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

The message below was sent by one of my Platinum members who has emailed me a couple of times before. He’s a Spaniard who is looking at applying to business school this year and, up to now, he’s been focused on applying to schools in the United States. In the message below, he informed me that he has won a prestigious scholarship to attend a business school in Shanghai, China and asked for my advice on whether to accept the scholarship or not.

Instead of telling him whether to take the scholarship, I offered him a quick framework that he … Read the rest

Continue Reading

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

Continue Reading

Hey, everyone. A few days ago, I was sent a couple of articles about the U.S. tax rules for deducting MBA costs and I realize that some of you may be concerned about MBA-related costs, so I thought you might find these articles to be informative. Most MBA students won’t be able to deduct the costs of an MBA when completing their tax returns, but, for those that can, it can result in huge financial benefits. I’d highly recommend figuring out where you stand on this prior to matriculating at your program.

——
“When You Can Deduct the Cost of … Read the rest

Continue Reading

One of the casualties of the economic downturn has been student loan programs for international students who attend U.S. business schools. I’ve heard several stories over the past year about foreign MBA applicants choosing not to apply to U.S. schools because of an inability to get loans to pay for that education. The following article from BusinessWeek.com describes a relatively new program that is trying to fill the void left by the elimination of loan programs that used to be offered by CitiAssist and Sallie Mae.

——
“A financial lifeline for foreign MBA students”
Author: Alison Damast
Source: BusinessWeek.com http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jan2010/bs2010014_067543.htm … Read the rest

Continue Reading

2009 has been a pretty wild year for business schools and their students. There have been many highs and lows for MBAs over the past 12 months, but I’m hopeful that things will starting looking up in 2010. BusinessWeek.com recently published its list of the top B-school related stories of 2009 and I thought that some of you might be interested in the list.

—————–

Title: “Top Business School Stories of 2009″

Author: Alison Damast and Geoff Gloeckler

Date: Dec 23, 2009 Source: BusinessWeek.com, http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2009/bs20091223_153201.htm

Excerpt from intro text:

“To call 2009 an interesting year for management education is perhaps … Read the rest

Continue Reading

What’s good, folk. Just when I said that I was going to start writing more often, things started getting busier at work and I found myself not writing stuff that wasn’t work-related for a while. Well, I’m sitting on a plane right now, which gives me time to plug away at the keyboard and this seems like as good a time as any to respond to a reader email…

When I read the message below, I couldn’t help but grin because he’s vibin’ with me on three factors that have made up the foundation of who I am over the… Read the rest

Continue Reading

What’s going on, y’all. I know it’s been a while since i’ve done an entry, but that’s because I’ve been super busy recently preparing to end my job (Next friday is my last day) and make my move out to Cali.

Now that I an nearing the light at the end of the tunnel for my job, it has started hitting me that I am going to be super broke with no paycheck coming for the scond half of July and all of August. So, I’ve been trying to curtail my spending and put some money to the side to … Read the rest

Continue Reading

I just got an email from Stanford telling me that I wasn’t moved to the semifinal round for the General Motors felowship in their Partnership for Diversity (P4D) Fellowship program. This diss along with the earlier diss from Goldman Sachs means that my fellowship search crapped out. Ford is another one of the sponsors of the program that offers a summer internship guarantee in exchange for full-tuition sponsorship, but they were looking for a candidate with a hardcore engineering background and I don’t think that my software engineering background was hardcore enough. Basically, i’m looking at a big ol’ loan… Read the rest

Continue Reading