HBS (or similar) after Teach For America

bump bump

I'm at MBB and I do some pro bono work for TFA.

If this is your motivation to do TFA, please do the world a favor and don't.

My bad accidentally gave you monkey shit instead of a banana.

Don't do TFA for a resume booster, end of story.

You'd be better off just taking an industry job in analytics post-graduation. That industry offering is taking off.

TFA and PC are both highly respected but it is in no way enough. You will need a business background in addition to that. Therefore, in your 3-4 years before B-School does 2 years of TFA or PC and 2 years as analyyst look better than 2 years as an anlyst and 2 years at a leadership program like GE, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, IBM, etc...I am not sure. I rather do the latter because I would get great experience and have seen 2 sides of business. The only good things about TFA and PC is that you can network with past alums and it is not weird to be like hey help me out where as if you email your MD and be like find me a job they wont help.

If you are doing service to do it because you want to then go for it, but just as a resume boost your a retard. If you really want the best of both worlds (analytics and 403B) then start yiur own non-prof. Then you will be a shoe in...

You need absolutely no business experience to matriculate at a top b-school. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly uninformed. The diversity of b-school backgrounds range from fine art connoisseurs to army generals to car salesmen.

Not sure how obtaining extra-curricular service activities to boost your resume for B-school is retarded you hippy liberal. No one is a shoe in

Obviously you do not NEED any but to think that it does not help you ten-fold means you are a fucking retard. And what I meant is that doing extra-curric just to boost your resume is retarded the ideal not its future benefits. I am a supporter of doing stuff for a better purpose to the comunity not selfish retards. The diversity of b-school applicants is very very diverse.

However if you see:

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/mba/studentlife/class_profile.html

The diversity of the class is well not so diverse being that 40% did investment management or consulting...and only 8% did non-profit before getting in.

Now go back and enjoy the last 2-3 years of your college experience junk because you're a fuckign retard.

tbroker:

I am a supporter of doing stuff for a better purpose to the comunity not selfish retards.

"hippy liberal" indeed. take your communist viewpoints back to Soviet Russia, we support the free market here!

(please dont flame, its just a joke)

well nowhere did i mention i was thinking of doing it. i was asking more if said people existed.

Perhaps only 8% of business school people come from non-profits is more a product of non-profit people not wanting business school as opposed to business school not wanting them.

Also, while I respect you're opinion. I think peace corps or tfa would be better in combo w/ analyst than another company stint, as it allows one to escape the corporate bubble, and see real problems that exist, and come up with attempts at solutions. Not criticizing.

Are peace corps and tfa even effective at what they attempt to do? i would argue not really.... which stinks.

The fact that they are not successful is the reason why I am against them. Trust me I went to Russia to help teach English for 6 months to those trying to better their famalies. TFA is a joke I have had friends who have done it and all it is is a party. They make 36K a year (and get paid in the summer)plus they have the summers off and they can teach summer school and make 3K per month so do the math they make 48K a year which is pretty good for "helping the community" PC is WAY different. They get a measly amount I think 5K to readjust after they leave PC and they get the minimum while serving. Though they are trying to change the problems abroad while TFA is domestic. You must support PC more due to the fact that there is ZERO monetary incentive. Now if they do it to pad their resume that is their problem.

Lastly, I would argue on ONLY doing another stint when it is something like a leadership position in a company. This is because it is a 40 hour job and you can do a lot of servie projects over this 2 year period. You can tutor intercity kids, work at a soup kitchen, read to the elderly, etc. While learning a different side of business especially for us IBD who focus on total valuation and do not give 2 fucks about management of people and that other shit you learn doing a corporate finance leadership position. Correct me if I am wrong.

what specific leadership programs are u talking about. I know GE's and lockheeds but htats about it. Its def better to do banking first followed by the other program......? even if it is peace corp?

GE, Lockheed, and Raytheon are the biggest to my knowledge. However, other companies have some such as: Home Deopt, Ford, United Way, MetLife, and a lot of regional companies.

As for PC type things: You can find a lot of teach english programs overseas, therefore you can see a place you like and also enjoy what you are doing. Cross-Cultural Solutions is a good PC alternative. Other include: United Nations Volunteers, AmeriCorps, Global Volunteers, etc

thanks tbroker... whats your story? whered you go to school/ what industry are you covering?

J&J has another rotational/leadership entry program. P&G isn't rotational, but they're pretty decent in terms of F500.

EMC also does both a financial leadership program and a marketing leadership program

Teach for America, Peace Corp .....what are these organizations ? first time I've even heard of their existence...

PnG and Pepsico have very strong leadership and management building programs as well. Also both places are full of Bschool alumni and if you make the right connections could help you get in. In general alot of CPG marketers and General Managers come from top Bschools to begin with.

