Welcome to another installation of Knewton’s MBA roundup! This week, check out articles about entrepreneurship, b-school applications, taking the GMAT, and a new venture contest in India.
“The MBA qualification is essential across a broad range of industries for people intending to step into general management, senior management and CEO roles,” says Sandra Burmeister of Landelahni Recruitment. Read this article to find out why.
With the proliferation of information available online these days, plagiarism is increasingly easy not only to commit, but also to detect — especially when it comes to high-stakes admissions essays.
Wondering what 2011 holds for the world of business? Look no further: This installment of our MBA Life on Youtube series features four faculty members from the London Business School sharing their predictions for how business research will be implemented and continue to develop throughout 2011.
Check out the video to hear the professors’ (very informed!) guesses of the improvements and setbacks in store for the coming year. For example, Nader Tavassoli, Chair of the Marketing Faculty at LBS, predicts that in the face of the recent economic crisis, the greatest challenge for marketers will be re-engaging customers, while the greatest challenge for HR will be to re-engage people.
In general, according to Professor Michael Jacobides, 2011 will be a year of great flux, as business and government sectors together redefine the way we capture value across a variety of sectors.
Check out the video and stay tuned for future posts in the MBA Life on Youtube series!
In this week’s EdTech Roundup, check out articles on Maine’s 1-1 student-laptop program, the National Broadband Plans’ startling data on school internet speeds, MIT’s OpenCourseWare program, and more.
A column from the Chronicle of Higher Education delineates everything that’s wrong with undergraduate education today — most significantly, the fact that “at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated “no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years.” How do you think this problem might be solved? Could ed tech innovations be part of the answer?
Nine years ago, Maine became the first state in the nation to implement a 1-1 laptop program in its schools. Read about the program’s challenges and lessons in this article from eSchoolNews.
When Pitzer College professor Alexandra Juhasz began teaching a class about YouTube in 2007, her critics thought that was taking things far enough. But now, Juhasz has produced a “Video Book” reflecting on YouTube in its own medium. The Video Book has an ISBN number and is available through its own website — raising more questions about where the future of publishing lies. Read the article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed for more.
For schools, slow Internet speeds are more than just a nuisance. The release of the National Broadband Map reveals that a large number of schools’ Internet connections are “woefully inadequate to meet education goals.” Learn more about the implications of this data in this article from THE Journal.
Ten years ago, MIT made the bold decision to release its course content online to anyone interested in listening in. Since then, they’ve shared their content with over 100 million people around the world. With all the technological innovations that have occurred since 2001, what’s the next step for MIT’s OpenCourseWare? Read more in this piece from ReadWriteWeb.
I recently came across a blog post from Rob Go, a cofounder of NextView Ventures, about some research he’s been doing surrounding the roles of product leaders in successful startups. In his post, Rob details an interesting analogy developed by Drew Houston, CEO at DropBox. The basic concept? Great product managers have the qualities of both a poet and a librarian.
If you’re not interested in product development (or even if you are), at this point you may be wondering: how does this apply to me? I haven’t even gotten into b-school yet — let alone graduated and secured a job! Read on: even at this early stage of your business career, as you apply to MBA programs, Houston’s distinctions may prove a helpful lesson.
Rob writes:
“POETs are product visionaries. They often are deeply in tune with the problems they are solving, and are instinctive about how to build products that succeed. They are extremely creative and are willing to trust their own gut over the reported needs of customers who might think they need feature x, y, or z. They often think many moves ahead, and see the implications of individuals feature in the evolution of the holistic product experience…
LIBRARIANs are organized and systematic. They are data driven in their decision-making… As the product and engineering team scales, a Librarian can figure out how to create a structure that can coordinate the efforts of many while maintaining the creativity and information flow between teams. A librarian is also obsessed with the details and data. They understand how small things can make a huge impact, and understand how to unlock the value of data to optimize a user flow or build a beautiful new feature.”
Rob goes on to argue that a successful company needs both poets and librarians over the course of its lifetime (and, it would seem, if one employee could fit both bills, all the better!)
What this means for you:
No matter your future or current business interests, the poet/librarian metaphor (and others like it) can help you conceptualize yourself as a business leader. Are you meticulous, detail-oriented, creative, intuitive? A mix of all these qualities? How does your personality manifest itself at work? What can you do idiosyncratically better than anyone else? Do you have any strengths you can press harder on? Any weaknesses you can understand better? Are you a non-traditional applicant (a real poet, in other words) looking for a way to tell your story in a fashion that business people understand?
