GMAT Test Prep: A Primer

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By Francesca Di Meglio

(Corrects reference to Kaplan’s founding. Kaplan began offering GMAT test prep services more than 40 years ago. Clarifies details of Manhattan Review’s offerings in Asia and online.)

Scoring big on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) is usually among the first steps to getting into a top business school. There are almost as many ways to prepare for the GMAT as there are test-takers. Some take a couple of practice tests and ease their way into a 700-plus score with no trouble at all, while others struggle to reach their goal.

Many turn to professional test-prep providers. But how does one decide which, if any, is the right choice? The first step is educating oneself on the books, classes, and practice tests that are available, and how much of an investment they require in both time and money.

What follows is a roundup of some of the most popular GMAT test-prep programs available, with information on prices, offerings, unique features, and the types of students who succeed most with each option. Also listed: each provider’s Beat the GMAT rating (one to five stars), which are based on user reviews at the Beat the GMAT website.

For a more personal evaluation of each provider, visit the Bloomberg Businessweek Business Schools Forum. You’ll find firsthand accounts of how test-takers benefited (or didn’t) from some of the more popular test-prep offerings, as well as the results of an ongoing poll rating each one.

800Score
Cost: $39.95 for this self-study, online program
Beat the GMAT Rating: NA

Basics: Founded in 1999, 800Score provides 600 pages and videos online in an entirely self-study-based program. So far, more than 150,000 students have prepared for the GMAT and GRE with 800Score. The company strives to improve its product every year, says Sean Selinger, chief executive officer and founder of 800Score in New York. His goal, he says, is to create more highly adaptive and interactive software, which he hopes will be ready in fall 2011. Competitors such as Veritas Prep use 800Score’s computer adaptive tests for their courses, says Selinger. Soon the company plans to unveil iPhone and iPad apps for the GMAT that apply what Selinger calls "jaw-dropping" technology.

What makes the company unique, says Selinger, is the convenience factor. "You can take a course without someone looking over your shoulder or having to drive somewhere," he says. The test pacer on the computer adaptive practice tests allows students to get a handle on the timing of the exam and teaches a proper pacing strategy. There are also forum discussions on individual questions, which one can work through with fellow students.

Downside: There are no instructors or experts to guide one through the program or offer advice on GMAT test-taking.

Best Fit: Those who are self-motivated and disciplined will probably do well with the content and computer adaptive practice tests. International students, says Selinger, are drawn to the convenience of having everything online. And few competitors can beat the price. "Our product is a fraction of the price for competitive content," says Selinger. "The trick is you have to be a self-starter."

GMAT Pill
Cost: $347 for complete package
Beat the GMAT Rating: NA

Basics: GMAT Pill takes an entirely different approach to the GMAT. With this test-prep company, students never attend a live course (online or in person), open a book, or even take a course-issued practice exam. Instead, they watch recorded classes online via video. The focus, says Zeke Lee, founder and chief instructor for GMAT Pill in New York, is on thought processes and visualization similar to methods used by pro athletes who want to improve their performance. "It doesn’t matter how many concepts or formulas you have memorized," says Lee. "The GMAT is about how you think."

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Pittsburgh Schools Use the Summer to Prepare for the Future

Harvard, Wharton Battle Over Wine at Chateau Lafite Rothschild

By Elin McCoy

Baron Eric de Rothschild and 11 other judges, in crimson velvet robes and matching hats, sweep into the candlelit cellar at Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

Eight teams from the world’s top business schools and universities wait at round tables, ready for a showdown of their esoteric wine knowledge and tastebud skills.

Surrounding both at this 10th annual 20 Sur Vin wine competition in a stone-pillared wine temple are dimly lit barrels of very expensive red. The recently released futures price for one bottle of 2010 Lafite has climbed to $1,600.

I sit alongside a dozen observers, wrapping my shawl against cellar chill.

The competition held last month before trade fair Vinexpo, is organized by the Commanderie du Bontemps, an association of 200 Medoc, Graves, Sauternes and Barsac chateaux, some of whose owners are judges.

The aim is to ensure that future business leaders learn to love — and eventually spend money — on Bordeaux’s great wines. Today’s younger drinkers know less about this region than their counterparts a generation ago. Many other places now make great wine and, in the U.S., beginning wine lovers turn more to the New World.

Two teams each come from France (Sciences Po Paris, SKEMA Lille), Europe (Cambridge, Nyenrode Business university) and — for the first time — Asia (Chinese University of Hong Kong, NTU Singapore) and the U.S. (Harvard Business School, Wharton).

"Bonne chance," says the grand master of the Commanderie, Emmanuel Cruse, whose family owns Chateau d’Issan, before he reads out the questions in English and French.

All teams do well answering part one’s 10 multiple choice questions, like "What are flavonols?"

They struggle more with the second half’s 3-part blind tasting. Example: Identify vintage, appellation, and comment on the wine poured for your team.

Luckily, they can assume it will be a Left Bank Bordeaux.

"Use your imaginations," urges Baron Eric. Each team’s three tasters sniff, swirl, spit, confer; one puts his face in his hands, searching for inspiration.

Hong Kong’s Fergus Chau King Fung, 21, in black tie, describes their wine as "absolutely a sleeping beauty," winning a few judges’ smiles, though the team misidentifies the 2002 Chateau Lagrange, from St. Julien, as a 2005 St. Estephe.

No team gets its wine right, but most offer passionate commentary worth some of the maximum 10 points.

Silence reigns as results are tallied, trumpets sound (yes, really), then the Baron announces the winner: Harvard, with Hong Kong only one point behind; Wharton and Nyenrode tie for third.

"We never expected to win, we just had fun with it," says Harvard’s Nicole Pereira, 26, who received her MBA in May and is now associate brand manager for Dom Perignon in New York.

Harvard wins a double-magnum of 1999 Lafite ($3,500), seats at Vinexpo’s Chateau Haut-Brion press dinner and round-trip tickets to Bordeaux on Air France. Pas mal!

