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Video Impressions of UC Berkeley Haas

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We visited several business school campuses in California last year, and we thought we would share some of our video footage, so that prospective students can get a little glimpse of life on campus and the surrounding areas.

Video Impressions of UC Berkeley Haas from FIND MBA on Vimeo.

This clip is from our  visit to UC Berkeley Haas School of Management. The campus is situated up on a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It is full of top-notch programs in the sciences, law, journalism, and other disciplines, so there’s a real intellectual vibrance here. The university also has a long history by California standards, but of course not as long as schools like Oxford or Heidelberg that have been around for centuries. Berkeley was a hotbed of student revolt and alternative movements during the sixties, and there are remnants of this on campus, course offerings, and off-campus life in Berkeley.

FIND MBA Goes Social!

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We don’t often post stuff about ourselves, but we have a few exciting things to announce:

First of all, the official FIND MBA Twitter channel is up and running! So now you can be the first to know about our MBA news updates and commentary. Follow us here.

Secondly, the FIND MBA Facebook page is also online. We’re just getting this started, but you can connect with us and other prospective MBA students there. We will be adding new, unique content here soon, so stay tuned.

Finally, we’ve upgraded the community tools on FIND MBA. We built the MBA AppTracker so that registered users can share their application status for the MBA programs they are applying to. It also lets you see how other users are doing in the application process: Who else is interested in the same program? Who else has applied? Who has received an admissions decision already?

Check it out. AppTracker is a tab in every users’ account (“My Account“).

Original penguin photo: Stan Shebs / Creative Commons

Video Impressions of IMD / Lausanne

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I was in Lausanne for the first time last week, and took the opportunity to drop by the famous IMD business school. The campus is located on a small hillside along Lake Geneva. It was a beautiful day, and my impression of the town and campus was very positive. Lovely setting. Lots of trees.

Campus was pretty empty, as it was rather late on Friday afternoon when I made it down there. There were some leadership and CSR conferences going on. Of course, I assume the MBAs were still hard at work somewhere.

Friendly people on and off campus, despite my lousy French. Toward the end of my two-hour train ride from Zurich Airport (Geneva is a lot closer!), I got a spectacular view of the lake, Alps, and vineyards as we descended into Lausanne.

Here are a few Flip video impressions from my stop. Sorry for being a little shaky.

Impressions of IMD & Lausanne from FIND MBA on Vimeo.

Book Review: Don’t Call Us Entrepreneurs

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Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever
Crown Business (US) / Vermilion (UK), 2010

Rework is a short, punchy business manifesto written by the founders of the Chicago software company, 37signals. It’s the kind of book you can breeze through in an afternoon, which is perhaps one reason why it climbed the New York Times bestseller list earlier this year.

Another reason, no doubt, is the book’s simplicity. The authors set out to make a few dozen points – lessons learned while building a company over the last decade. Like with many other popular business books, some of the points will border on truism (“Embrace constraints”, “Meetings are toxic”) for the Generation X and Y reader.

Luckily, however, most points laid out in Rework are provocative – not the kind of things you’ll usually find on hardcover dust jackets in the business section; things like “Emulate drug dealers” “Learning from mistakes is overrated;” and “Good enough is fine.”

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Interview: Pamela Hartigan at Oxford Saïd

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Pamela Hartigan

Social entrepreneurship is an increasingly popular focus for MBA students, but what exactly does the term mean? We spoke to Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

Can you briefly define social entrepreneurship?

Social entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship that fuses innovation, resourcefulness, and opportunity to create new systems or practices – or improve on those that exist – that instead of being focused on just making a profit are focused on transforming society in a positive way.

How does that differ from the work of charities?
Social entrepreneurship defines an approach; it’s not a legal structure. You can be a social entrepreneur who is focused on creating change through a non-profit, or through a for-profit structure.

People get caught up in this idea whether it’s a charity or not; it is independent of charity. And in fact, to make it sustainable, it should not be a charity. But it really is not about the legal structure, and that’s the main message here: it’s about an approach to how to create innovation in a way that changes systems and practices.

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Interview: Stig Lanesskog at the University of Illinois

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Dean Stig Lanesskog

Stig Lanesskog

What do you recommend that students do to prepare to go back to school?

We hope that they would be able to develop their plan for how to best use the next two years, in order to get the most out of their MBA.  When students first get here, I ask them “what’s your story going to be?” In other words, what are you going to tell a future employer in terms of, here’s what I did before I got my MBA, here’s what I did while getting my MBA, here’s my experience – this is my story.

