Business School Profile Reality Check

Good digs man, keep 'em coming. Every article helps.

These articles are great. Good objective reviews.

Sandy is one of the very few b-school admissions consultants who knows what he's talking about. He's not going lie about your chances but will give it to you straight. The truth hurts, but too many consultants manipulate naive applicants into paying for their services. (I'm talking to you, stacy blackman, aringo, mba admissions, etc.)

Always enjoy reading anything Sandy has written, very informative across the board.

this south asian dude sounds like he's full of BS..and indians from india are renowned for inflating (lying) on their resumes to get into b-school...

Want to spend 150k on b-school? Why not do something better and spend that coin on opening a business? Or on travel? I learned far more by blowing 20 grand on a failed business venture then I did in my undergrad. I want to go to b-school but not for a diploma I want to go for he experience. Sure it can help you land that coveted PE job. If you think that going to b-school will do anything more for you, you are deluding yourself. Experience is gained from rolling up your sleeves and diving head first into the pile of shit we call life.

sure but if you cant get that experience without a network thats provided to you by a business school....

i also have to argue against anyone that says 'oh you can easily make things happen without schooling!' seeing as the economy sucks dick and kind of need that boost/network for the future and to make things happen and occur. i have a buddy who is a 'trader' and trying to start a fund and asks me why i dont just give him my bschool tuition and we start a fund together. fail.

heister you had a large acreage willed to you that enabled you to go about doing things other people wouldnt have been able to do. can kind of count that as a 'pedigree' of being part of a family that opened that opportunity up to you. had that not happened you wouldnt have been able to do the same things

im not from a target either but going to a nontarget i know i definitely want to get out 'under the shadow' of the lack of a network from my alma mater and get into somewhere that i can leverage for my future endeavours.

ty 4 link good read broooooo

thanks!

posts like these make up for 10 "[random ethnicity] babes are the hottest" threads.

win.

There's a reason why so many smart capable people bust their butts off to get into these schools.

Yeah, and the reason is that they do so in order to get a job and work for someone else. If you want to go the risk-averse route, that's the way. I think Heister's point was about starting your own business.

Heister, I can't think of that many better ways to spend $150K as a long-term investment than an elite b-school. Sure, the standard answer is to use that capital to start your own business. But let's be honest; most start-ups don't go anywhere. And of course, you can always invest it in the markets and hope to make a lot in the long-term. Ultimately though, an elite MBA is not just about the money, although that certainly plays a role. It's a combination of having a once in a lifetime experience, an amazing network, access to opportunities that were previously unavailable to you, etc. I think it's hard to quantify all of that.

Pedigree is SEVERELY UNDERRATED and not in any way overrated. Going to a top university and making friends at that university or going to an elite company and making friends at the company (while young) are perhaps the single best things you can do in life to sway your odds of financial success... even going to an elite HS goes a very, very, very long way (though part of that is because it leads to college/first few jobs etc).. don't be fucking crazy here people. Pedigree IS NOT EVERYTHING, but it is ONE OF only a few very, very important factors.... Talent probably is the most important, but pedigree may be tied for second along with drive and luck.

awesome post thanks

I liked his no bs approach and sense of humor

yes heister and (not that any of this was to be a personal attack btw) you also then used the original land to get all the other land, didnt you? sooooo kinda was necessary in the beginning. kinda like for me to say oh i could have made all the money i have from trading after not having been given the initial trading capital :P and yes you can definitely spend 150k on a startup ( i looked into starting a pinkberry back home in CT, no joke) and get a higher multiple POSSIBLY... you can also spend a dollar and win a 300mm lottery

InternationalPymp, I agree 100% with what you wrote. Prestige is actually very underrated. For men, I think it's more important than looks, charisma, personality. Raw drive still matters more, of course, but I have seen a lot of people of mediocre intelligence get great jobs and make great money due to their pedigree.

As I said to heister above, there is a damm good reason why so many gifted ambitious people bust their asses off to get into the likes of harvard undergrad, HBS, harvard law, stanford business, etc.

The growing "pedigree frenzy" and the manner in which institutional linearity and connections have begun to supercede 'the person' are one of the main reasons I'm becoming a real bear on America in the long-term. America's extraordinary post-WWII economic growth wasn't the result of a few jargon-spewing CEOs making claim to $1,000,000 blocks of capital, but of a capital-allocation system that could regularly succeed at distributing $1,000,000 worth across 20 hard-working, $50,000-a-year folks who would spend that money and keep the economy pumping. Vast swathes of the working population fell in that "decent wage" category and spent it to everyone's profit, while the wealthy spend a much lower percentage of their income (and redirect it to investment and savings schemes). Someone else pointed this out earlier and it's maddeningly obvious - at least, to me it is (my background and our social networks are what most would describe as "privileged"). You can't blame the wealthy for wanting to invest and you can't blame wage-earners for taking care of their living circumstances; this isn't about values, but about rate of growth - societal proportions for the post-WWII generation were simply much more conducive to economic growth. Today's America isn't like that anymore: it is still milking the excessively-suckled nipples of the sacred cows created by that tough-as-guns post-War America. No one seems to really consider that the cow will eventually die, and leave behind it a cloud of methane that will engulf all but those wearing gas masks and still nourish themselves from pasteurized milk, without truly realizing that the only people who sit comfortably are the owners of the farm and pasture.