Later, at dinner, we slurp oysters and sip a crisp, tangy 2007 Chateau Larrivet Haut-Brion white at a long candlelit table positioned between rows of polished wooden fermentation vats.

In between bites, last year’s co-president of Harvard Business School’s Wine & Cuisine Society, Katy Andersen, 26, fills me in on its history. Founded in 1997, it’s now the largest club on campus, with 450 members and two tastings a week. High demand for membership requires a lottery, though those who grew up drinking first growths are shooed in.

Clearly, MBA students feel they must know about wine. Wharton’s club is 230-strong, Nyenrode’s 120.

"Our win will help us recruit more members," says Chau King Fung, chancellor of his fledgling 60-member Wine Society, the first at any Chinese school.

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Orlando Schools Make Plans for the 2006-2007 School Year

School of Life

Ryan Reynolds lights up the screen as the charismatic and hip Mr. D, a teacher whose lessons extend far beyond the classroom. A heartwarming tale of learning to appreciate every moment we're given, School of Life, is a funny and touching story about life in school, but more importantly, the human spirit.

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Whether to Shutter a Struggling Family Business

By Karen E. Klein

A good friend’s dad runs a store that has been losing money to the many big-box stores in the vicinity. The store sells a few specialty items but little else. Many of its vendors require payments every month for inventory that does not sell but is supplied anyway. The store is kept open for sentimental reasons, as it has been in the family for a couple of generations. My friend asked me for advice. Do you have any suggestions? —G.R.K., Los Angeles

A family business that is bleeding cash is a very expensive hobby. And unless this family has unlimited wealth, there’s almost no way to justify keeping the store operating for sentimental reasons.

There’s not much positive sentiment, at any rate, in losing money every month, fighting with vendors, and retaining the potential liability involved in owning a retail business, says Micah Solomon, a customer relations consultant and speaker and author of Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit. "These are not things to be done if one’s heart is not in the venture," he says.

Your friend should call a family meeting, perhaps structured as an intervention, and lay the store’s financial documents out on the table. If her father can be made to see the long-term drain this hobby is creating, he may take it more seriously, says John A. Davis, faculty chairman of the Families in Business Program at Harvard Business School.

"The business model either needs to change to become cash positive, or it needs to be sold or closed. Your friend needs to confront her father with the consequences of continuing to run the business at a loss; if he refuses to face reality and change how he is managing it, your friend needs to try to protect family assets from his use," Davis says.

Seek out a local family business consultant or SCORE.org counselor who can be brought in to explain, he suggests. Often, a neutral third party can help immensely in an emotionally charged situation like this one.

What to do with the business and the property in the future? The easy answer is a properly managed, going-out-of-business sale that would provide an opportunity to recover some of the company’s recent losses, says Robert Kramer, a longtime retail consultant and author of Revolutionary Retailing. If the family owns the building in which the store operates, they can sell it outright or perhaps lease it to another retailer to create future income.

An alternative plan might be to revamp and revitalize the store, provided your friend or another family member is interested in keeping it open on a profitable basis. "Figure out what would excite your friend’s passions," Solomon says. "Is there any set of products and service circumstances that would be both of interest to your friend and potentially commercially viable with the customers who can be expected in the store?"

The answer may be to specialize and offer a truly full range of items within that specialty. A winning formula for small retailers usually involves finding the right niche and location and offering the kind of welcoming service not often in evidence in big-box stores, Solomon notes.

Making the store over from the ground up will be a big job, given how far it has fallen, says Dave Ratner, president of Dave’s Soda & Pet City, a Massachusetts retail chain. "If you’re not carrying merchandise the public wants, and you’re not open the right hours, and you don’t have parking—you’re not going to do any business," he says.

Furthermore, your father’s suppliers should not be forcing inventory on him. "If it’s not selling, why would you accept it?" Ratner asks. "You need a clearer understanding of the business. If it has been there for generations, the location that was great in the 1950s and ’60s may not be so great any more."

Create a new business plan that revisits every aspect, from location to customer service to product line and retail focus. Have a professional look over the plan and give you an honest opinion about its viability.

If your friend decides to move forward, she can go back to her father’s vendors and attempt to get better terms and more involvement from them, Solomon says. "Nobody knows a product line better than the vendors themselves, yet most retailers treat vendors with a high level of contempt. If your friend can be the exception, it may be amazing the level of assistance and knowledge she can pick up from her formerly adversarial vendors."

If the business is beyond its prime and there’s no family interest in making it over, your friend’s family should close down the store, encourage her father to retire, and let everyone else move on without the financial headache the store is causing.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

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Robert Motherwell & the New York School: Storming the Citadel

This program, made shortly before Robert Motherwell's death in 1991, is an exploration of the Abstract Expressionist movement and a portrait of one of its last survivors. Having come to New York in the early 1940s, Motherwell found himself on the battleground of American art. He and a group of painters set out to change the face of American painting. The film charts this epic battle led by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, who endeavored to make American painting equal to painting elsewhere and, in the process, shifted the center of modern art from Paris to New York.

The film contains archive footage and photographs of the artists, of Greenwich Village where they lived, of the events which influenced their lives - World War II, the WPA, the Spanish Civil War. Also included are interviews with art critic Clement Greenberg, art historian William Rubin, sculptor and founder of The Eight Street Club, Philip Pavia, Surrealist Robert Matta, artist Larry Rivers, art historian and curator Henry Geldzahler, gallery owner Sidney Janis, and art historian Jack Flam.

Interwoven throughout the documentary is film of Motherwell painting in his Greenwich studio, creating a collage in Provincetown and preparing for a major retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Director: Catherine Tatge

Price: $19.99

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Advice for New College Graduates

By H. Buford Barr

More than 3 million college seniors from across the country recently graduated, and are entering a real world that is unstructured, rapidly changing, and wide open. Making a successful transition from college to the corporate world is not going to be easy, It will take precise planning, effort, execution, and even retraining. At least 16 years of schooling have taught these graduates not only theories and concepts, individual performance, and other skills needed to turn in stellar work, but some bad habits as well. They’re often found waiting to be told what to do, rather than instinctively taking the initiative to join or even lead the team effort on a specific project.

