I asked a few of my friends who'd been to B-school this question and they all advised me to take a vacation and relax. However, I spent most of 2012 doing just that (I've worked a total of 5 months within the past 16). Aside from language lessons overseas and a contract Six Sigma assignment my lifestyle's been pretty sedentary.
I'll be going in armed with rusty skills against a bunch of hard charging, overachieving maniacs.
Any suggestions on how to spend the summer preparing? Should I consider an Excel course to bring me to expert level? A financial modeling course? Pre-MBA internships? Quantitative classes?
And for anyone who's already been, is there anything you wish you'd done/known that could have given you an advantage prior to matriculating? What do you think?
double post*
HBS '15 here. Some schools have a a financial analytics class a few weeks before matriculation - I know HBS does. Depending on your work exp, you might not be required to take it - but if you feel rusty, you might want to.
A financial modeling class seems a bit extreme, especially if your program makes you take financial analysis classes as required curriculum.
Pre-MBA internship could be interesting but for the love of Pete, don't waste it being a IB monkey. I applied to some Fortune 500 pre-MBA programs of varying lengths (Nike, P&G, eg) but many won't let you know until June if you get admitted. Pretty poor for planning purposes. You could work at a startup - although the exposure you get to actual product or strategy might be minimal.
People come into b-school with a really wide range of experiences and talents, so I wouldn't worry too much. Probably the best prep you can do (based on experiences of many friends currently in school) is to read a lot - business books and beyond - to get back in the stream of reading 100s of pages a week. But hey, you can do that on a beach somewhere...
Thanks alot for your input and CONGRATS on HBS! Holy smokes! No, IB definitely isn't for me but I'm not averse to doing anything else in finance or financial services if opportunities present themselves as my own background is almost completely corp fin. I'm leaning more towards either General Management/Rotational Programs or Consulting (as a reach-so far I've looked at a few cases and they seemed interesting).
Will def. get back into the habit of leisure-reading dense material and maybe look at some Pre-MBA internships
P&G has a nice program. Check it out - although some of the tests they make you take online will make you question your sanity/intelligence. Basically all the F100 companies have some sort of MBA program, and I imagine you can inquire about a pre-MBA bootcamp. Most of those I've seen have been only a couple of weeks, and probably are glorified recruitment events - they are load managing their summer recruiting efforts, in other words. But still might be worth it, especially since most pay for expenses.
Seriously, take Proust, Dale Carnegie, and all your backlogged Economist issues to a damned beach somewhere. Every single person in b school with you is an overachiever and you will feel really left out when you hear about all your classmates talk about spending 8 weeks in Southeast Asia.
TheGrind, I know how you're feeling. My job wound down once I dropped my papers to get out of the military. Since my wife is in grad school I won't be taking any month-long trips round the world or going to Yacht Week, etc but I will try to at least get a week of vacation somewhere.
I'm trying to brush up on my skills as well since, as my username suggests, I have very little business related experience. I don't think I'll go as far as a financial modeling class but I'm doing lots of reading. Just finishing Margin of Safety, going to re-read Intelligent Investor and I have Security Analysis sitting on my bookshelf that I never got through. I'm also trying to find some online courses. I took statistics and basic accounting during undergrad but haven't used them since so I think a few short refreshers would at least shake off the cobwebs. It's amazing what you can find on youtube and sites like Khan Academy.
Also, there is a great IB textbook out there - "Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and M&A" by Rosenbaum and Pearl. Should be able to find pdfs online and there's an online repository of working and shell models to play with. Found it useful reading when learning not to be a complete rube for comps modeling - the text explaining how to model is helpful irrespective of actually practicing.
Yeah I've been perusing through Khan Academy, and the program I'll be attending (Tuck) offers free access to mbamath.com for admitted students. You might want to take a look at it for your online class needs. That and reading seem to be the safest bets. I might as well sit tight and collect a few more paychecks/fill the resume gap. But it'd be nice to get a leg up on networking, which is why the Pre-MBA internships look so appealing.
For the record MilitaryToFinance, I was military as well-but prior to starting college. Enlisted in the Army (I assume you're an officer, though?), did my 3 years, took the college money and hightailed it out of there.
MBAMath looks like an interesting resource. Since CBS doesn't pay for it though I don't think it's worth it. I may not be able to find the quizzes online but I can certainly find replacements for the lectures that I can accomplish for free.
What to do with summer before b-school? (Originally Posted: 12/20/2015)
Will be attending an MBA program next summer and want to hear about cool stuff that people have done with their summers before school. I have some flexibility in when I leave my job, so I can take anywhere from 1-4 months off and am looking for ideas. I am interested in both career-focused options like an internship at a cool startup, or totally off the wall travel/adventures that I will never again have the time for.
