Hey there, folk. The email below is a prospective Bschool student with a social science background who is trying to make a transition into the investment industry. She’s asked me some rather specific questions about a few schools, none of which is Stanford, so it was a challenge for me to respond. These sorts of emails are always tough because I was never a student at any other school, so anything I’d say can’t really be considered the “real deal”. If any of you are students at the schools she listed and would like to chime in on this, you can either leave a comment for this post or send me an email and I’ll post your words up here for other folks who might be interested in your school.
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PL wrote:
“Dear Marquis,
I’m an MBA-aspirant hoping to matriculate in ’08 and I came across your very informative blog. You seem very knowledgeable on B-schools, and even though I’m not applying to Stanford I was wondering if you could kindly give me some advice about how a number of other schools compare?
Here are some info on me: I’m Asian, have a social science degree, and have worked for about 4 years mainly in market research.
I’m wanting to transition into investment banking or investment management, and have decided to apply to an MBA to hopefully achieve this goal. I think my main problem would be the lack of quant on my resume (although I do do some data analysis in market research).
Wharton and Chicago are my top chioces, and I will probably also apply to LBS, Columbia and NYU Stern. My ideal MBA programme would fulfill these criteria, in no particular order of importance:
- strong placement in investment banking/ management,
- a collaborative student culture and a close-knit network (i.e. not overly-competitive, though I understand this can be kinda subjective),
- smaller community to make it easier to know everyone,
- programme rigour (esp. in equipping someone with no finance background with financial skills),
- inspiring professors (i.e. take pride in their teaching and inspiring professionally and personally).
I’m particularly interested to find out about the culture – the kind of environment that would suit me best would be one that is collaborative, all-inclusive and not too much segregation, direct and straightforward, not too rigid, fast-moving.
Would you be able to advise please which of the five schools I’m interested in would fit this criteria? Or whether there are other suitable schools that I’ve not thought of yet?
I really appreciate your help on this – thanks very much!
PL”
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My response:
PL,
Thanks for checking out my blog and seeing it as a resource for Bschool information. Your email is a tough one for me to answer because I can only truly comment confidently about the culture at Stanford because that’s the only Bschool I ever attended. Plus, I didn’t apply to any of the schools you listed, so I didn’t even do any research on them as I was going through the process. What I know of these schools comes from things I’ve read and conversations that I’ve had with alums of those schools, but you might want to visit the schools and talk to current students to really find out what the deal is with these schools. You could probably knock out Columbia, Stern, and Wharton on a two-day trip and then you’d have to do Chicago and LBS separately…this is assuming that you haven’t already done that.
So, even though I’m not an expert on any of these schools, I can try to make a run at giving you some sort of answer to your questions…or at least tell you how I would think about them. I’ll start of by saying that I don’t know anything about LBS, so I won’t even touch that one here. Anything I would say about it would be an uninformed guess and I’d hate to give you bad information on that school. As for the other four schools you listed, I know people who’ve gone to all of them, so I’ll just try to draw from those folks to give some sort of answer:
Strong placement in investment banking/management: Each of your listed schools is known for having strong placement in investment banking/management, so don’t worry about whether you will be able to compete for post-MBA jobs in that industry at any of those schools. The bigger concern should be whether you’ll be able to capitalize on the opportunities for those jobs and actually get the offers. Due to their reputations of being good feeders for investment jobs, you’d probably be competing for the investment industry jobs with a good number of your classmates, some of whom will have been bankers or consultants prior to business school. For each of your target schools, I’d recommend finding some current MBA2 students or recent grads who came from non-Finance/Consulting backgrounds and were able to get an inverstment industry post-MBA job offer and asking them how they found the road to that offer at their particular school. This would give you a true sense of what you’d have waiting for you as you pursue that industry at each school.
Smaller community: Have you taken a look at the business school profiles on BusinessWeek.com(http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/)? The information listed on it could be found on each school’s website, but BusinessWeek pulls it all together as a one-stop-shop where it can all be easily found. I just spent 2-3 minutes looking up the profiles for each of the four US schools you listed and easily found the info about the size of each school’s student community. The student counts for the full-time, part-time, and executive MBA programs at each school are there, so you’ll have to decide upon your definition of “community”…is it only the full-time MBA students or is it all MBA students at the school? Also, some schools focus on individual sections within each class as the source of community, rather than the entire class, which is something you should look into as you’re further researching your target schools.