Well, grads, listen up. The days of gorging, purging, and forgetting are over. You need to learn new skills—such as establishing your personal brand, understanding office politics, and creating a professional network. As you embark on your new career, you will face situations with your co-workers or your supervisors that you may not know how to handle. Here are some problems that may surface in the first year on the job, and some advice on how to handle them.

You don’t like your job. You should have done your homework during the interview process by asking questions and taking the time to meet with future co-workers. Since you’ve already started the job, it’s time to take charge of your destiny. Be proactive by finding additional projects you can take on. That doesn’t mean that you can neglect your current duties. You will be very busy for a few months. Find a way to get on more projects and more teams so that you can show the bosses skills you may not be using in your current role. You might find yourself being asked to do similar projects in the future or to move to a different position that better suits you.

Your workload is brutal. If your boss gives you the bulk of the work, forcing you to stay late while others go home early, don’t complain. This is the best compliment you can receive because it shows that your manager likes the work you do. Never turn away work, always exceed expectations, and reach out for help before you need it. When it’s time to ask for help, you can say: "Joe would be a real asset on this project. May I add him to the team?" This demonstrates your managerial skills. Remember: The more work you take on, the more opportunities you have to prove yourself.

You’re paid less than the unpaid intern. Many companies put newly hired employees on probationary periods for anywhere from 30 days to six months or more. When your managers evaluate your performance, discuss how your work has helped your office reach its targets, increase revenue, or exceed customer demands. Without complaining, explain how your work produced results. Focus on accomplishments—what your work produced in return on investment for the company or against project objectives—rather than just your job responsibilities. Without bragging, make sure you and your contributions are visible to management.

You’re suddenly in demand. You’ve already started the job, and now you have received a further job offer. Better pay doesn’t always mean a better job. You have to look at the big picture and think about your long-term goals. Are there opportunities to grow within your current company? Do you have mentors who will help you reach the next level? What will you learn now that will help you become a better marketer, engineer, or writer in the future? Talk to your manager, be honest, and ask questions about how and when you can achieve your goals by staying in your current position. Be positive, show commitment, and never undersell yourself. If you do decide to leave the company, weighing the pros and cons and thinking about your future will help you better explain to your supervisor how you came to make the difficult decision.

Remember: It is always about the company’s success, not yours.

Some final words of advice. As you evolve in the business world, you must quickly achieve several things. For starters, you need to establish your personal brand. Who are you and how are you perceived by superiors, subordinates and peers? This brand will evolve as you do in your career. In addition to establishing a brand identity, you must develop your professional network. Reach out, meet, get to know key people, and nurture those relationships. Avoid burning bridges or tarnishing your reputation, and proactively build your reputation and network by performing and exceeding expectations over time. Finally, document everything. Keep a record of your work, the results, the projects you led, and all of your accolades. This will come in handy during your annual reviews, when it’s time to ask for a raise or a promotion, and when you’re ready to look for a new job or career.

If you treat every job you do as a career, you will succeed and receive the recognition and rewards you deserve. A job is today. A career is a lifetime.

Barr is a lecturer in marketing and communication at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.

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High School Musical 3: Senior Year (Deluxe Extended Edition + Digital Copy + DVD and BD Live) [Blu-ray]

It's time to celebrate as Disney's phenomenal High School Musical hits new heights in High School Musical 3: Senior Year! Fresh from the big screen, this motion picture extravaganza delivers non-stop entertainment from start to finish! It's almost graduation day for high school seniors Troy, Gabriella, Sharpay, Chad, Ryan and Taylor - and the thought of heading off in separate directions after leaving East High has these Wildcats thinking they need to do something they ll remember forever. Together with the rest of the Wildcats, they stage a spring musical reflecting their hopes and fears about the future and their unforgettable experiences growing up together. But with graduation approaching and college plans in question, what will become of the dreams, romances, and friendships of East High's senior Wilcats?
Find out what happens to all your favorite characters in the big screen musical sensation, High School Musical 3: Senior Year! It s a fabulous celebration the whole family will love!

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Ready, Set, B-School

By Francesca Di Meglio

Editor’s Note: To help you make the transition from the working world to graduate business school, Bloomberg Businessweek is launching a new series about how to prepare for an MBA program. The series—this is the first installment—will provide tips from experts and business school insiders, including administrators, students, and alumni, about how to do everything from making ends meet without a salary to setting career goals for achieving your dream job after graduation.

Graduate business school applicants put their heart and soul into getting into their dream MBA program. By the time they actually enroll in business school, they are trying to wrap things up at work, reconnect with friends and family, and take a deep breath before heading to campus. Usually this means the soon-to-be student does little to prepare for this major life change.

Going back to school after years in the workforce can be jarring. Just consider a return to sitting through hours of lecture, late-night study sessions, student clubs, and stress-inducing exams. Before preparing for the academic rigor and competitive job search that a top MBA program entails, it helps to consider the practical problems many new students will encounter, from developing a budget sans salary for two years, moving to campus, and settling the family into a new life. Here is an outline of the first steps aspiring MBAs must take when preparing for the practical side of their B-school journey.

Learning to live like a student on zero salary can be shocking, especially if one waits until the first day of classes. "Start cutting back your life before you quit your job," says Ann Johnston Scott, director of graduate programs at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech Full-Time MBA Profile). "You have to get out of that steak-and-potatoes lifestyle and get back to peanut butter and jelly."

Indeed, experts recommend adjusting spending habits up to a year before returning to school. Eat out less, cut back on entertainment, quit buying top-of-the-line items, and refrain from using credit cards, suggests Scott. Start socking away any savings for those two years in B-school without a salary.

Next, students have to determine how much money they have for business school and what their expenses will be. "Too many people say, ‘I’ll live off X amount,’ without considering their actual expenses," says John Ritter, a certified financial planner at Ritter Daniher Financial Advisory in Cincinnati. Instead, students should come up with a total and do their best to use cash rather than credit to cover it. "You might have a lot of debt when you graduate because you can’t control the price of school," says R.J. Weiss, a certified financial planner at GenYWealth.com, which is based near Chicago. "But you can control your personal debt."

