination, probability, etc) questions, which is one of the most important question-type. Does not break down the concepts/questions step by step. This is the only book I recommend you must buy apart from the OG.EZ Solutions (series of books):
Pros - Thorough math review from A to Z in the review books. Effective test taking strategies. Abundant solved examples. Numerous practice exercises. Great practice question bank in basic and advanced workbooks. As with most books, you are expected to already have a good knowledge about the various match concepts, but with these books, you can literally start from scratch and reach the most advanced level of the GMAT.
Cons - To get the best result from these books, you have to invest in buying several books (set of 10 books), but if you compare the cost and benefits, the benefits outweigh the cost, or you can buy a few not all. Missing the verbal section. This is not a good option if you are looking for a very basic brush-up. Recommended for serious test takers who have enough time for preparation.
Showing posts with label Articles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Articles. Show all posts
Saturday, September 12, 2009
MBA Journal
—Jonathon Feit, Carnegie Mellon
—Toby Gardner, UC Berkeley
—Ron Margalit, Georgetown
—Alejandro Tinajero, UCLA
How to Write an MBA Admissions Essay
Highlights:
Be clear about your career goals and how business school can help you achieve them. But most of all be yourself
- You have to explain how your experience up to that point, combined with what this business school's program offers, can help you achieve both short- and long-term goals.
- Increasingly, business school applications are being evaluated by career services looking for evidence of employability at graduation (devido aos impactos da crise nas taxas de empregabilidade que as escolas informam aos principais rankings, está sendo avaliado a capacidade do candidato de se recolocar profissionalmente depois do MBA).
- Repeating leadership-related buzz words is not the right road to take (importância de citar exemplos com o detalhamento adequado que demonstram suas habilidades).
- Letting down your guard is a must. Show unique characteristics. Show a little personality (para minha admissão em Kellogg, isso foi crucial).
Be clear about your career goals and how business school can help you achieve them. But most of all be yourself
The admissions committees at top business schools want to meet the real you, the man or woman behind your GMAT scores, transcripts, and résumé. They want to know who you are now—what motivates you, what sets you apart from others, and who you'd like to become—what career goals you have and how you'd like to achieve them. Revealing your inner self, your hopes and dreams, is the purpose of the business school application essays. "The essays are windows into who you are as a person, your heart," says Stacy Blackman, president of Stacy Blackman Consulting in Los Angeles. Your No. 1 priority is to communicate just how much your entrance into this business school means to you, and what you bring to the table.
Before you even think about writing your essays, you should take time for serious self-reflection by focusing on your strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations. Try to look at yourself objectively and contemplate what you'd be bringing to a business school and where B-school might help you improve. Also, reflect on the career you'd like to create for yourself after the MBA and how you could realistically achieve such goals. Finally, you must thoroughly research the schools, their programs and courses, and the campus culture.
After you have scratched all the above tasks off your to-do list, then you can start writing your application essays. Without getting hung up on what you think the admissions committees want to read, you should try to make your essays lively and fresh.
Whatever you do, don't get into "term-paper mode", warns Paul Bodine, senior editor at Accepted.com, an admissions consulting firm, and author of Great Application Essays for Business Schools (McGraw-Hill, November 2005). "Make it about self-discovery," he adds. "Make it fun." Keep in mind that the committee members read thousands of responses to the same questions as they consider applications, so you don't want to bore them. Using anecdotes, including vivid details, and avoiding spelling and grammar mistakes that could distract the reader are key.
GET REAL
One of the biggest mistakes applicants make, say admissions consultants, is failing to do what is asked of them. "The answer to the question being posed should be in every single essay," says Linda Abraham, president of Accepted.com. "It's not always there, and that's bad news." Having someone proofread your essays and then guess the original question is one way to stay on task, says Shelley Burt, director of graduate management enrollment at the Carroll School of Management (Carroll Full-Time MBA Profile) at Boston College.
Keeping it real is the golden rule of application essay writing. "You need to approach the essays with a certain level of integrity and sincerity," says Abraham. "What the adcomm wants to do is learn about the applicant, so if you try to hide yourself, then on some level you're failing." Abraham adds that you must recognize yourself in your work and that you must be the one to write the essays, even if others look them over for you or give you advice on how to improve them.
MAP YOUR CAREER GOALS
Sending the right messages about your candidacy throughout the application is imperative, and the essays are your chance to make certain points stick. For starters, you have to express your career goals and how you hope to achieve them. Many programs have a specific essay question that asks outright about your plans. One interesting way to approach the question in an essay, suggests Abraham, is to write about a typical day in your life as you imagine it to be five years down the road.If you decide to try to do this, adds Abraham, you must be clear about the path you plan to take, the duties you'll be carrying out, and where you'll be working.