What did they think of it?

Well it is important, I think, to do a financial leadership position because you will learn a lot of skills YOU need. However, they are both equal.

My story: I went to MIT undergrad and I have a degree in Economics and Math. I graduated with a 3.79 (4.0 in Econ and a 3.9 in Math). I did a lot of summer analyst gigs at Banks and I got to work with ST, IBD, and research.

My last gig was at Merrill but I really wanted to do this service program in Russia but of all of the banks I got into they were the only one not allowing me to defer. I had options between most of the BB besides GS, but BoA was lettign me do a stint in Cali which I thought would be fun and I did tech and now I do Healthcare. I am almost a second year analyst.

I hope to go to B-School in Fall of 08 near my home in Boston and then get into PE or HF.

My sister did it and I would say it was good for her because she wanted to be a teacher. But they really throw you to the wolves. She had at least 2 times where she broke down emotionally because one time she was basically teaching gangsters and another time the school was so poor she really couldn't help the kids.

I would stay far far away. The prestige angle is just a hook to grab the gullible in my opinion. It's charity work which means that it is hard and it doesn't pay well (not saying charity work is bad, but you have to sign up for the good feelings you get out of it, not monetary rewards or exit ops).

If you really want to be a teacher and have an ivy league or math degree then it may be easier just to apply. Make sure that you apply to a state that has solid finances and a growing community though as the new teachers are the ones to get the axe when the budget falls short.

I have a huge problem with Teach for America, it turns an otherwise noble occupation into just another notch on the belt or line of the resume for some of these kids who use it to get to Yale Law or Goldman Sachs.

If you're applying to TFA and several other teaching programs because you genuinely care about teaching, awesome and I applaud you. If not, don't apply to TFA and stick to law school please

read the mission statement of TFA and if thats what your looking for.. then rock on..

if not then dont waste your time or theirs

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html

this is a must read.

They recruit like crazy from my school. Their entire pitch rests not on the desire to teach but for the desire to do something better than teaching. I have had their recruiters tell me that people move on to bigger and better things afterwards; this obviously attracts the wrong people and worsens the situation at most schools since instead of having dedicated people in the community instruct the youth, you have freshly minted Ivy League graduates, most likely from the North East, just trying to bide the time till they can get into Grad School.

TFA has been discussed at some length in other posts. I don't entirely agree that it reduces a noble occupation to a notch on someone's belt. You're never going to find a top student at a good school who wants to spend his/her entire career in a poor inner-city school district making 28,000 a year. But you will find a lot who are willing to do it for 2 years and then move on, and 2 years with a great teacher is better than 0.

I've had several friends go into TFA (though all actually want to teach or become educational professionals long-term) and the other teachers in their schools have despised them because the amount of time and effort they've put into it makes everyone else look bad. It may ultimately be a belt notch, but these kids bust their asses.

That said, if you don't want to teach for two years, don't do it. It's a pretty foolish route to GS or Harvard Law, and you won't survive if you don't legitimately value the experience.

I have one friend that did it who wanted to be a teacher. His thoughts were that it really isn't that beneficial of an organization because of a couple main reasons:

1) The kids generally don't care 2) They don't have the materials to teach the kids

If you want to be a teacher, great, do it. If not, stay the hell away. It will suck two years of your life and (solely from my one source) more often than not people are overwhelmed by the lack of difference they do make.

From a personal perspective, I'd say go straight into finance, enjoy your career, and when you retire become a teacher and give back. I was at a community college in northern VA when I met a guy who had done exactly this. The man didn't seem like the most impressive guy in class, he was very laid back, dressed a little sloppy, etc, but when I went out to have lunch with him I saw him dressed for a business meeting and I was seriously impressed. He was part of a team that helped install one of the first internet networks in an AF base, he smoked pot with Jimmy Carter's son apparently (still don't know if I believe this, what's more is he said they smoked on the White House roof, and while this was back in the 70s, still a long shot haha), and then he built his own company from the ground up doing tech stuff until he sold it 3 or 4 years ago for a cool $20m. He went back to school to get his masters so he could teach high school kids earth science. Frankly, I think this is the single best way to give back to your community, after you retire, go into teaching.

Good students are made by the parents. The rest hardly matter.

You send kids into school with serious home problems, drug addicted/criminal/abusive parents, etc. -- you can dump all the money you want on that school and you will get very little for it.

yea i am not crazy about TFA either. if i was a recruiter and was comparing a kid who did TFA for 2yrs versus a kid who did IB/consulting or whatever he/she was trying to get into for 2yrs, id without a doubt go with the latter.

Maybe you would, but grad schools value TFA - not over GS/McK/etc. but they still value it. Also, the bad parents thing has a point, but I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who did a piece on education where the research showed that the #1 predictor of how much students learn isn't class size, income, etc.; it's quality of teacher.

