Motown - October Updates

This month has been just crazy and ended in a ball of stress.  As I mentioned, I spent a few weeks on the E. Coast for work so I was able to visit some schools and also get some alone time to flush a few essays.  Through all of this…and I’m sure you could tell from my recent posts…I’m about to shake up my school list.  More to come on this after I do a little research.   

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend about my school selection and realized from ~March to the present, I am now assured what I want in a school…and back in March when I really started, I wasn’t as confident.  So now I know when I go to schools and speak to students I really want to focus on: non-traditional career paths, entrepreneurship, social enterprise and friendliness.  I realized that students being nice is totally different than being friendly and helpful.  

 Anyhow, the next month I will have my FIRST bschool interview (nervous) and I’m getting my wisdom teeth taken out....so that will knock me out at least for a few days for me.  Anyways, I’m just trying to hang in there. 

 ALSO…I wanted to end this post with a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE CONGRATS to my friend that got the Harvard interview invite!!! GOOD LUCK AND CONGRATS!!!!!! I knew your hard work would pay off!

Source

-Motown 

Read more...

Attempts at Writing Essays

Source

So far I have written ~two and a half essay decks. 

There are only a handful of essays I’m really happy about and the others are just okay.   I know that you can be your harshest critique but geez…I have a ways to go.  

I sat in front of my laptop with a blank stare the other day and gave up (just for the night)….b/c I really feel like I need to go back to the drawing board sometimes and think about two main things.  What is the theme of my essay deck and what does the school care about? 

To me that is the hardest part.

Last week I reviewed an essay deck with a friend and basically I realized that I needed to delete an entire essay and rewrite another one.  They just weren’t the right message.  So I started a Word-doc called “extra-writing”…where I throw in stories and paragraphs that get deleted.  I’m hoping I can eventually dig these up and use them later, but right now they are in a temporary garbage.  So far my “extra-writing ”doc  is 6 pages lol….just to let you know how much I’ve thrown out.

Anyways, so right now I’m just stepping back, reviewing the Excel document where I typed up my entire life, and asking…What stories does this school care about?

Good luck writing your essays!

Read more...

Will I get in?

Since I’m only applying to two Consortium schools, I’m debating adding one more school.   I’ve had a school on my mind for a while butttt I realized that applying to more than 6 schools may not be wise. 

As I shared my school list with a few of my close friends, some of them ask me, “Which one is your safety?”  Well, I do have 3 safety schools in which my GMAT fits in their 80% range and I’m within their GPA range as well, but these schools still have acceptance rates hovering around 25%.  So my questions to myself are: Will I get in? Am I overconfident?

While I do have faith that everything happens for a reason, I (guess) I’m okay not getting into any school.... as long as I put forth 100% effort into my applications.  Yet at the same time, am I short changing myself by selecting schools that are all pretty selective?

Anyhow, so the school I have in mind,  I researched extensively in the spring.  I really really really liked the students, alums and AOs that I met but was not sure that the school could really fulfill my ST and LT goals.  So…I took it off my list but always felt bad about taking it off…ARGH!!! What to do?! 

-Motown

Read more...

It finally hit me.....

Things are getting so real now.  Back when I was studying and researching business schools it seemed like just a goal that was so far away.  It finally hit me this week that yes I'm applying to business school. Just a little recap of this past week.  At the end of last week I received and email stating that I was admitted to Johnson Means Business (Cornell's diversity weekend).  I was actually writing essays in the library with one of my friends (future_JD) . We were talking about different school I planned on visiting and I realized that I didn't know when I would hear back from Cornell.  I called the ODI phone number they had listed on the website  and  the lady who answer the phone said "actually we will be sending out notifications today".  I tried to get back to writing essays but I couldn't stay focus  because I found myself checking my email every 5 mins. During my compulsive email checking, Future_JD thought it was funny to send me an email saying "boo"  ... not funny at all, I had to give her the side eye.  Finally at 5:11 PM I saw the email  that I had been accepted (YAAY!!)