Add 50 percent, says Ritter, to whatever you think your cash reserve should be to plan for the unexpected. According to business schools, MBA students often overlook aspects of their in-school budget. In the first year, says Scott, most students will have to pay income tax on the jobs they had before enrolling in school. Those who had high-paying gigs might owe Uncle Sam a large sum come spring semester. In the second year, they’ll have to consider the tax implications of internships, graduate assistantships, and any part-time work they do.

Besides taxes, students often forget about travel expenses (and not just those tickets to see Mom and Dad at Thanksgiving). "What sometimes surprises students is that they tend to travel for global experiences and student club treks," says Gary Fraser, dean of students at New York University’s Stern School of Business (Stern Full-Time MBA Profile). "It’s one thing they don’t always budget for, so we talk about it more at orientation."

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Nashville Schools Release 2005-2006 Data and Makes Plans for the 2006-2007 School Year

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Back to School Preparation for All Ages

Small Companies: The MBA Road Not Taken

By Valerie Claude-Gaudillat

For many students and their schools, an MBA stands for Master of Business Administration during the program and then for McKinsey, Bain, and Accenture once the job search begins. So much is made of return on investment when the subject of MBAs is raised that it seems to be an undisputed truth that these programs naturally lead to positions with large, public companies.

In such a context, an MBA program that channels alumni toward small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will probably be seen as unsuccessful or lacking ambition. The same view is likely to be taken of students who choose to take the SME path.

Smaller companies are seldom the sort of household name employers usually linked to MBAs and are likely to evolve in sectors whose managers have to get their hands dirty. However, there is a case to be made for SMEs being the best possible fit for an MBA graduate.

A classic, high-quality MBA program is a general management curriculum designed to equip participants with all the skills needed to run a business. While the structure rests on specific subjects such as finance, strategy and leadership, the overall logic is to meld these blocks of knowledge together. In the vast majority of cases, MBA students shy away from too much specialization, preferring instead to focus on a well-rounded education.

Despite the courting of high-profile, multinational recruiters by MBA programs, their emphasis on preparing graduates for high-level management jobs does not always resonate with bigger employers. While a large company can offer a vast range of posts, these are often limited to specific functions that are particularly well-suited to junior MBA graduates. In this way, alumni become directors of marketing, purchasing, or perhaps human resources. Few within a multinational will start their post-MBA career in a general management position.

The same is not true within SMEs, where size alone makes a high-level position all-encompassing. That is not to say that MBA alumni cannot function in classic department-specific roles, but that SMEs provide opportunities to put all these skills and more together in one management role.

In the western world in particular, management jobs are seldom created at the well-known companies for which MBAs would like to work. Today's schools and students need to recognize that it is the smaller companies that are looking to find the right people to help make them capable of competing in an ever-more-international business world. It is no longer the case that only employers with a massive international presence can offer truly international careers. SMEs are increasingly looking to expand beyond their borders and do not always have the management teams to make such change. This is where MBA programs could answer a need and at the same time help alumni find very satisfying careers at companies they might never have looked at in the past.

If there exists a level of misconception among MBA providers, graduates, and students concerning SMEs, there is also a general misunderstanding of MBAs by SMEs themselves. The smaller companies that seem ideally suited to the general-management MBAs coming out of business schools also play an often-subconscious role in keeping the notion alive that no holder of an MBA would want to work in anything less than a huge group. Where the recruitment of MBA alumni is concerned, there seems to be a large dose of self-censorship at work.

It appears that for many SMEs, an MBA graduate would risk being more trouble than he or she may be worth. The image is likely to be one of a handsomely paid manager with bags of self-confidence and extremely high standards. Such a mix would be seen as an explosive one by most smaller companies. They seem to feel that the cost and culture shock involved in recruiting someone with an MBA would create a host of problems.

Salary, too, is an aspect that could easily frighten off SMEs. In terms of cost, there is no denying that an MBA listed on a CV means higher wage expectations. This needs to be weighed against the far-reaching leadership and strategic benefits that such a manager can add to a more-compact company. The extra value that can be brought by an MBA graduate is potentially huge.

A manager with an MBA background can offer the sort of long-term vision more common among larger groups allied to the latest management knowledge—vision that most smaller firms lack the time or resources to implement. As the globalization of markets, manpower, and production puts SMEs increasingly in competition with bigger companies and those active in distant markets, this sort of 360-degree approach can make all the difference. In short, the competitive rules for SMEs are becoming much like those for larger firms. They need to play by the same rules. Here, MBA graduates can prove themselves.

For business schools and their students, larger recruiters will always be a key target. The prestige and certainty of a big salary hike make sense in the traditional terms of career, program marketing, and in some cases, rankings. It could, however, be the case that some old-world assumptions need to evolve. The moment may have come for both SMEs and MBAs to recognize that they could be made for each other.

Valerie Claude-Gaudillat is the MBA director at Audencia Nantes School of Management in Nantes, France .

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Live Chat: Tuck MBA Admissions

Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile) in Hanover, N.H., accepted 20 percent of the 2,528 people who applied to the full-time MBA program in 2010.A priority is keeping the community small and tight-knit so faculty and administrators can offer personalized attention to students, says Dawna Clarke (screen name: DawnaClarkeTuck), director of admissions at Tuck. Recently, she fielded questions about the program from the public and from Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Francesca Di Meglio (screen name: FrancescaBW). Here are edited excerpts of the conversation:

YHmac: What importance does your undergrad transcript have in the application?

DawnaClarkeTuck: The admissions process is a holistic one. We look at a wide range of criteria and undergraduate performance is one of them. We'll consider your overall performance—if there was an upward trend, the rigor of the classes, the extent to which you were involved—and any extenuating circumstances. You can also take post-baccalaureate courses to make up for a poor undergraduate GPA.

Springer: Could you explain how much weight is placed on entrance-exam scores?