Program rigor: As someone coming in with no business background, you’ll likely find the overall academic experience at each of your target schools to be rigorous. I think the question you actually want to be asking here is how strong the Finance elective courses are at each school. The core Finance class will likely be tough, but the upper-level Finance electives might end up being a REAL challenge because you’ll be surrounded by your classmates who are also interested in Finance careers (including some with previous experience). As such, the professors would most likely boost the rigor in these courses to ensure a good learning experience for the entire class. From what I know of the schools you listed, each of them has a very rigorous overall program and offer a strong set of Finance courses. I’d recommend visiting each school’s website and checking out the course listings to get an idea of the breadth of Finance-related courses offered by each.
Professors: I don’t know much about the professors at the individual schools, but I imagine that each of the schools have professors, both veteran and newer, who are incredibly inspiring and engaging. I haven’t had any conversations with my friends who went to your listed schools specifically about their professors, so I can’t really give you details about that. If you haven’t visted your target schools yet, this is the sort of thing you’ll get a sense for.
Culture: Your question about the schools’ cultures is one that I definitely can’t give you any insight on because this is something that only someone who attended the schools can provide. You’re definitely looking for the right things here, so you need to make sure you finding out the RIGHT information about each school. There’s always going to be a view of a school from the outside, but it is seldom the same as one would experience as a student. This is where you’d REALLY need to get in contact with some real students to get the best information possible because a school’s culture is the main factor in determining whether it is a fit for you.
Now that I’m re-reading these last couple of sections of this message, I don’t know if I’ve come anywhere close to what you’re looking for, so you should really try to find some current students at these schools and find out what’s up from someone on the inside.
In terms of other schools to consider, you might want to add one or two that aren’t necessarily known for churning out Finance or I-Banking people. One my friends who is a Kellogg grad explained it best when he told me that the investment banks are left basically begging Kellogg students to apply for summer and fulltime positions because most of the kids there are interested in Marketing. The Finance courses at the school are top-notch, but everyone just sees it as a Marketing school and immediately count it out if they have interest in Finance career. If you have the time/funds to include one or two more schools that might fit your school criteria, it might be worth adding them to your list. Off the top of my head Stanford and Kellogg might be two schools that fit your listed qualities, but you would have to do a little more due diligence on your own to figure out whether they’d truly fit you or not.
I hope this email was helpful, but I’m not sure if I was able to give you the definitive “this is what school X is all about” perspective that you were looking for, but I didn’t want to just guess at the answers to your questions because this Bschool choice is a crucial decision point in one’s career. Take care and good luck with your Bschool applications.
-M
————–
PL wrote:
“Dear Marquis,
I’m an MBA-aspirant hoping to matriculate in ’08 and I came across your very informative blog. You seem very knowledgeable on B-schools, and even though I’m not applying to Stanford I was wondering if you could kindly give me some advice about how a number of other schools compare?
Here are some info on me: I’m Asian, have a social science degree, and have worked for about 4 years mainly in market research.
I’m wanting to transition into investment banking or investment management, and have decided to apply to an MBA to hopefully achieve this goal. I think my main problem would be the lack of quant on my resume (although I do do some data analysis in market research).
Wharton and Chicago are my top chioces, and I will probably also apply to LBS, Columbia and NYU Stern. My ideal MBA programme would fulfill these criteria, in no particular order of importance:
- strong placement in investment banking/ management,
- a collaborative student culture and a close-knit network (i.e. not overly-competitive, though I understand this can be kinda subjective),
- smaller community to make it easier to know everyone,
- programme rigour (esp. in equipping someone with no finance background with financial skills),
- inspiring professors (i.e. take pride in their teaching and inspiring professionally and personally).
I’m particularly interested to find out about the culture – the kind of environment that would suit me best would be one that is collaborative, all-inclusive and not too much segregation, direct and straightforward, not too rigid, fast-moving.
Would you be able to advise please which of the five schools I’m interested in would fit this criteria? Or whether there are other suitable schools that I’ve not thought of yet?
I really appreciate your help on this – thanks very much!
PL”
————–
My response:
PL,
Thanks for checking out my blog and seeing it as a resource for Bschool information. Your email is a tough one for me to answer because I can only truly comment confidently about the culture at Stanford because that’s the only Bschool I ever attended. Plus, I didn’t apply to any of the schools you listed, so I didn’t even do any research on them as I was going through the process. What I know of these schools comes from things I’ve read and conversations that I’ve had with alums of those schools, but you might want to visit the schools and talk to current students to really find out what the deal is with these schools. You could probably knock out Columbia, Stern, and Wharton on a two-day trip and then you’d have to do Chicago and LBS separately…this is assuming that you haven’t already done that.