Then this week I asked a key recommender for a recommendation. I was really nervous about asking this one because I had no idea how it would go. Needless to say everything went smoothly.  All smiles here! I did a lot of worrying over this recommender for nothing.

Its pretty much mid October I can't believe where the time has gone. I have about 2.5 months before R2 deadlines. So now its time to finish essays, interview prep and book travel for my last few school visits. Wish me luck!  

Ms.HR

Read more...

MLT

So there is ANOTHER application process going on besides business school.....its for MLT MBA Prep Program!!!!

I've been pretty mute about it so I really wanted to make a special post about it.  For the record, I would NOT be where I am today or have the mindset that I do without MLT.

For those of you that don't know what MLT is it is: Management Leadership for Tomorrow has a program called MBA Prep which helps underrepresented minorities (like myself) with the business school application process.  You can learn more about the specifics about the program here.

Through MLT I have been able to really think through this process.  I've been pushed to make sure that I understand my ST and LT goals and do research behind them.  My coach never just let me say "yea I wanna be a consultant and own a non-profit".  I was told to research.  That meant speaking with MBA students who had similar goals to mine and alums as well.  Although it was alot of work, my coach helped me through and now I feel wayyyy more confident writing alllll of these essays, meeting AO's and eventually interviewing.

With that said....you should def apply for MLT if you are in the beginning stages of your business school application process.  I applied last year, Fall 2010 and spoke to people who were in in MLT and who "graduated" from MLT to see what I was getting myself into.  If you have any questions about MLT please contact me here and I would LOVE to talk to you more about it.

FYI the R1 deadline already passed but the R2 deadline is  October 30, 2011 and the R3 deadline is November 20, 2011 (As space is available).

I hope this helps!

-Motown

Read more...

It's Great to be a Michigan Wolverine!

I <3 Michigan. Visiting Ross reminded me why I chose University of Michigan for undergrad. First things first, ann arbor is such a cute town. Football was amazing. During this busy trip to Michigan I made sure to attend a football game. All the Michigan Alumni you must go back and visit the Big House, it is so much better!  The Big House was great before but its amazing now. The student section had a new chant and the DJ was 100x better.

Okay now to the good stuff , Ross! I too signed up on their website. I paid to park in a parking structure that was like a 3 min walk from the bschool. Parking was really cheap from like 8am-1pm it was only $5.   I enjoyed the two 2nd years students they had at Q&A session. Both were really straight forward with their answers. One thing I noticed and liked about the Ross visit is that they had a lot of classes to choose from. Since the classes where throughout the day you could potential go to more than one class.

I have to co-sign with Motown, the building was absolutely AMAZING! The 6th floor view is breathtaking.

The highlight of my visit to Ross was definitely the class I attended.  I went to a class called "Persuasive Management Communication". During the class they had to give a 5 min presentation on any persuasive topic.  The students  gave presentations on various different topics. A few of my favorite were  "Why to go to Thailand for New years" , "say no to kindle dxg" and my favortite one was "why you need to own a koozie".  Not only do the topics show so much personality but during the Q&A section after each presentation the students asked witty and funny questions.  If this class represents the entire bschool class I can definitely see myself fitting in.

I was not able to connect with anyone who wanted to do  HR post MBA but everyone I asked gave me their contact information and said they would put me in contact with someone who was doing. I'm in Michigan a few more days so hopefully I'll connect with someone before I leave


-Ms. Hr

Read more...

Rosswesome

Overall my visit to Ross was pretty pleasant. I just did a VIP visit though the website, so it was not affiliated with a diversity/special event.  This was the first time I did a visit like this. It was nice seeing the school as “authentic” as possible.

Anyhow heres my play by play.

So first, parking was not easy to find…and I am pretty familiar with ann arbor. I looked for some parking in student neighborhoods and eventually just caved in and parked in a structure. Just a heads up for anyone planning a visit, leave early b/c I probably walked about 3-5 blocks to get to the school. It was really nice and reminded me of my life on campus. However keep in mind, I knew where I was going…so if you aren’t familiar with the twists and turns of the campus…leave early!

