How to Make the Most of MBA Fairs

by: Niki Healey
Manager of Ivey MBA admissions

Knowing that in the next few months there will be plenty of MBA Fairs happening around the world, I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on two things: how to make the most of attending an MBA fair, and what benefit you can get from attending these events.

If you've never attended an MBA Fair, stepping into a room with 30, 40, or 50+ tables from different MBA Programs around the world with several thousand other prospective MBA applicants can be an overwhelming experience to say the least...The MBA Fair is not a great place to do preliminary research on schools - it is too busy, and your time with Admissions staff will be fairly limited. My view on Fairs is that they are a great tool to help firm-up the shortlist of schools you intend to apply to. This implies that it really is necessary to do some background research on the schools you're targeting prior to the Fair. As mentioned, your time speaking with the Admissions rep at a table is short, so to use up your questions asking things like 'what is your GMAT requirement' or 'when do classes start' is really not the best use of your time! Think of the MBA fair as your opportunity to make a strong impression on members of the Admission team...this will be good motivation to do your homework on their respective schools! If you can stand out in what is often the chaos of a Fair, you are leaps and bounds ahead in the game of differentiating yourself to the Admissions committee!

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Find the rest of this and other related posts at Ivey MBA admissions blog

First Impressions (Fall Cohort)

By: Marc Folch

So... All the applying, GMAT writing, interviewing, reference chasing and waiting have paid off. I am now at what many consider to be Canada's premier MBA school.

What is it like? Well, there is a lot of work for sure. Full classes haven not even started (we are doing an optional preparatory knowledge course) but we are waking up for class that starts at 8:00am and goes straight to 5:00pm with a good 3-5 hrs of homework after.

I suppose when you are cramming a full MBA (normally 2 years), into a year and two weeks, there is not much time left for a slow ramp up. You really need to hit the ground running. Good thing I brought my Nikes.

It's a very collaborative environment here and we do a good bit of group work, but this translates to our social life as well. Even outside of class there is an incredible attitude of brotherhood/sisterhood in the program and any time you need a hand with something, there is always someone ready help.

The staff here are also like nothing I have ever encountered at an academic institution. The profs are interesting and know how to relate the material to the real world in a way that makes it relevant and forces you to think about the big picture. That was my biggest frustration with undergrad, it was often too abstract.

As for the admin staff, they are amazing. Most admins either treat you like a number or just don't care. Here, they are on the ball and will bend over backwards to help. When I first arrived, I couldn't get in touch with my roommate because his phone was off so i figured i might as well ask an admin. Within 5 minutes, she'd tracked him down to an international student orientation and had someone pass him a note to call me with my cell phone number. Never seen anything like it!

Overall, I'm impressed. We work hard, play hard, will sleep when we're dead.

Marc Folch
MBA Candidate 2008 (Fall Cohort)
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

Industry week (Recruiting begins)

Hard to believe that it has already been three months since the start of the MBA program. What I find even harder to believe though is that we are starting our main recruiting cycle fairly shortly. So one might think that it is happening way too fast and that might indeed be the case if you are thinking in-terms of a two year programs. When it comes to the Ivey one year MBA experience it somehow ends up feeling more or less like a natural progression.

Recognizing that for the majority of students it’s the career enhancement aspect why we are ultimately here, Ivey places a big emphasis on trying to tightly integrate the career management activities into the curriculum. Right from the day one we are encouraged to take advantage of the fact that Ivey has such a resourceful career management team. The way it’s structured is by having individual Relationship Managers focusing on particular industry segments, such as consulting, finance, and general industry.

So now let’s take a look at a more specific career management activity to-date. Two weeks ago we had the “Get Connected” industry week in Toronto. Its purpose was to meet and get to know a variety of interesting companies. The beauty of it was that the whole week was pre-arranged for us. The recipe for success was simply to add Ivey students and mix and mingle.

The week was packed with networking events, information sessions, and career coaching activities. We had presentations and networking events going back to back starting at 8am and sometimes going until 10pm. For those of you curious about some of the companies that participated in activities that week, starting with management consulting firms – McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Oliver Wyman, Monitor, AT Kearney, Deloitte, IBM, ZS Associates. Finance – RBC, Scotia Capital, CPP, CIBC, BMO Capital markets. There was also number of general industry representatives. The one that particularly stood out for me was Google.

Overall, it was a great week, lots of useful contacts, tons of insightful information that we would not have had otherwise. The real test is going to come in less than a month when the main recruiting cycle starts!

Till next time,
George

The Strategy Paradox - Book review

I got this book based on the recommendation made by one of Corporate Strategy professors at Ivey. Coincidentally, one of my friends invited me to this book's release event. Michael gave a very interesting and insightful speech and as the result I was left itching to grab the book and dive into his ideas deeper.