We want students to be in a position to be able to answer those questions, knowing that the responses might change once they get here, but to have some trajectory in mind from day one.

At the University of Illinois, students can take advantage of a flexible curriculum, where they can, with their electives, take classes even outside the college of business.  Because of that flexibility, they have to figure out how they can take advantage of the resources of the university. So I suggest that they familiarize themselves with what they can take advantage of, through, in our case, the University of Illinois.

For example, if you think you want to do marketing, which is a very traditional concentration – maybe you want to get into the mind of a consumer – so you can take a psychology class that might be helpful for you to really get into the behavior and mind of a consumer.

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Master in Management (MiM) or MBA: What’s Better For You?

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Thomas Graf

Read the FIND MBA article: Master in Management Programs vs. MBAs

We spoke to Thomas Graf, director of the recently launched website Master in Management Compass, about the pros and cons of doing an Master in Management (MiM) program versus an MBA.

How is the MiM different from the MBA?

In my opinion, there are three key differences: age of students, their professional experience, and program tuition fees.

MiM programs are designed for people in the early stages of their career – right after their undergraduate degree or after about a year on the job. As a result, MiM students are typically younger than MBA students: 23 years on average (with a range from 20 to about 27) compared to the 27-32 average age for MBA programs.

Accordingly, the MiM students have no or only a little bit of professional experience. Most business schools, actually, do not require professional experience at all for their MiM programs. In contrast, MBA program are designed for people with about three to five years of being in the job. A diversity of different professional backgrounds is one of the key benefits that you may get from an MBA program because you may profit not only from books or professors, but also from your fellow students.

As for the tuition fees, the MiM programs are cheaper than MBA programs. Whereas tuitions at the most expensive full-time MBA programs can reach as high as €60,000, the most expensive MiM programs cost only about half of that.

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Interview: John Mooney at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business

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John Mooney

John Mooney

Part-time MBA programs can offer flexibility and value for working professionals. John Mooney, associate dean and professor at Pepperdine’s Academic Programs for Working Professionals, says that the benefits don’t stop there.

What are some of the advantages of part-time MBA programs?

For one thing, it’s a far more immediate learning. Theories of learning have recognized for many years that the quality of learning improves dramatically when you move beyond passively consuming new knowledge and are able to apply it immediately. And that’s the big advantage for working professionals.

The other big issue about MBA programs for learning professionals is the affordability issue. If you’re going to do a full-time MBA program, it means that you have to make a conscious decision to stop working. And that implies a loss of income for the duration of that program.

And with part-time programs, students also get to continue progressing in their career. Many of our students tend to get promoted before they finish, and that’s a clever strategy on the part of employers because as an employer, you don’t want  somebody to finish their MBA and then decide they want to go somewhere else.

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Interview: Andrew Atzert at ASU WP Carey’s Online Program

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Andrew Atzert, ASU WP Carey

Are online MBA programs comparable to classroom-based ones? We asked Andrew Atzert, assistant dean and director of the W.P. Carey MBA – Online Program at Arizona State University

Is online a compromise?

We developed our distance learning MBA program using the faculty who teach in our regular program and the same curriculum in our regular program. We’ve always had the philosophy that our MBA program is the same program as our regular MBA program in terms of the actual degree and knowledge you get from the program.

But at the same time, it’s different. What potential students think is that there’s a trade-off when you choose an online program. And the trade-off is that most people want face-to-face interaction.They want the ability to network with other classmates and faculty. So they accept the convenience of an online program, but they also feel like they’re trading off that interaction. The challenge for us is to try to not have as much of a trade-off, and to offer more interaction.

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Interview: Rachel Killian at Warwick Business School

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Rachel Killian

Online MBA programs can provide more flexibility than classroom based programs. But how does the actual experience compare? We asked Rachel Killian, the Marketing and Recruiting Manager at Warwick Business School.

What are the benefits of a distance learning program over a class-based one?

There are two main reasons why people would choose a distance learning program over a class-based program. The first of which is the cost, because typically a distance learning program is likely to be more affordable – particularly if people are looking for a part-time program but are not getting any corporate sponsorship or funding from their employer. And we have seen a fall in the last 12 or 18 months of the number of corporations that are able to sponsor students’ MBAs. For those people who are not getting funding, then a distance learning MBA is an affordable option. The second reason is that it gives students more flexibility in fitting their studies around their professional lives, but also if they have family as well, their family life. Because for us, the average age of our distance learning MBA students is about 34 or 35; and that’s a time of life where people are quite busy, so I do think that it gives people more flexibility.

They can study when they want, when it suits them, and when they can fit it in.

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