Simply saying you'd like to be a consultant is not enough. That is fine as a short-term goal, but it's not specific enough, say admissions consultants. You have to explain how your experience up to that point, combined with what this business school's program offers, can help you achieve both short- and long-term goals. Bodine says you might even go through the course catalog to see which classes might help you and mention their titles in the essays.
Make no mistake about it: Explaining your career goals in a thoughtful and detailed manner could be the difference between getting accepted and rejected. Increasingly, business school applications are being evaluated by career services looking for evidence of employability at graduation. "Schools are looking at the essays to determine if they can help the student achieve his goals, not just educational but professional as well," says Burt. In fact, the director of Career Strategy at the Carroll School sits on the admissions committee and scans the essays to determine if the school would be able to help the applicant succeed.
WHY THIS BUSINESS SCHOOL?
In tandem with your career goals, you must demonstrate your knowledge of the school and how you will fit into its distinct culture. Linking your personality traits with the culture of the school—noting that you led your college's comedy troupe and that you'd like to participate in this B-school's annual follies show, for example—is one way to prove that you're a good match.
Another way to show you would fit in well is by visiting campus and mentioning what you encountered there and why that appealed to you. "Share conversations you've had with members of the community," suggests Burt. The point is to show that you have an understanding of what your life would be like at this particular business school and that you'd be successful and happy on campus.
PROVE YOU CAN RULE THE WORLD
Leadership gets a lot of lip service in business school circles, and it's an important part of your application. But it's hard to define. Blackman suggests you think of it as an overriding term for 50 or so characteristics—from a good work ethic to an ability to motivate teammates. Once you start to look at leadership from that perspective, you can go through the list of characteristics that you come up with and choose the five that play to your strengths. Then, you can trumpet those in your application essays.
Repeating leadership-related buzz words is not the right road to take. If you'd like to demonstrate that you know how to mentor others, you might describe the bond you developed with the elementary school student you volunteered to tutor in math, and how you taught him to budget his allowance so that he could later afford a video game he really wanted.
FLAUNT YOUR PERSONALITY
Letting down your guard is a must. "Show unique characteristics," says Burt. "Show a little personality." Demonstrating how you're different from the competition is necessary, says Bodine. For example, if you grew up in Borneo in a large family, you could bring those experiences and your culture into an essay, says Bodine. Another candidate might have an unusual hobby or work experience. "You can always come up with five things that set you apart," says Bodine. Including your personality in your essays also will help members of the admissions committee see how you can play a role in creating diversity in the class that they are assembling.
COMMUNICATE WELL
Your pen—rather your keyboard—holds your destiny. Ultimately, the essays are the best way for schools to determine if you are a capable communicator, an attribute every leader must always strive to improve. Aside from demonstrating that you have the basics of writing nailed down—from proper grammar to organized structure—you should also personalize your writing for the school to which you are applying. "Students who write essays that can be repurposed at other programs are a red flag to us," says Burt.
Staying on track is also important. "Don't ever write about someone else," says Blackman. "Keep the focus on you, even if the question is, 'With whom would you like to go to lunch?'" Your message should be that this school is the place for you to gain the tools necessary to fulfill your dreams—and that you'll reciprocate the favor by contributing to the community in your own unique way. To make this point, write what you have to write concisely but with verve.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Was Earning That Harvard M.B.A. Worth It?
ABOUT a year before Adam Richman was to graduate from the HarvardBusiness School in 1996, he took on an extracurricular project. It was long before the Internet bubble inflated and burst, and well before one of the school's graduates landed in the White House. Mr. Richman wondered: What was the real-world value of a master's in business administration, especially one from the iviest of Ivies? Was it, as widely perceived, an ace in the hole, a get-out-of-jail-free card, a ticket to the good life?
To that end, Mr. Richman decided to track a core group of his Harvard classmates, to converse with them about their personal and professional aspirations, and then to revisit them every five years until 2026. He also decided to film them along the way, à la "7 Up," Michael Apted's celebrated documentary series, which chronicled the lives of the same 14 people every seven years.
"I wanted to know how students made their career and leadership decisions, how they defined success," said Mr. Richman, 36, the co-founder of Double Nickel Entertainment, a television and film production company. His academic adviser, Monica C. Higgins, an associate professor at the business school, became a consultant for the series, titled "Building Career Foundations," which she uses for case-study work in her classroom.