So, even though I’m not an expert on any of these schools, I can try to make a run at giving you some sort of answer to your questions…or at least tell you how I would think about them. I’ll start of by saying that I don’t know anything about LBS, so I won’t even touch that one here. Anything I would say about it would be an uninformed guess and I’d hate to give you bad information on that school. As for the other four schools you listed, I know people who’ve gone to all of them, so I’ll just try to draw from those folks to give some sort of answer:
Strong placement in investment banking/management: Each of your listed schools is known for having strong placement in investment banking/management, so don’t worry about whether you will be able to compete for post-MBA jobs in that industry at any of those schools. The bigger concern should be whether you’ll be able to capitalize on the opportunities for those jobs and actually get the offers. Due to their reputations of being good feeders for investment jobs, you’d probably be competing for the investment industry jobs with a good number of your classmates, some of whom will have been bankers or consultants prior to business school. For each of your target schools, I’d recommend finding some current MBA2 students or recent grads who came from non-Finance/Consulting backgrounds and were able to get an inverstment industry post-MBA job offer and asking them how they found the road to that offer at their particular school. This would give you a true sense of what you’d have waiting for you as you pursue that industry at each school.
Smaller community: Have you taken a look at the business school profiles on BusinessWeek.com(http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/)? The information listed on it could be found on each school’s website, but BusinessWeek pulls it all together as a one-stop-shop where it can all be easily found. I just spent 2-3 minutes looking up the profiles for each of the four US schools you listed and easily found the info about the size of each school’s student community. The student counts for the full-time, part-time, and executive MBA programs at each school are there, so you’ll have to decide upon your definition of “community”…is it only the full-time MBA students or is it all MBA students at the school? Also, some schools focus on individual sections within each class as the source of community, rather than the entire class, which is something you should look into as you’re further researching your target schools.
Program rigor: As someone coming in with no business background, you’ll likely find the overall academic experience at each of your target schools to be rigorous. I think the question you actually want to be asking here is how strong the Finance elective courses are at each school. The core Finance class will likely be tough, but the upper-level Finance electives might end up being a REAL challenge because you’ll be surrounded by your classmates who are also interested in Finance careers (including some with previous experience). As such, the professors would most likely boost the rigor in these courses to ensure a good learning experience for the entire class. From what I know of the schools you listed, each of them has a very rigorous overall program and offer a strong set of Finance courses. I’d recommend visiting each school’s website and checking out the course listings to get an idea of the breadth of Finance-related courses offered by each.
Professors: I don’t know much about the professors at the individual schools, but I imagine that each of the schools have professors, both veteran and newer, who are incredibly inspiring and engaging. I haven’t had any conversations with my friends who went to your listed schools specifically about their professors, so I can’t really give you details about that. If you haven’t visted your target schools yet, this is the sort of thing you’ll get a sense for.
Culture: Your question about the schools’ cultures is one that I definitely can’t give you any insight on because this is something that only someone who attended the schools can provide. You’re definitely looking for the right things here, so you need to make sure you finding out the RIGHT information about each school. There’s always going to be a view of a school from the outside, but it is seldom the same as one would experience as a student. This is where you’d REALLY need to get in contact with some real students to get the best information possible because a school’s culture is the main factor in determining whether it is a fit for you.
Now that I’m re-reading these last couple of sections of this message, I don’t know if I’ve come anywhere close to what you’re looking for, so you should really try to find some current students at these schools and find out what’s up from someone on the inside.
In terms of other schools to consider, you might want to add one or two that aren’t necessarily known for churning out Finance or I-Banking people. One my friends who is a Kellogg grad explained it best when he told me that the investment banks are left basically begging Kellogg students to apply for summer and fulltime positions because most of the kids there are interested in Marketing. The Finance courses at the school are top-notch, but everyone just sees it as a Marketing school and immediately count it out if they have interest in Finance career. If you have the time/funds to include one or two more schools that might fit your school criteria, it might be worth adding them to your list. Off the top of my head Stanford and Kellogg might be two schools that fit your listed qualities, but you would have to do a little more due diligence on your own to figure out whether they’d truly fit you or not.
I hope this email was helpful, but I’m not sure if I was able to give you the definitive “this is what school X is all about” perspective that you were looking for, but I didn’t want to just guess at the answers to your questions because this Bschool choice is a crucial decision point in one’s career. Take care and good luck with your Bschool applications.
-M