DawnaClarkeTuck: My answer would be somewhat similar to the one regarding the undergrad GPA. It's truly a holistic process and factors such as the GMAT are one of many that are taken into consideration.

My advice: The GMAT is a test in which preparation pays off. Most applicants take the test two to three times, and we'll look at the highest score. We also accept the GRE.

Springer: How much prior business experience do you like to see?

DawnaClarkeTuck: The average of prior business experience tends to be more than four years. However, the range is typically two to 20 years. It's the quality of a person's experience (and how they present it in the interview, essays, and application) that matters more than the quantity of experience.

We have found that our recruiters are more likely to hire those MBA candidates with significant (meaning at least two years) experience before the MBA. Prior work experience really adds to the richness of the classroom experience for your peers as well.

fd10: What subjects would you recommend for post-baccalaureate courses to supplement a lower-than-average GPA (particularly if we've already taken calculus)?

DawnaClarkeTuck: I'd recommend courses that a) are relevant to the MBA curriculum and b) you haven't already taken. Some examples would be accounting, business statistics, finance, or economics. There are many evening classes at universities in major metropolitan areas, which make it more feasible when you're working full-time.

MAB: How important is the GMAT score for international applicants—let's say Indians, who I believe apply in huge numbers. Also, since eliminating people on scores alone is quite easy, is it the first criteria for elimination?

DawnaClarkeTuck: We never eliminate a candidate based on a low GMAT score. We're fortunate in that we're a small school and every applicant is reviewed thoroughly regardless of the GMAT score. India is quite impressive in terms of its educational system, so we tend to see very strong GMAT scores from students from India, but the range of admitted GMAT scores from India is in sync with the general range.

pwing: What international study opportunities does Tuck offer?

DawnaClarkeTuck: We love to see applicants who are interested in global opportunities.

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A Farewell to Summer: The Pre-MBA Internship

By Alison Damast

A few weeks after she got admitted to Columbia Business School, Cristina Benitez Sacasas started cold-calling dozens of companies in the hope of landing summer work at a consulting firm. Like many MBA students, Sacasas was a career switcher with no previous consulting experience. She worried that her four years as a sales associate in the private wealth management division of Morgan Stanley wouldn’t impress recruiters from top consulting firms visiting her school that fall.

Her determination paid off when a recruiter from Deloitte told her about a new summer internship program the company was starting called the Deloitte Consulting Immersion Program, geared toward students like her about to enter business school. She was accepted to the program, and by July she was working on a restructuring project for a manufacturing client. When she got to (Columbia Full-Time MBA Profile) last fall, she had a leg up on many of her fellow students, as well as a coveted offer from Deloitte to return the following summer as a first-year associate.

"It was a crash course in what you were expected to do as a consultant," says Sacasas, 26, who accepted Deloitte’s offer and is interning there again this summer. "It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for."

Perhaps the biggest quandary for MBA career switchers is how to get the attention of a recruiter in a field they’ve never worked in before. Increasingly, the solution for many is landing a pre-MBA internship, which runs four weeks or longer internship and gives students experience in a field they hope to get into after business school, plus an edge that impresses recruiters. With the still shaky economy making it more competitive for MBA career changers to land a job in a new sector, students have been more aggressive about pursuing these types of opportunities, says Nicole Hall, president of MBA Career Services Council (CSC) in Tampa and executive director for career services at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management (Graziadio Full-Time MBA Profile). The CSC does not track the number of students who do pre-MBA internships, but Hall says she and other career services officers have noticed more students pursuing them. Companies are making the experiences available to students because it helps the companies get a head start on the fall recruiting process, Hall says.

"It is becoming increasingly important for employers to have early visibility with students," Hall says. "If they can connect with them before they literally start their first class, that increases their access to the best talent."

One of the most common ways students land these opportunities is through minority leadership organizations, which set them up with paid internships at banks and consulting companies. Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the number of minority students enrolled in MBA programs, has been one of the early proponents of the pre-MBA internship, says MLT Chief Executive John Rice.

The organization started its pre-MBA internship program about seven years ago, as an extension of its larger MBA preparation program. Every summer, Rice helps about 20 to 25 prematriculating MBA career-switchers find paid summer internships at leading banks, consulting companies, and venture capital firms.

Almost all the MLT fellows end up with either job offers from the company where they did their pre-MBA internship or a position at another leading business in the same sector. Most don’t have any experience in the sector where they spend the summer, and they would otherwise have trouble competing against classmates with more experience during the competitive fall recruiting season, Rice says.

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For B-School's Entrepreneurship Program, a 10 Percent Solution

Matthew Turcotte, right, meets with Clarkson University business school professor Marc Compeau. As part of Clarkson's Young Entrepreneur Award program, Turcotte is giving the school a stake in his Web development business in exchange for free tuition. Clarkson University

By Alison Damast

Over the past few years, Clarkson University President Tony Collins and members of the business school faculty had been thinking of ways to strengthen the school's entrepreneurship program. Clarkson's undergraduate business program had a strong focus on entrepreneurship, but the school wanted to attract more top-teen entrepreneurial talent to campus. The problem was finding the students.

The Clarkson team tackled the problem like businessmen, coming up with an unusual concept: exchanging tuition—which can cost close to $150,000 for four years—for an ownership stake in the incoming student's business.

"We think we can take young entrepreneurs and make them better entrepreneurs, but we are a private university and we are not inexpensive," says Timothy Sugrue, the business school dean at Clarkson (Clarkson Undergraduate Business Profile), a private school in Potsdam, N.Y. "If tuition is what is standing between us doing that, then the idea of trading a portion of a student's company for tuition and a little help making it stronger seems like a win-win."

They ran with the idea, establishing a Young Entrepreneur Award program last fall. The program looks for a handful of students each year who have started their own companies and recruits them to the school. Students selected for the award receive enough financial aid to cover tuition and allow the university an equity stake in their business venture. Marc Compeau, director of Clarkson's Center for Entrepreneurship, says the school believes it's the first to develop this type of program.