^ Yes. And there is no more important teacher than the parent.

why dont you fucking search... i have talked about this 8 times this year

TFA gets lots of recent Ivy grads into teaching, mostly for the short haul. Whether this is a net positive for society remains to be seen. I'll echo a couple of the above posters in saying that most people seem to have a horrible experience teaching with TFA, though this is just anecdotal.

people have bad exp with tfa cause they dont fully know what they are getting into. LOTS of people do it for the wrong reasons. I saw a bunch of people quit last year after learning they dont like kids... working in a school..who would of thought kids would be there

rio g valley i would guess...

monty: I understand what you're saying, and from what I understand my friend had a good idea of what he was getting into, but not as good as he needed. The first place he went was a school of 3,000 kids with metal detectors, gang violence, etc. 1 of his students was shot and killed within 2 months of him starting and apparently about 1/5 kids at some point went to jail or was involved in some sort of extreme violence. He did say from that school that he did have 2 decent students, one of which was accepted on a full scholarship to a small private school and the other went to state school, and while that was uplifting, didnt help the fact that the other ~25 kids didnt go anywhere

that is not the goal of TFA....tfa does not give a shit what college these kids go to.... CLOSING THE GAP..... meaning taking the 19 year old who reads at a 5th grade level and help him/her read at a high school level.. thats closing the gap...

where is that gap largest? inner city so you will have innter city kids. I am an inner city kid..

i been on a campus that 70% of the students lived in areas controled by MS 13.. MS 13 made them pay a tax to live in their own house.. if you didnt pay you sold drugs for them.. if you didnt do that... you were killed.. thats the reality of some 13-21 year olds.. maybe not your reality but for them it is.. I seen a kid put a pen into another kids back over $2... thats nothing to me but to someone that comes from a family making $75 bucks a day with 6 people in the household.. thats all that kid has to eat everyday... this is not uncommon..

i started a non profit in 2002 that focus on the 25 you mention above.. most people tend to write them off.. i focus on them.. maybe college is not in their cards.. but maybe learning a trade, joining the arm forces etc etc

i was in the two you mentioned.. i was able to hit a 92 mph fastball so went to play baseball in college.. once there found finance and trading.. if i could not hit a baseball i would be a drug dealer today.. i know for a fact i would of went that path as most of my friends did.. am i special? no.. but i had a chance those other 25 kids didnt.. my goal is to give them a chance.. thats all they need.. true most will fuck it up.. but maybe just maybe a few will take that chance and run with it..

I am on a high school campus about 3 days a week talking to kids.. mostly baseball players but you dont know whats it like to talk to a kid and give him a little bit of hope.. say "hey man.. you can do it.. give it a shot.. take the sat or lets proof read that essay.. yes you can do to college.. its okat to be the first in your family.. its okay to not end up a stat. "

the kids are rough no doubt.. most are mean son of a bitches.. but you know what.. they are still kids and desrve the chance of a better life... we here have all seen that education can be the ticket to that life..

didnt mean to be an asshole but TFA is about kids... not padding your resume to law school...

I know what you're saying and I understand. I called him up and talked to him about to see what he had to say, and here's the jist of it:

-TFA gave him the impression he'd have more of an impact on the kids (he corrected me, also, from his first year he sent 2 kids to community college and 1 to a private school for FB or something) -his goal was exactly what you said, to try and get kids past the 5th grade reading level. Besides the 3 kids he was successful with, he was only able to get a few more to move maybe a quarter of a year forward in their studies -didnt have great expectations, but he did expect to be able to do more than the above and maybe motivate some -apparently had an exceptionally bad class of kids, he guessed more than half of them are now probably dead or in jail (his words) -didnt go to HLS/whatever (though he made it a point to say he was accepted to a top 5 program/suck on that - jokingly)

On top of that he said you were pretty much right and I got the wrong impression from what he was saying. He wouldn't trade that experience for anything, but he wish he had had a better idea of what type of shit went down before he got there

so where is my silver banana? hahha

I think in same cases the teachers see more results then others.. some areas are more on board(d.c/mich/texas) then others(la/nyc)

You SB whore ;)

Agreed. Monty get a life man.

I'm not trying to be a dog in this fight but....Monty does know a thing or two about TFA. Not that you don't bigbear (no homo?) but he does know a fair amount about the program...alright now you two can get back to it

Clearly this guy is pwning the hell out of monty right now.

"Monty, being in attendance with people is hardly the same as actually meeting and talking with them. If that's how you define meeting people, I've actually met Jack Nicholson and Denzel Washington... they were at the same Lakers game I was at last year. "

So true. Well done sir.

who wants to play me in pogo chess.