Dunno. You could sail across the Atlantic? (Is summer transatlantic sailing season? I can't remember : )
Otherwise, an internship in your target industry is always a good idea,
JF
I'll be recruiting for banking and have been considering doing an internship in M&A, as I have a friend who runs a local M&A consulting firm. However, I also may just take some time off to travel and study things completely unrelated to business! I think most are in the same boat.
i think if you're planning on going down a structured recruiting path (IB, Consulting, etc) then take the time off to travel, read, etc. If you want to work in PE/VC, it would be very beneficial to do a pre-MBA internship if you can swing it.
I have a buddy who after getting accepted, deferred for one year and then went through the OTS process to become Reserve Officer for Air Force.
Business School Running Commentary - Part 3 - Pre-work and Summer Plans (Originally Posted: 04/24/2015)
It looks like we have another user posting some of their own stories leading up to b-school, so be sure to check it out - user is tOSUbuckeyes.
Upon accepting my offer to attend business school in the Fall, one of the first things I was tasked to complete is a set of pre-work courses around some basic business topics. These include accounting, finance, economics, as well as learning (aka breezing through) basic Excel formula skills assessments.
This post is intended to cover the topics in the online coursework for the benefit of the forums here. While I would assume many here are currently or have already completed similar coursework in undergrad, this will at least give a glimpse into what a “basic foundation” of business looks like when starting a MBA program. As a note, this is run through a website called mbamath.com and is used by a number of universities including Cornell, Tuck, and Georgetown. They mention it can take someone anywhere from 20-50 hours to complete all of the modules.
Here is the outline of the topics covered:
MBA Math Quantitative Skills Course Topics (24 Lessons) The MBA Math course covers 24 modular topics, each with its own quizzes and learning materials.
Pre-Quiz: You start with a pre-quiz on a particular topic to establish your starting point. For some topics, your pre-quiz score may well be a big fat zero! There is no reason that you would know about regression, for example, until you have studied it.
Study: Guided by your pre-quiz score, you then work through the teaching material and exercises until you understand how to solve problems accurately.
Post-Quiz: You take a post-quiz when you are ready. If you are not satisfied with your post-quiz score, you can continue your studying and then take another post-quiz. As many times as you need to attain the proficiency you desire.
Basic Excel worksheet techniques are covered in one topic with beginner and intermediate narrated lectures that provide the Excel foundation that you will extend through the rest of the course. Additional topic-specific techniques are used in lessons covering the MBA topics below. Solutions illustrate basic functions implementing algebraic formulas and also the built-in functions (e.g., FV, NPV, VAR, STDEV, CORREL, RSQ, NORMDIST) that you will use most often in your MBA experience.
Familiarity with time value of money concepts, formulas, and spreadsheet solution techniques should be considered a prerequisite for your MBA experience. Because everything else in financial math is built on this foundation of shifting one cash payment at one time to its equivalent at another time, you should be clear about this before you start. Annuities and perpetuities are the simplest smooth patterns of cash flows over time. Bonds are a mixture of annuities and future values. Net present value allows you to convert an irregular set of cash flows back to the present to compare one course of action with another. Such problems appear throughout the MBA curriculum.
Making sense of accounting requires a clear understanding of the three main financial statements and how these statements represent standard business transactions. The math is simple. The challenge lies in the logic, definitions, and conventions. Using Intel's financial statements as an example, you learn the basics about the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows. After studying each financial statement separately, you then work on the connections among the three statements with a set of examples. You use the balance sheet equation and t-accounts to characterize standard business transactions in terms of offsetting debits and credits . Finally, you apply what you learned with t-accounts to make appropriate journal entries.
Marginal analysis addresses the question of how much to produce to maximize profit, given specified costs and revenues. Problem statements and solutions involve either tables or formulas. You learn to distinguish among marginal, total, and average costs and revenues. Supply and demand are the classic economics concept. You learn to create and interpret the classic linear "curves", compute the equilibrium point that maximizes profit and the corresponding consumer surplus. You examine market segmentation, and use demand curves as part of marginal analysis.
You start with basic summary statistics, which form the foundation. You then tackle statistics of linear combinations, which is a fancy way of saying stock portfolios. Tables and graphs summarize raw data. You need to know how to make them and work with them. Regression allows you to draw a best-fit line through a set of data points. You can do it visually or computationally. Both approaches are a snap using Excel. The standard normal "bell curve" is the king of continuous distributions. You learn to work with continuous distributions in terms of intervals rather than points. Excel makes solutions a breeze but you may, depending on your MBA program, need to learn the z-table approach and its corresponding pictographs and conversions. Sampling and inference extend the normal distribution to the Central Limit Theorem, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing.
Pretty riveting all around, right? I suppose there isn't much to discuss on this topic but I'm happy to answer any questions. This definitely falls into more of a FYI post.
Thanks for the shout out, good stuff!
Perhaps unsurprisingly this sounds like a condensed undergrad business degree. Certainly a good thing for those entering your program from other backgrounds.
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