Self-awareness is an important part of the MBA application process. You can demonstrate this key quality by pitching yourself in a memorable way that admissions officers grasp quickly and easily. Also remember that the “story” you tell during your interview (“I have always been obsessed with operations and perfecting work-flow….”) should make sense, and be backed up by your past pursuits (academic, extracurricular, and career-related).
Even if you do not explicitly connect the dots in certain parts of your story, admissions officers will notice details and facts you do not draw attention to and arrive at their own conclusions. For instance, if you describe yourself as a team player but have little experience functioning in teams, your words will come across as hollow, no matter how elaborately you praise the virtues of teamwork. In other words, expect follow-up questions to your initial answers. It is always a good idea to assume that your interviewer will be skeptical and that you will have to work hard to convince him/her that you are suitable for the school.
In this video, Dave and Jen provide an introduction to “strengthen” questions on the GMAT Critical Reasoning section. As Dave and Jen explain, there are two main ways for an answer choice to strengthen an argument presented in a CR question stem:
Validate an assumption on which the conclusion depends
Provide an additional piece of evidence that supports the conclusion
Recently, we posted about Four Ways to Use Tag Clouds in the Classroom — with the promise that we’d follow up with a step-by-step tutorial for making these awesome interactive graphics on your own. Check out our earlier post for a quick background on what tag clouds are, and how they can be used to supplement classroom lessons.
Ready to get started? Today I’ll walk you through how to create two types of tag clouds: one that uses a set list of inputted words, and one that “scrapes” its words from a website of your choice. For both, we’ll create the cloud using a a great web program called Tagul.
To begin, visit http://www.tagul.com/ and register. Once you’ve created a username and accepted their terms and conditions, you can get started by clicking “Create” under the “My Clouds” heading on the right side of the screen.
Creating a Tag Cloud with a Set List of Words
1. Decide what you want the tag cloud to display.
For the sake of this example, let’s do a Valentine’s Day vocabulary list, with the goal of linking each word to its dictionary.com definition, so that students can click on any words they don’t know. Once you’ve compiled the list of words you want to include, you can copy or type it into the “text” section of Tagul. After entering the tags, hit “Fetch tags” to populate the list.
2. Size the information.
Since part of the fun of tag clouds is sizing the information intelligently, we have to decide how to weigh each word. For example, you might include the most difficult or most common vocabulary words most often. To do this, simply repeat these words to give them more weight.
3. Decide where on the web the tags will go.
As described in Step 1, in this case, we’ll use dictionary.com to get definitions for each word in the cloud. We can pull the “tag link pattern” for definitions from dictionary.com and replace the “$tag” marker with the actual vocabulary word. (You can easily find the “tag link pattern” on dictionary.com simply by inputting a sample word into the search field. No matter what word you enter, the URL follows the same pattern: http://www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/word). This tells Tagul where the link of each word will go.
4. Style your cloud!
Pick a shape font, all the colors and the angles you want your words to go in. For this one, we’ll use a heart (a no-brainer), but there are also stars, rectangles, triangles, clouds, etc. We will keep these particular words flat at 0 degrees, but we can make the cloud much more interesting with new angles. Then hit “build cloud!”
5. Check the tags.
Once the cloud is built, you can check the tags (and erase any you want) and see the weights of each tag.
6. Add (more) style!
Color your words, create a background, set the rollover text animation speed and color under the “style options” tab. We’ll use some Valentine’s colors here by adding them to the right box.
7. Preview the cloud.
Make sure it does what you want, check the links, and finalize. Here is the finished product below- remember to rollover and click the links!
Pretty cool, right? Now, on to the next lesson…
Creating Tag Clouds that “Scrape” from Website Content
For these types of clouds, the tag cloud pulls its terms from a website of your choice (you don’t need to input any words!)
1. Decide what you want the tag cloud to display.
Let’s use the “Egyptian revolution” cloud I created for my earlier post as an example for this tutorial. This cloud scraped its tags from the NY Times’ “Times Topics” page on Egypt; this page displays the headlines and first few lines of all the Times’ articles about the Egyptian revolution. I used Tagul to pull the 300 most common terms from this page.