"We've looked pretty hard, and we can't find any other university engaging in this type of an exchange," he says.

The first student the school selected for the program was Matthew Turcotte, 18, of Clayton, N.Y., who started his own Web development company, North Shore Solutions, when he was 16. He started by designing a Web site for his uncle's business and was soon building websites for other small businesses in his town, eventually expanding his client base to businesses all over New York, California, and Canada. His accomplishments attracted the attention of Collins, who saw Turcotte on the local news promoting a book he'd just written titled, From Main Street to Mainstream: The Essential Steps to Launching Your Small Town Business Online.

That fall Collins invited the high school senior to his home for dinner, where he and Compeau presented him with the concept behind the Young Entrepreneur Award program. In exchange for a portion of his company, the school would give him free tuition, free office space, and mentorship from Clarkson business faculty and successful alumni.

For Turcotte, the offer proved to be irresistible. Clarkson was one of his top choices, but he knew it would be a financial challenge to attend a private school without taking out massive student loans, he says. His parents were initially wary of the idea, but he says he convinced them it was the right move for his career.

"It was either I could take this opportunity or end up going to my local community college," Turcotte says. "For me, it was my ticket to go to the university I wanted to go to."

Once Turcotte agreed to enter the program as a full-time student in the fall of 2010, the next challenge was figuring out how to structure the agreement between him and the university. Both sides brought in lawyers as they hammered out the contract, eventually working out a deal that allowed the university to buy about 10 percent of his company, acquiring 1.25 percent each semester that Turcotte attended the school.

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The $32,000 Startup

By Vivek Wadhwa

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1999, David Park founded discussion forum service Coolboard.com. It took more than a dozen software developers, product managers, and quality assurance staff 18 months to build the company's core technology. To fund it, Park raised $10 million in venture capital, of which $4 million was spent before the company was launched. It went down in flames in 2003, a casualty of the dot-com bust.

In 2005, Park launched his next business, MBA admissions blog and forum Beat The GMAT in San Mateo, Calif. Rather than take venture capital, he limited startup costs, spending just $119,000. The site steadily gained traction, but Park was nervous that technologies like Facebook and Twitter would make it obsolete.

Earlier this year he shifted gears again, embarking on a new version of the site that he describes as a social network for business school applicants. It includes new features such as aggregated GMAT prep and MBA admissions news, a way for members to connect with one another, and social gaming elements to keep members motivated. It makes money advertising test prep services. Amazingly, the new site took only four months and cost just $32,000 in total.

I was skeptical when Park and his co-founder, Eric Bahn, approached me last year to ask for advice on business strategy for the site. They were convinced they could build a bunch of sophisticated technologies in months—on a shoestring budget. They were determined not to raise venture capital. I had doubts. My two software companies took years and cost millions. Yes, technology is much easier to build today than it was during my tech days. But I meet Silicon Valley startup founders every week who tell me about their ideas and their plans. No one says they can build their products for less than the cost of a BMW 328.

But Park and Bahn did. How? To start with, they crowdsourced the design. Instead of hiring a bunch of marketing people, as tech companies usually do, they asked their user community for volunteers to help conceive a new site. Then they selected a handful of the most eager users and trained them on the basics of Silicon Valley-style product management. Next, Park and Bahn needed to find a designer. They used 99designs.com, which hosts design competitions, for a two-week contest that attracted hundreds of designers, yielding a design they used as the theme for the new site. The contest, prize, and designer's time cost $9,200.

They broke up Web development into two tasks: front-end engineering (turning design artwork into code) and back-end engineering (making the code actually function). They built their technology on top of WordPress, phpBB, and Drupal—which are free, open-source platforms. Front-end engineering usually requires sophisticated coding done by contractors who earn as much as $100 an hour. Instead, the Beat The GMAT team turned to a service called PSD2HTML.com—which converts Photoshop design files into HTML and CSS code. This service costs $160 to $220 per Web page, totaling $4,500. For back-end engineering, they hired four developers from Hungary and Ukraine on the outsourcing website oDesk. They paid $15 to $20 per hour. The entire back-end engineering cost $18,000.

In software development, things don't usually go as planned. Park and Bahn had their share of missed deadlines, buggy code, and product problems. Outsourcing always makes things more difficult, because developers are in different time zones, speak different languages, and don't always understand what is expected of them. It took many sleepless nights and lots of caffeine to surmount these obstacles.

This brings up another point. If entrepreneurs can build sophisticated technologies so cheaply in the Web world, who needs venture capitalists any more? Software startups often spend the first few months of their existence polishing business plans and pitching investors. They can instead be working with smart people all over the world and focus their energy on perfecting their technologies, as Beat The GMAT did. When law school grads can build successful technology companies—Park says his site has been profitable since its inception, with annual revenue close to $1 million—the notion that website founders need computer programming backgrounds is outdated.

Vivek Wadhwa is a visiting scholar at University of California-Berkeley, senior research associate at Harvard Law School, and director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter (@wadhwa) and find his research at wadhwa.com.

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Special Education Needs Causing Financial Crisis in California Schools

America's Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs 2011

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Admissions Q&A: Yale

Change and momentum are in the air at the (Yale Full-Time MBA Profile), just a few days before the arrival of a new dean, Ted Snyder. Construction has begun on a business school building scheduled to open in 2013. Admissions to the school have gone entirely online and applicants who prefer not to take the GMAT can now submit GRE scores.

Some things at top-ranked Yale remain the same. The school remains committed to the public and nonprofit sectors, with financial aid earmarked for graduates planning to take jobs in them. Yale School of Management is as selective as ever, offering about 18 percent of its 2011 applicants a spot. And the institution continues to forge ties with other Yale graduate schools to benefit students and alumni, according to Admissions Director Bruce DelMonico.

One of the challenges DelMonico says he faces is explaining to potential recruits that an MBA isn’t just for business types. Students often see law as the default graduate degree, he says, adding that an MBA can be more versatile, with a variety of applications in different sectors and industries. DelMonico himself has a master’s degree in English from the University of Texas, Austin and a JD from the University of Virginia law school.