"We're very interested in how external shocks affect careers — like 9/11, the dot-com boom and bust — and this class was right before the dot-com boom," said Professor Higgins, 41. "We wondered: 'How do people make the decision to drop everything and go after a dream? Who makes those type of choices and why?' People ask alums, 'What was the most important class you took in school?' But the real test comes once you're out."
In that regard, their documentary is a litmus test of sorts about how much bang Harvard Business School graduates get for their buck after their academic sojourn to Boston. It is, of course, a narrow, microcosmic gauge, limited by the number of people Mr. Richman and Professor Higgins are following, the questions they ask and the complexities of education and personal choice.
Even so, their work offers a window into the value of a Harvard degree that carries a two-year tuition bill of more than $70,000 and, more generally, onto the overall utility of any M.B.A. degree.
THE popularity of the degrees has surged. In 1970, for example, business schools handed out 26,490 M.B.A.'s, according to the Department of Education. By 2004, after a period marked by an economic boom and heightened competition for top-flight business careers, that figure had jumped to 139,347. But opinion and data appear divided on the tangible benefits of an M.B.A.
"The M.B.A. is the most versatile degree out there — most of the others are very field specific, but you can apply an M.B.A. to any field," said Rachel Edgington, a research director for the Graduate Management Admission Council, a nonprofit group in McLean, Va., that is overseen by leading business schools and administers annual admission exams.
But others advocate hands-on experience over academic buffing and polishing. "M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences," said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal. "You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one, you've created hubris."
In 2003, Professor Mintzberg tracked the performance of 19 students who graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1990 and were at the top of their class academically. Ten of the 19 were "utter failures," he said. "Another four were very questionable, at least," he added. "So five out of 19 did well."
Research varies on the value of an M.B.A. A 2006 study by the Lubin School of Business atPace University, looking at 482 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, found that only 162 of them had chief executives with graduate degrees in business. The companies with chief executives who went to more prestigious schools did no better than those who went to less prestigious schools, according to the study. Why this was so is unclear.
"One possibility is that if you don't have a graduate degree from a top school then you have to work that much harder to succeed," said Aron A. Gottesman, an associate professor at Pace and a co-author of the study.
On the other hand, Professor Gottesman and a colleague found in a separate study, published earlier this year in the Journal of Empirical Finance, that mutual fund managers with M.B.A.'s from BusinessWeek's 30 top-ranked business schools — including Harvard — generally outperformed other mutual fund managers. Professor Gottesman is not sure why this was so, either. "One possibility is that at higher-quality schools they simply teach better technical skills," he speculated. "Or students at top-tier schools have a higher I.Q."
And the subjects of "Building Career Foundations" have told Mr. Richman that they are pleased, indeed, with the professional and personal doors that their Harvard degrees have opened. Mr. Richman and Professor Higgins initially chose four women and six men to be their subjects in 1996 after a lengthy interview process. They surveyed about 130 other students along with their main focus group, asking questions about post-Harvard goals, salary expectations, relationship status and other topics. They also sent similar questionnaires to the same people in 2001 and had their cameras ready to film their core group. Last weekend, when the class of 1996 returned to the Harvard Business School for its 10-year reunion, Mr. Richman and Professor Higgins were present with their cameras and notepads. "The experience lets you handle challenges, gives you the confidence to take calculated risks and enables people to pursue passions or dreams that maybe they otherwise couldn't at that point in their life," said Terrence M. Mullen, 39, a subject of the documentary who is a co-founder of Arsenal Capital Partners, a private equity fund in Manhattan. In 1996 and 2001, Mr. Richman and Professor Higgins asked their 140 subjects how they defined success. Their answers, in descending order of importance, were the same in each of those years: personal satisfaction or "balance," the respect of their peers, and the chief executive's or chief financial officer's post at a corporation. High salaries ranked last each year. "It did surprise me that the folks coming right out of school would put money last, because they had all this debt," Professor Higgins said. "But they want to have it all." Respondents to her survey this year offered a different mix of priorities. They said that balance, financial security and corporate power were their top goals, but they placed less emphasis on becoming C.E.O.'s and were more interested in general corporate leadership positions. Ranked last was "respect by peers." Another category that often emerged, Professor Higgins said, was "impact" — defined as making "a real difference" or "a positive difference to society." Professor Higgins said the focus on "balance" and "happiness" seemed to stem from having or planning to have children, from feelings about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. "They seemed to have come to realize that certain things are precious in life, not the least of which is family," she said. At this year's reunion of the