2. Copy the URL from your website to the “URL” section of Tagul.
Only the top 300 most common words will be pulled for inclusion in the cloud. Any good news website or article works, but news aggregators or RSS feeders also work perfectly with Tagul.
2. Decide where you want each word in the cloud to link.
In this case, I decided to link each term pulled from the Times webpage to the Google News search results for that term. For example, “Mubarak” was one of the words that appeared in my tag cloud. Clicking on this word would direct you to the current Google News results for “Mubarak.”
3. Set up the “Tags’ link pattern” to tell Tagul where the words should link.
The term “$tag” must be substituted into the URL wherever the actual word will go. For example, if you search Google News for “egypt”, you might get this URL:
Then replace the word you searched for with the “$tag” code to tell Tagul what to replace:
The latter URL can be copied back into Tagul. Hit “fetch tags” in Tagul to pull all the appropriate tags.
3.View the tags by weight.
Once the top 300 tags are pulled, you can view them, by weight, in the “tags” tab on Tagul. This is a good time to “blacklist” the common English words (“the,” “and,” “or,” etc.) or weird non-words that are irrelevant to your tag cloud (by hitting the “x” next to them). These words will not appear in the cloud.
4. Add Style.
Choose your color, shape, and more! Check out steps 4 and 6 in the Valentine’s tutorial above for more details.
5. Enjoy your cloud!
Roll over individual words and click to read the most recent news stories for each word.
In this installment of our MBA Life on Youtube series, Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School professor Jim Little discusses the school’s belief in the importance of having a research-active faculty.
Professor Little talks about the important feedback loop that emerges from faculty research: faculty take issues that come up in the classroom, use them in their research, and then reintroduce those issues to other students from a newly enlightened perspective. In the end, in Olin’s view, the focus on research keeps class discussions timely — and emphasizes critical thinking skills.
Check out the video for more, and be sure to stay tuned for future MBA Life on Youtube posts!
With all the emphasis placed on b-school admissions, job interviews, and networking, it can be easy for prospective students to forget the real point of b-school: to study business.
Top business schools offer more than just access to prestigious recruiters, experiential learning opportunities, and a class of talented peers. They offer the opportunity to study under some of the most accomplished and dynamic professors in the world.
So what does it take to be a great teacher of business?
Poets and Quants surveyed students, faculty, and alumni at the world’s finest b-schools to come up with a list of The World’s 40 Best B-School Profs Under the Age of 40. Hailing from Chicago Booth, MIT Sloan, HBS, Wharton, Kellogg, Duke Fuqua, and other fine institutions, these world-class educators teach the core business disciplines – finance, operations, accounting, marketing, leadership, and strategy.
Some are barely 30. Some have received honors such as the Nasdaq Award, the Goldman Sachs Asset Management Prize, and the Barclay’s Global Investors Prize. Others have had interesting life experiences (one is a filmmaker on the side, another used to be a trapeze artist). Almost all have received awards for teaching excellence.
What qualities do they have in common? Wit, charisma, and the ability to pull students out of their comfort zone. Their classrooms are bursting with lively and proactive discussions, and students often emerge from them with greater self-awareness and the ability to grasp the complexities of real-world business situations. On top of all this, outstanding business professors are fantastic one-on-one mentors who care about their students’ professional development. They often have innovative ways of using technology in their classrooms and a knack for generating hands-on learning opportunities.