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Kiah Lau Haslett, DelMonico explains Yale’s admissions philosophy, how students should and shouldn’t try to stand out, and the benefits of being in a small business school and collegiate environment.

Describe Yale in one sentence.

I would describe it as a leading management school, the mission of which is to educate leaders of business and society.

What does Yale look for in an applicant?
One of the hallmarks of the Yale School of Management is that we want to bring in a class of individuals with diverse backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. The things we do look for are qualities that will support the mission of the school. … [We want] individuals who are broad-minded in their thinking, who don’t have a vocational mind-set, [who are] thinking about issues in much larger ways and thinking about connections in various areas.

Where do you recruit?

We recruit across a number of dimensions. We do recruit individuals who are already out in the workforce and are not only around the U.S., but also overseas. We recruit some students who are still in college through our Silver Scholars program, which is directed at individuals right out of college who are starting their MBA in the fall. We recruit [at] finance firms [and] consulting firms. We recruit at Teach for America because they tend to bring in and train students who might stay in education and the public sector, who have intellectual curiosity, and who tend to embody that mission of the school that we hope our students will fulfill.

What is the demographic breakdown of your students? How diverse is the school?

The demographic breakdown tends to be about two-thirds domestic students and one-third international, [concentrated] most heavily in Asia but with significant amounts in Europe and Latin America, and a smaller number in Africa. But we’re making efforts to increase those numbers.

We tend to be 30-to-45 percent female. Our average age tends to be in the 27- to 28-year-old range with four to five years of experience, but the head and the tail extend pretty far. As for industry and background, we tend to draw people from a pretty broad range of backgrounds: The largest are from finance and consulting but those are a plurality, not the majority of students. We have students from the public sector, engineers, and architects.

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Business School Entrepreneurs

For years, business schools have been working as a silent partner in hundreds, if not thousands, of new business ventures dreamt up by students. Without the assistance of professors, administrators, alumni, and fellow students, most of the concepts would never have made it past the idea phase. What follows are profiles of some of those businesses, the individuals behind them, and what the schools did to help.

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San Diego Schools Choice Program Means More Opportunities for Students but More Work for Parents

MBA Journal: Reflecting on B-School

By Rusmir Music

I started business school at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business (McDonough Full-Time MBA Profile) with panic attacks. Once I met my classmates (incredibly accomplished people who were arriving from all walks of life and all corners of the world) and realized the full magnitude of our course load (four new classes every seven weeks, plus four residencies), I thought that a person like me (background in education, no real business experience) could never make it.

Two years later: I graduated as the salutatorian of my class and have started working as a consultant with the World Bank. I helped win awards at my summer internship through a branding campaign for the company's eco-sensible initiatives and produced a business development decision matrix for a Vietnamese retail client, ranking market attractiveness of major regions around the globe. I have shared meals with corporate chief executives and received a VIP ticket to hear President Obama's energy policy address on campus. This is a long way of saying that my investment in business school was very much worth it.

But I credit my successes at school to three important principles:

1. Power naps: As a student, I've had to juggle multiple assignments from entirely different disciplines, while keeping track of student leadership responsibilities, networking, and job searching. Keeping these balls in the air requires a sane mind, which I maintained by napping.

2. Closed laptop in class: Knowing I would be lured by distractions of modern communication if I kept my laptop open, I opted to remove the temptation and take notes the old-fashioned way. I was able to stay more engaged with the class and take deeper notes.

3. Getting involved (inside and outside the classroom): Staying engaged and raising my hand to offer opinions meant not just better grades, but also permission to seek out professors after class, whether for career networking or general mentoring advice. Getting involved as a student leader similarly helped me get to know my classmates better and network with professionals, not as just another student but as leader of a club pertinent to that professional's industry.

Point No. 3 required sacrifices: It meant passing up some socializing or couch-potato time to finish the next assignment, organize volunteers for a conference, and send that class-wide announcement. I focused on priorities. What these sacrifices brought was the aforementioned access to faculty and professionals and a stronger network at school. My friend Nick told me that the first time he needs a consulting engagement at his job, I would be the first person he'd call. I realized there is no better way to explain how I would want to leave my legacy at Georgetown.

Business school has a way of making you feel special. You are constantly learning challenging material from multiple perspectives, surrounded by bright and motivated people, with high-level speakers walking through the door every day of the week. In my entry at the end of my summer internship, I spoke of this constant supply of stimuli, something I will sorely miss once the everyday job routine settles in. Still, I am excited to get my Sundays back. I recently had a glorious, four-hour Sunday brunch and was so excited that nowhere in the back of my mind was a guilty feeling that I should be doing something else. Leisure time is no longer a short respite before the next assignment.

Looking back, Georgetown was the perfect fit for me. I wanted an urban school, with an international focus and a globally known brand name. I received access to alumni and resources from the entire university. Georgetown alums have answered my calls from around the world and have jumped on the opportunity to help me.

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Admissions Q&A: Notre Dame

Brian Lohr, director of MBA admissions at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business (Mendoza Full-Time MBA Profile), says Mendoza students are part of their own little grass roots movement.

Lohr, who has been on the Notre Dame admissions staff for nearly 14 years, gives the example of a recent community service trip to a home for adults with special needs. The one-year MBAs shared ice cream with the residents, then washed the vans used to help residents get around. They also agreed to help the organization develop a business plan to obtain greater funding, which they'll start working on in late summer or early fall. "It goes beyond cleaning some vans," Lohr says.

Mendoza alumni also seem to know a thing or two about giving back. Although the percentage of the class of 2011 that was offered jobs has not been finalized, Lohr says it is higher than in the preceding two years. Many of the graduates, Lohr says, took advantage of Mendoza's 274 alumni clubs, located in 42 countries.

What does it take to be accepted into Notre Dame's MBA program? Businessweek.com reporter Victoria Taylor talked with Lohr about the Irish, ethics, and application essays to get a better picture of Mendoza and what it takes to be a Domer. What follows are edited excerpts of their conversation.

Does Notre Dame's "Go Irish" football culture affect the Mendoza culture?