documentary's main subjects, it turned out that 6 of the 10 had been involved in Internet businesses previously — four as C.E.O.'s of their own companies, and two as investors in other companies. Five of the 10 had experienced a major career trauma — their businesses collapsed or were taken over or they lost jobs because of layoffs. The other five had invested successfully or cashed in on initial public offerings in companies where they had worked. The documentary's main subjects now have jobs in various fields. Stephen Klein is executive vice president of Too Far, an arts and entertainment company in San Francisco; Kevin Hall is the chief operating officer of the Broad Foundation, a Los Angeles nonprofit group; Kim Malone is director of online advertising sales for Google Adsense in Mountain View, Calif.; Mareva Grabowski is a bank executive in Athens; Jeff Flemings is a senior executive at Digitas, an advertising and consulting firm in Boston; Clare R. Scherrer is a managing director at Goldman Sachs in New York; Levent Kahraman is a managing director of a New York bank; Cheryl Pegues is the director of business development at Cox Enterprises in Atlanta; and Humphrey Chen is a director at Avaya, a software company in Basking Ridge, N.J. MR. HALL, 39, pursued a series of corporate jobs after getting his Harvard degree and then founded a company that ran charter schools. At the Broad Foundation, he focuses on improving public education in Los Angeles. "September 11 really reinforced for me that I'm willing and want to devote my energy toward K through 12 from a patriotic standpoint," he said. "I think it's really critical for us as a country to do this." Mr. Richman, who was a creative writing and drama major when he graduated from Tufts University in 1992, later went to Harvard Business School without formal business training and no plans to seek a corporate job. He did, however, want to do something in television and film, and rather than start as a gofer in Hollywood he applied to business school to "round myself off," he said. "When I first got out, people in Hollywood were like: 'Why did you get your M.B.A.? You would have been better off sitting at someone's desk answering phones,' " he recalled. "But it certainly has been helpful for me now that we're doing bigger deals. It was helpful even before I started my company, putting together financing for projects and closing deals." Another benefit of an M.B.A. degree, especially from a top-notch school, is the public perception of it — and, by default, its holder — according to a 2005 report by the University of Maryland. The study found that recruiters paid higher salaries to graduates of top-tier business schools compared with those from less prominent ones. "The school's prominence provides legitimacy in the eyes of third parties," said Violina P. Rindova, an associate professor of strategy at the University of Maryland and co-author of the study. "The real value of an Ivy League business degree is arguably not the education itself, but the screening of intelligence, drive and past accomplishments that the schools do," said Ben Dattner, founding principal of Dattner Consulting in New York. "Just like with undergraduate degrees, if you're smart enough to get into a top-tier school, you're likely to inspire confidence." MICHELLE MADDEN, 39, a 1994 Harvard Business School graduate who lives in New York and worked at an online media company which she and her partners sold in 2001, agrees. "People tend to give you the benefit of the doubt that you're somewhat intelligent," she said. "They assume that if H.B.S. has done the screening, they don't need to concern themselves with the intelligence screener." The degree also gave Ms. Madden the confidence to leave the business world several years ago to pursue interests in photography and mountain climbing before resuming work as a consultant. "Today, there's much less of a stigma to taking time off and changing careers," she said. "With the M.B.A., I felt I could do it and return to work without much problem." Others say that they preferred actually being an entrepreneur to just contemplating becoming one. Jamie Rosen, who quit Harvard Business School in 1995 after getting funding for a software start-up, sold his company in 2004 and founded Memorystone Publishing, a company that produces digital photo albums, a year later. "The reason I went to B-school was to learn to be an entrepreneur, and here was an opportunity to build a business and get paid for it," said Mr. Rosen, 35, of his decision to leave Harvard. "I'm not necessarily happy that I didn't finish, but I don't regret not going back because I enjoyed what I was doing." Ms. Malone, one of the subjects of Mr. Richman's documentary, said she never expected to enjoy Harvard as much as she did. "I went in with great skepticism," she said with a laugh. But what Ms. Malone, 38, found at Harvard surprised her — "a pretty friendly, warm, welcoming, nice place." After Harvard, Ms. Malone spent a year working at the Federal Communications Commission and then helped begin an Internet telephone start-up, which eventually went public. She quit in 1999 to write her first novel, as yet unpublished, before joining Google in June 2004. Like Ms. Madden, Ms. Malone said her degree allowed her to take time off while knowing that it would be easy to get another job. "It's this big safety net; it's a credential that makes it easier to get a job later," she said. "Maybe life shouldn't be that way, but it is what it is."Wherever the broader value of an M.B.A. degree resides, most graduates themselves appear to be satisfied with their diplomas. According to the 2006 Global M.B.A. Graduate Survey from the Graduate Management Admission Council, 63 percent of M.B.A. alumni described the value of their degree as "outstanding or excellent," when comparing the cost of their degree to the quality of their educations; 29 percent called it "good."
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