One hears that America's brightest prospects are leading the charge to enter a select group of brand-management institutions loosely affiliated with the educational sector, and that because the very smartest people are doing this, it must be the right thing to do. Here's some insight into those people and their values: smart, hard-working Americans pursue pedigree out of risk aversion, and because out of all the paths towards the elite, it's the closest thing to non-natal inheritance and virtual assurance of comfortable living. Without a doubt, the institutional track places a much lower burden on creativity and originality than entrepreneurship does (America's greatest non-bubble modern entrepreneurs were generally speaking just as academically able as the institutional-track squad, but weaned themselves off from its drug and branched out). This is a linear path which requires hard work, raw intelligence, institutional extroversion and an etiquette of discretion, but of all these, entrepreneurship requires only the first two (the second really being the ability to innovate), and replaces the others with an ability to face difficult choices, which the institutional path doesn't. There are other paths, but increasingly less of them, as the wages offered by 'normal jobs' have failed to catch up with cost-of-living inflation, and as such, the risk-reward is less attractive than that afforded by 'good schooling' (which itself is fundamentally a pretty simple game - much like dating and mating, which humans have done throughout the entire existence - except institutional gaming is much simpler than mating, jealousy, love and family).

If you can leverage pedigree to guarantee that you can join an overpaid, self-selecting, self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing network, then power to you: apart from the ultra-rich, that cluster which straddles the ceiling of the upper middle-class and eats off the crumbs of wealth ("comfortably poor", essentially) is one of the few that will do well in America in coming years and decades. But overall, there's little good to report about this system: it draws talent early on into a rat-race academic filter that begins in elementary school and proceeds in linear fashion until someone is 30, and by that time, raw intellectual talent has essentially failed to make any kind of impact (pitch books, strategy decks and amicus briefs just don't cut it). Instead, they have learned that at core, wealth has precious little to do with creation, work has precious little to do with product, and winning has precious little to do with success; anyone who's smart will see that the system is a game rigged by referees who masquerade as players, a castle of cards and will crumble at the slighest billow of wind, and if anyone owes their socioeconomic comfort to such a system, the rational conclusion is to view it as a structure worth exerting every effort to preserve. Without it, what are you? An overeducated, pedigree'd 30-something with no real skills, no language, fully conditioned to be inefficient (ie. dicking around for 80-110 hours a week on a desk) and lacking in actual confidence to get things down without the power of a brand name behind you. That's a terrifying prospect for people who have historically shown themselves to be risk averse, and the sheer panic of such prospects will drive those of America's highest wage-earners (who haven't been able to make the jump into becoming asset-owners) to mobilize every resource they can to protect their niche.

To me, the growing prominence of this institutional linearity and the urgency felt by Americans to break in to the white collar freemasonry are strong indicators of impending secular decline in the United States. America will always have an asset-owning elite and new fortunes will still be made in America - let there be no mistake about that, and that is a pleasing thing. But such dynamics are also true of Gulf states, Asian Banana Republics and Latin America as a whole, which are not the mirrors America chooses to view itself in. Perhaps the only notable difference between a 2050 America and these countries is the existence of an over-educated, pedigree'd upper-middle class that provides services to the asset-owners, yet this is a small consolation. With some luck, 2020 America will manage to find a floor for its Middle Class and resemble post-zombie bank Japan, which is also only a small consolation, but a more consoling one, at that. And with that, good luck to all of us in attempting to find a pedigree'd chair to sit on before the music stops playing.

personally for me it isnt about the 'prestige' so much as the fact that, coming from a nontarget ugrad, id like my life to be a little 'easier' with a brand name school aiding in the recruiting : you pay for the network that goes ahead and feeds itself with others. slaving your ass away for a job sucks, you learn after the first time YOUREDOINGITWRONG

I just read through every profile there. So apparently if you are a minority American woman you are given the golden ticket to H/S/W almost regardless of your background? "1st-generation college grads" also have it made as well.

im a first gen HIGH SCHOOL grad. booya. but columbia and booth gave me no love :P i also had a 2.7 ugrad so..... lol