Today we introduce you to the all-stars of my MBA program and yours. We seek only the top tier of characters that can singularly steal the show (and maybe $1.2 billion dollars in segregated customer funds on the side).
The Questions Guy
- The guy that everyone loves to hate. In any setting — be it the classroom, company-sponsored information session, or networking circle — The Questions Guy always has something to say. And while it technically always ends with a question mark, we understand the sentence to have the primary purpose of demonstrating some deeper knowledge of the material at hand. Sometimes these “questions” are insightful; however most times, we blame him for wasting classroom time, stealing our thunder, or dumbing everyone down with his trifling. We envy the fact that he’s clearly getting his money’s worth of his tuition … and ours.
The Open Mouth Learner - Formerly some kind of nonprofit hero, the Open Mouth Learner’s jaw dropped with his first exposure to supply/demand curves, and he has remained captivated ever since. He brings up his non-traditional background at every opportunity, even if totally irrelevant to the conversation at hand. Professionally, he drops the phrase “non-traditional background” assertively in introductions, in order to ask questions in finance networking circles. At school, he drops the phrase defensively, in order to shirk the number-crunching parts of group assignments. The Open Mouth Learner is quietly both ashamed and proud of the fact that he has gotten through life this far without ever learning fractions. Continue reading »
Dealbreaker’s Business School Bureau Chief is a full-time MBA student at Chicago Booth. Upon graduation, she plans to go back into the same industry and job function as she held before school, and as a result, some observers have questioned the need for her business school education. Though there are occasional moments when she, too, ponders the MBA, our Business School Bureau Chief is bent on proving its worth.
During first-year orientation last year, we had a special 90-minute session on “Compelling Correspondence” or How to Communicate via the Written Word Without Sounding Like a Douchebag. I took the lecture and feedback session in stride, thinking, “What moron would forget to spell-check and do a final read-through?”
A couple of weeks later, I realized my ego was writing checks my body couldn’t cash. I submitted a resume with the following header – in both soft and hard copy – to a Very Important Firm: Continue reading »
If you’re one of Moynihan’s mini-mistmakers and a slowdown in staffing, dwindling office supplies and your MD’s refusal to make eye contact have left you convinced that you’re among the 10,000/40,000/30,000 people whose brief yet brilliant tenure at Old BAC will soon be toasted over rounds at Phil’s Tavern, you may already be thinking about your next move. And it may have occurred to you that dropping a few hundred grand for two years of team building exercises, team learning projects, team drinking challenges, and individual scamming on undergraduates might be preferable to finding another job in banking / moving back in with your parents. Well, good news: no one else has thought of that yet.
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Why do you want to go to business school? Is it to advance your career? While that may be the answer for many, that’s not what business school admissions officers want to hear. They’re bored. Sick of it. They want to be wowed. They want to drill down to who you are- as a human. They want to get to know you. Step out of these clothes and slip into something more comfortable. Figure out what motivates you. What makes you tick. How to they intend to do this? By changing the face of the b-school application process as we know it. The well compensated powers that be in academia have revolutionized the interview process in the following ways: Continue reading »
For starters, they’d like to see a management shakeup. Continue reading »
And the feeling is mutual. Continue reading »