I was in disbelief how beautiful the school was.  From what I understand, Ross got its new building in 2009, which was after I graduated. I totally felt like I was not at Michigan….which was great for me b/c I could feel that it would be something ‘new’ for me if I ended up going to Ross.

Anyways so when I got there I signed up and went spent about an hour with two students in a Q&A. They were all friendly and pretty candid. I could not believe how honestly they answered my questions about financial aid. Afterwards we went on a campus tour. Once again, I was soooo impressed by the facilities. It’s super state-of-the-art! We went to the 6th floor of Ross and you could see the skyline of Ross. I realized, after spending 5 years at Michigan, I never had seen the campus from a rooftop. I literally was drooling at how pretty the campus was and the fact you could see the Big House in the background.

Anyhow, after the tour I went to a Corporate Strategy course which is apart of the core. So the students had only been in class 3 weeks but their insights seemed (at least to me) pretty solid. I didn’t see the case, but it was pretty easy to catch on and interesting. I also took a few random notes and looked around. I saw that most people weren’t on laptops or phones (so really engaged in the class discussion) and also most students raised their hands to speak....and usually spoke for about 45 secs to 1 min. So I thought they were engaged but also like not trying to hog the spotlight..which is cool. Also, the demographics of the class were pretty mixed. There were like ~80 students and it looked like a mix from all over the world with a (kind of) even number of men and women.

Anyways, so afterwards was lunch. I was honestly starving and the lunch was SO good. They host a restaurant in one area of their Wintergarden (which is their cafeteria area) and this week was a Middle Eastern restaurant. By the way, middle eastern is like my favorite kind of food...I was sososososososososososo happy about the food!

After lunch I broke away from the group to go to the admissions office to get a few questions answered. I was really disappointed that no one was there to answer my questions. I tried financial aid too, and no one was available. So the catch about doing random visits on campus is that it’s kind of hit or miss to be able to connect with admissions reps. Just keep that in mind in the future if you are planning any random visits, not associated with a special event.

Lastly, my takeways from my visit are:

• I’m now 100% comfortable imagining myself at Ross. I don’t think it would be a ‘repeat’ of my undergrad, which was one of my top concerns. I really felt like I was at a different school
• A student told me that, he took advantage of going to school with a college atmosphere since this is probably the last time he would be in a ‘small’ town
• There’s no class on Fridays
• There’s no GPA

Well hope this helped someone out there. Tomorrow check out Ms. HR's post about her visit to Ross

-Motown

Note: the title Rosswesome came from a student’s team name. I thought it was pretty clever and funny….just wanted you to know I was NOT the one that made that up!

Read more...

Wharton Student Interview

So during this quest to get my MBA I have spoken to probably at least 20-30 students. All who have given me pretty honest answers about their experiences at school X. So lately, I have been changing my strategy to speak to students that are not interested in social enterprise. I’ve decided to switch it up a bit and see how students outside of social enterprise evaluate programs (in case I ever want to switch when I get to school). So last month I had the chance to speak with a Wharton student in Retail and Luxury goods(one of my back up back up plans…more to come on that later). Below are (some) the details:

This student had a great internship with an R&L company and spoke about the job treks that helped her get this opportunity. As far as academics, she said that the first year at Wharton is grueling with the core courses but at the same time the curriculum is changing to be more focused on leadership for incoming classes.

She also told me about her experience with Wharton Leadership Ventures, which are treks that are generally risky and test how you react in stressful situations. I thought that was sooooo cool. Also, she mentioned how Wharton is going to be changing their curriculum a bit to focus a bit more on leadership.

Wharton is great for the student that wants a very rigorous business school curriculum, but also has great leadership opportunities with plenty of available resources.

Anyone else thinking about Wharton?

-Motown

Read more...