This book turned out indeed to be quite a treat. The Strategy Paradox is a "collision between commitment and uncertainty". Michael not only identifies the challenge that managers face everyday: in order for a strategy to succeed resources have to be committed to it, but at the same time future by its nature is inherently uncertain and therefore there is no way to know if the strategy that they have chosen to pursue is the "right" one. The example analyzed in the book is the famous Betamax vs. VHS bet that Sony made back in the days.

The idea developed in the book is a J&J strategy of hedging strategic choices by investing a small portion of resources into creating independent strategy options. Those new initiatives take on life of their own and become alternative realities. Moreover, if one of those options takes off it will get absorbed back into the main business, ultimately helping to shape the overall company strategy.

I do recommend this book as it not only has interesting ideas about selecting the "right" strategy but is also very well written.

Till next time,

George

Playing on a Seesaw vs. MBA experience

Have you ever played on a seesaw? I’m sure many of you have. As it turns out, it is not only a fun physical exercise, but it teaches us about important concepts in physics, statistics, and negotiations. And with any luck, I will try to illustrate that it also might teach us a lesson or two about MBA grades.
In one of my posts I mentioned that marks are probably one of the hardest ways to differentiate yourself in an MBA program. I’ve received number of emails from readers curious to find out why that might be the case.

Throughout our lives we are instilled with a notion that being great means being better than your peers. In high school we were happy when we got the top grade in class even though it might have been only 72%; it was all the same, as long as we were at the top of the hill. That is precisely why the question of whether one would chose a $10,000 bonus if it was the highest bonus in the company or a $25,000 if it was a lowest one becomes hard to answer. It is as true in an MBA as it is in any other environment, and probably even more so in the MBA as everybody here is a type-A personality and everybody is aiming for a win.

Let me make myself clear here, what I’m not trying to do is to prove that marks are not important, as they definitely are. Especially if you are targeting Top Five consulting and finance firms, they are going to be scrutinizing your MBA grades in addition to other quantitative pieces of information such as your Undergraduate marks and GMAT score.

What I am trying to convey here is that while concentrating on maintaining good marks there has to be a definite focus on trying to differentiate yourself though other means, such as extracurricular activities, your professional network, depth of knowledge about the industry, and the list goes on.

By now you are probably wondering why I threw in the seesaw analogy at the beginning of this post. The reason being is the intimate curve. It is near and dear to a lot of us here in the MBA program, even though it does feel a bit tight at times. Curve is a tool which statisticians refer to as a normal distribution, in reality you can think of it as a semi-flexible seesaw; the central point being the mean value. If the two people at sitting right at the opposite ends of seesaw they are two standard deviations away from the mean (central value). Interesting property of this type of distribution is that 68% of values fall within one standard deviation away from the mean and 95% fall within two standard deviations away from the mean. Furthermore, a lot of distributions of values in the world fit well under this type of description, and the ones that do not fit are sometimes force fitted.

And now the big secret that schools and majority of employers know about: mean value of MBA grades is 78% with standard deviation of approximately 2%. If we assume an average class size of 100 students that translates into 68 students being somewhere in the 76 to 80% range as far as their final marks, another 27 students being somewhere in the 74 to 82% range, one or two students around 72% and finally two or three in the 85-90% range. Combined with the fact that dean’s list is top 25% of the class, grades might mean that the difference between student on a dean’s list and the one who is not on it might be in the order of a tenth of a percent.

One thing that I didn’t mention when I introduced the concept of a curve is the fact that it has to balance on both sides of the mean. The seesaw analogy comes in handy here again, as similar to the game, if somebody is on one side there has to be somebody on the other side, at approximately the same distance from the center for seesaw to balance. You can think of a curve as playing on a seesaw with multiple people on each side.

And finally one curious fact about the curve, let’s take a hypothetical situation: say Bob decides that his future depends on getting 88% in an ABC course, he works nights and days, doesn’t sleep or eat to get that grade. At the same time John works hard as well but tries to maintain some sort of a balanced lifestyle. The curious thing that John starts to discover soon enough is that even though he is putting solid effort into the course, his mark for ABC is starting to slide because there has to be somebody offsetting Bob’s outstanding results on the “other” side of the mean. At this point John gets scared as he also wants a great job which depends on him being on the dean’s list, so John decides to up his efforts and cut back on sleep for the next couple of weeks. To Jane’s surprise, her marks in ABC are suddenly sliding quite fast to “balance” both Bob’s and John’s increased contribution. But now comes the B-School reality, at the end of the day any school is faced with a choice: would they rather have Jane really upset despite the fact that she paid $xx,000 for the program and put solid amount of work into the course while John and Bob would be quite happy with their marks, or would the school rather have everybody not unhappy to various degrees. Hence a tight curve with a fixed mean and resulting need to differentiate yourself through means other than marks.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or comments about this or any other posts on this blog.

Till next time,
George