I would say one of the things during our orientation is becoming Irish. I think it's very important for students looking at schools—and for those who ultimately attend—to know about the traditions of the place. One of the things we try to do is make sure that our freshly minted MBA candidates understand the culture and traditions of Notre Dame.

Mendoza's undergraduate program recently took the top spot in the ethics category in Bloomberg Businessweek's Best Undergraduate Business Schools by Specialty. How important is ethics for the graduate program?

We feel very strongly about that aspect of our school as a whole. We have over 100 professors who teach both graduate and undergrad courses. That emphasis on ethics is going to come through, no matter what level you are. It is a very strong aspect of the Mendoza community. It comes from the top. [Mendoza Dean] Carolyn Woo is an absolutely tremendous leader and she emphasized from summer 1997 to present day that we're not going to take any shortcuts and do anything that could be construed as unethical. Our MBAs do things the right way and we train them to do the right thing. We're not in the business of giving them the answer to every ethical question … we give them the framework and practice in how to handle those situations.

Does the school's Roman Catholic affiliation affect Mendoza?

We're certainly not going to be shy about the fact that we're the prime Catholic university in the country. The term Catholic actually means universal church of God … and we have a variety of faiths [within the program].

Do MBA applicants who went to Notre Dame as undergrads have an advantage?

I don't know that they're at an advantage or disadvantage. About 10 percent of the class was Notre Dame undergrads. Often times we will encourage Notre Dame undergrads to have a broader experience outside of the Notre Dame environment, but those Notre Dame undergrads that we do bring into the MBA program are typically strong leaders and typically embrace that role. There's only one thing better than a Domer and that's a double Domer.

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Acing the GMAT: Tips for Beating the Exam

Let’s face it: Even though admissions committees at top business schools want well-rounded candidates with solid applications, the GMAT score can make or break an applicant. Although an applicant with a low GMAT score can still get into a top program, it makes the rest of the application that much more important. Talk about pressure.

Preparing for the GMAT—in the hope of getting a score that falls into the typical range of your dream business school—is often among the first steps an applicant must make on his or her B-school journey. Some study independently with practice tests and books, some take online courses, and others attend in-person classes or private tutoring sessions. Whatever the strategy, the goal is the same: the best score possible. As a result, any insider information about the test is coveted.

What follows are tips from those who teach the test at some of the best-known GMAT test prep programs and have earned 730 or above on the GMAT.

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Hip Eyewear: Warby Parker’s New Spectacles

Co-founders Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa in their New York showroom Adam Krause for Bloomberg Businessweek

By Susan Berfield

On a warm afternoon in downtown Manhattan, Dave Gilboa is trying on glasses, and it isn’t going well. At one shop, none of the frames the saleswoman suggests look remotely good on him. “Every time I go into an optical shop, I think: When are these places going to go out of business? It’s a terrible shopping experience,” says Gilboa.

Gilboa and his shopping companion that day, Neil Blumenthal, aren’t disinterested observers: They are co-chief executives and co-founders of Warby Parker, a 17-month-old company that sells eyewear online. Customers test the startup’s retro-style glasses, which go for $95, including prescription lenses, through a mail-order, try-it-at-home program. The frames, and the business model, have attracted a devoted following among young, trendy professionals. “Sometimes if something’s cheap, it’s dumb,” says entrepreneur and designer Andy Spade. “Warby Parker has done it intelligently.” The startup’s success—Warby Parker has sold more than 50,000 pairs of glasses, says it’s profitable, and raised $1.5 million from investors in May—is inspiring competition from more established retailers.

Hip though its frames may be, Warby Parker was started at a bastion of business conservatism, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In the fall of 2008, Blumenthal and Gilboa, both then 28, were in the first year of its MBA program, kicking around ideas with classmates Andrew Hunt and Jeffrey Raider. They wondered why glasses—uncomplicated, easily broken, and mass-produced—often cost as much as an iPhone. Blumenthal, who before B-school worked at a nonprofit that gives glasses to people in developing countries, believed he knew why: “The optical industry is an oligopoly. A few companies are making outrageous margins and screwing you and me.”

A quick primer, then, on the $16 billion optical industry: Luxottica, based in Milan, is one of the heavyweights in question. It owns LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, and the optical shops in Target and Sears; it owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Oliver Peoples; it manufactures, under license, eyewear for more than 20 top brands, including Chanel, Burberry, Prada, and Stella McCartney. “They’ve created the illusion of choice,” says Gilboa. And inadvertently they’ve created an opening for an indie anti-brand brand such as Warby Parker. Luxottica declined to comment.

By early spring of 2009 the four founders had a look in mind. They call it modern vintage, a bold, often boxy style that was already popular in hipster neighborhoods. It took them months to christen the new business, however. They found the names Warby and Parker in some unpublished writings of Jack Kerouac that the New York Public Library discovered that summer. Meanwhile, they’d started designing and testing frames on fellow students. They eventually came up with 27 styles and now have 50. “It’s great to start a business in business school,” says Gilboa. “We had 820 classmates who were our target consumer category, who came from all over the world.”

Warby Parker uses the same materials and the same Chinese factories as Luxottica. It can sell its glasses for less because it doesn’t have to pay licensing fees, which can be as much as 15 percent of the $100 wholesale cost of a pair of glasses. Warby Parker doesn’t have to deal with retailers, either, whose markups can double or triple prices, it says. And at least for now, the founders are content with lower margins.

Since graduating in 2010, Gilboa and Blumenthal have been running the company from a Manhattan office so small that many staffers squeeze around a single conference table. The other two founders sit on Warby’s board of directors. Over the past several months the company’s staff has nearly tripled in size, to 40 employees, and they are about to move to a more comfortable setup in SoHo. Blumenthal, cheery and earnest, doesn’t need glasses but wears Warby’s Huxley frames on occasion. He’s in charge of design, communications, and customer service. Gilboa used to sport $500 frames from Prada; now he wears the Japhy, a design described on the site as being for the “contemporary intellectual.” He oversees operations.

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