According to Poets and Quants, here’s what some students had to say about their professors:
On Professor John Ackerman, Assistant Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan:
“Professor Ackerman’s classes are galloping adventures through the amusing, quirky, irrational bits of the human mind as it navigates consumption and marketing decisions. His amazing breadth of knowledge on consumer behavior and psychology unfurls relentlessly in every class, as he runs quirky in-class experiments, cites findings both recent and classic, and explains theory and practice with a mild-mannered yet gripping authority. The class material is so fascinating that it attracts an incredible amount of class participation and many, many ‘smaht’ questions – which he calmly answers, or parries, with signature wit. His class is destined to become a classic, and I’m glad I was there.” – Lu-Fong Chua, MIT Sloan MBA Class of 2012
On Professor Katherine Phillips, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Business:
“What sets Professor Phillips apart in the classroom, and makes her class a great way to start the Kellogg experience, is her dynamic nature, relatable style and deep understanding of the value of diverse perspectives. She often incorporates real-world examples from her professional and personal life in her teaching: flashing up pictures of her husband and two children as she’s discussing negotiations strategy or telling stories about walking the long way around the academic building as a Stanford PhD student to maximize networking opportunities. Outside the classroom, Professor Phillips is generous with her time in supporting student initiatives. She’s served as a speaker and advisor to the Women’s Business Association on the topics of mentorship and inclusion. Her engaging teaching style and commitment beyond the classroom make her an incredible resource for Kellogg students and an asset to the school.” – Ashlee A. Miller, Kellogg MBA Class of 2011
What this means for you. If you’re applying to business school this spring or next fall, spend some time thinking about the kind of curriculum you want to define your MBA experience. Do you enjoy lecture or case-based instruction (or a mix of both teaching styles)? It’s often a good idea to familiarize yourself with the course offerings and professors at various programs. While Poets and Quants’ list is a great place to start your research, be sure to make some inquiries of your own. At b-school information sessions, ask current students to discuss their particular experiences in the classroom–which professors and classes they enjoy most, their process around shaping a course of study, etc. Remember: great professors can be found at business schools around the country. If you have an interest in a particular area of business, be sure to check out your dream b-school’s faculty and course offerings in that subject area, before you apply or accept an offer to attend!
This post comes to us from our friends at Clear Admit. For more b-school application advice, be sure to check out their blog!
Though many business school applicants know exactly what they want to do – and how much they hope to make – after they graduate from an MBA program, a surprising number apply to school without thinking about how they’ll pay for this expensive degree. While some students do foot the entire bill themselves or receive scholarship support from the school or an outside institution, the vast majority of MBA students borrow funds to cover their tuition and living expenses. With this in mind, we wanted to cover some very basic information on loans for the benefit of both recent admits entering school this fall and early birds entry just beginning to think about their applications for Fall ’11.
The primary source of funding for U.S.-based applicants will be federal loans or alternative education loans. The main federal loans, available to U.S. citizens or permanent residents, are the Federal Stafford Loan (subsidized or unsubsidized), the Federal Perkins Loan and the GradPLUS Loan. Full-time students, usually those enrolled in two or more courses per semester, can borrow as much as $20,500/year through the Federal Stafford loan program. Perkins Loans are low-interest (5 percent) loans with a maximum annual loan amount of $8,000/year for graduate students. The Grad PLUS Loan can be used to pay for the total cost of education less minus aid you’ve already been awarded. Those interested in applying for federal student aid should check out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). When federal loans are not enough, private loans can help bridge the gap in education costs. Students might contact their local bank or look into lender programs, such as SallieMae, Access Group or GradLoans, for details on borrowing eligibility.
International students are not eligible for federal loans, but may consider private loans as a financing option. The International Student Loan Program (ISLP), for instance, offers a credit-based loan to international students who are looking to finance their education in the U.S. However, as with most private loans, this loan requires a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to co-sign. International students can also visit International Education Financial Aid (IEFA) to search for funds (as can U.S. citizens planning on studying overseas). Finally, most of the leading MBA programs offer private loans to their students in partnership with a particular financial institution – some of which do not require a co-signer – so this might become an option after one is admitted.
Many need-based loans are classified as subsidized, meaning that interest does not accrue while the borrower is enrolled in a degree program (whereas interest begins to accrue immediately on unsubsidized loans). Typical timelines of loan repayment can extend from 5 to 30 years, depending on the lender’s conditions of deferral and the amount of funds borrowed. After graduation, students usually have a 6-month grace period before monthly repayment begins. While schools’ admittance packages usually include detailed information about financing the MBA, incoming students and applicants should not hesitate contact the school’s financial aid office for further information on available need- or credit-based loans.
Welcome to another installation of Knewton’s MBA roundup! This week, check out articles about rising MBA salaries, the work load in b-school, executive MBA programs, and a few sub-par management fads that may be all too familiar…
From “Six Sigma” to “Business Process Reengineering” to “Matrix Management,” this quirky run-down through some of the most well-known management fads is sure to make you think twice about adopting the next buzzword in your office.
Deciding whether to take the MBA plunge now or to wait a few years and enroll in an executive program? This article may help you sort through the factors.
Welcome to another installation of Knewton’s MBA roundup! This week, check out articles about entrepreneurship, b-school applications, taking the GMAT, and a new venture contest in India.
