MarquisParker.com // Business Strategist, Speaker, Advisor, and Coach

The message below was sent to me by a Platinum member of this site a couple of days and, as I always try to do for my Platinum members, I made sure to get a response to his email recorded and uploaded as quickly as I could.

The sender is a Canadian MBA aspirant who is planning to apply to business school during the 2011-2012 application cycle. In the meantime, he wants to do whatever he can to strengthen his overall application profile and is especially concerned about his low undergraduate GPA. He asked for some advice on how he … Read the rest

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The email below came from a first-year MBA student who is interested in pursuing a summer internship with a Big Three consulting firm (McKinsey, Bain, or BCG) as the start to a career in emerging market consulting. In his email, the student stated that a potential issue for him is his low undergrad grades, which he plans to address either verbally or with a cover letter.

This was a tough email to address because I actually noticed a different big issue than the one that he described in his email. It took me a while to figure out how to … Read the rest

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Back in the summer of 2008, I was approached by the publishing company of a new MBA admissions strategy book called “The Best Business Schools Admissions Secrets” with a request to write up a review. I promptly read the book and was fully prepared to type up a lengthy review, but then real life happened and I dropped the ball on it.

A couple of weeks ago, I found the book in a box in my apartment and remembered that I’d neglected to follow through on my commitment to write a review. So, I re-read the book to get a … Read the rest

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The message below was from a member who is an experienced professional in his early 40′s who is considering returning to school. He is seeking advice from me about whether that is a good path for him to take.

Many people would look at his age and offer up an immediate “NO” to his question, but I took a different stance. Instead of saying “NO”, I thought it would be better for him to do some thinking about whether he actually needs to go back to school to achieve his goals. I’ll leave the rest for the video below to … Read the rest

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OK, I know what you might be thinking after seeing the title of this entry…”What the hell is Marquis thinking in saying that an MBA is a waste of time and money”. Before running too hard on that line of thought, let’s slow down and take a step back. I think it’s obvious that I don’t agree with that statement because I wouldn’t have spent two years and a lot of loan money to get a Stanford MBA if I did. Rather, that line is the title of an article that I recently came across that piqued my interest because… Read the rest

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The article below is about a topic that will likely interest most readers of this site: post-MBA salaries. Specifically, the article focuses on research that reveals a high correlation between attending top business schools and earning high post-MBA salaries. This idea isn’t exactly a new one, but I can’t remember ever having seen any analysis comparing total 20-year post-MBA earnings between schools. That said, the analysis isn’t perfect. The article does describe some potential issues with the source data set, but I still found the outcomes of the analysis to be interesting, especially as it relates to international students who… Read the rest

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This entry is the fourth and final part of my “Strategic approach to the job search” series. The video below lays out my thoughts on how one should manage job offers at the back end of a job search process. When I considered my full-time job offers coming out of Stanford GSB, the process was somewhat straightforward, but that definitely wasn’t the case when I had to weigh my job offers as an experienced professional. Understanding the differences in these two situations has definitely altered the way that I will evaluate job offers in the future…hopefully, my words will help… Read the rest

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