Entries Tagged 'UF MBA' ↓

Now that I am more than halfway through the first module I can tell you with great certainty that business school is tough.  It’s also extremely rewarding and I am enjoying the challenge.  I’ve learned much these first few weeks and have greased up sections of my brain that hadn’t operated in years.  The math hasn’t been nearly as daunting as I expected it to be and I actually enjoy my classes, even accounting!  I’ve operated outside of my comfort zone on multiple occasions and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to push myself into uncharted territory.  My favorite class this mod is probably economics, then managing groups, stats and lastly accounting.  I am ready for a marketing class but alas I won’t have one until the third module which doesn’t begin until January.

Yesterday was my first day of my first year of business school. I only had one class on Monday so there wasn’t much to report, but having now attended three of my four classes I can see that this is shaping up to be a gnarly module. We already have our first team assignment in managerial economics and the my accounting professor kicked off class by telling us that the workbook we were assigned to complete over the summer was only enough to prep us for the first two days of class. Super. I also appear to be the only one in my cohort to have never taken a statistics class before. Also, super. I am confident that I will do well in both classes but I am definitely behind the quantitative eight ball in comparison to my classmates.

In addition to the class work heaped upon us there is a plethora of “optional” extracurricular activities to dive into at UF. Optional is quotationalized because you are not required to attend these activities however you would be a fool not to since they are primarily: 1) Free (my managerial econ teacher would reprimand me if he read this statement) and 2) A key cog in the MBA experience that can shine a light on what to do with your degree. UF hosts three speaker series, the Alfred A. Ring Distinguished Speaker Series, the Finance Professional Speaker Series and the Entrepreneurship Speaker Series. Amongst the three series there is usually one or two speakers to hear on campus every week.

There are also career fairs and GBCSO workshops to attend. If your search for an internship and/or job hasn’t begun before the first day of class then you are already running behind. Finally, somewhere between classes, speakers, career fairs and workshops there are MBAA activities to attend, intramural games to win and tailgating festivities to be enjoyed. This module is going to pass before my eyes in a flash.

MBA orientation kicked off yesterday.  There are only 38 37 of us in the Class of 2010 and everyone seems cool and down to earth.  The variety of life experience is much more diverse than I expected.  There’s a journalist in the class, an ex-fighter pilot and ex-Peace Core(r).  In fact, the class is so diverse that none of my classmates shares a birth city with another and perhaps more surprisingly there are only seven classmates that hold an undergrad degree from UF.  I expected at least a third of the class to have had one.  Equally more surprising is that one of my classmates is also from Los Angeles and was friends with a girl I know back in L.A.  I had never met this kid until yesterday.  It’s amazing how small the world can be.

After the breakfast meet and greet we went into in Stuzin Hall and were bombarded by speeches, information and opportunites.  There is a lot of opportunity to be extremely involved in the program and in extracurricular activities and I plan on diving head first into as much as I can handle.  They also gave us our class stats and they are quite impressive.  The average GPA of my class is a 3.4, the average GMAT is a shade under 690, the average age is 27 and the average years of work experience is four.  I am not sure how I cajoled my way into a class so impressive but I like it.

Day Two was supposed to be our Ropes obstacle course out at Lake Wauberg but Tropical Storm Fay cancelled that for us.  Ropes has been rescheduled for Saturday but of course Fay can’t make up her mind which way she wants to blow and it turns out we could have done the course today.  I am convinced that it will rain on Saturday and we will be the first MBA class at UF to not do the ropes course.  So instead of Ropes we had our Developing Yourself leadership day.  We received our DiSC evaluations, participated in a fun listening exercise, wrote the alphabet chicken scratch style with our non-dominant hands and practiced our elevator pitches.  It was interesting and interactive stuff. Hopefully once school starts our real classes will be as interactive as our orientation has been so far.

Every student admitted to the two-year program at UF is expected to bone up on his or her accounting skills prior to setting foot on campus. We’re given two options, either take an introductory accounting course at a local community college or buy the Essentials of Accounting workbook. UF strongly encourages us to take the community college class but that wasn’t a realistic option for me so I went with the workbook.

That might have been a mistake.

This book was preposterously easy to complete and its possible, err probable, that I didn’t learn anything. The questions in the book are almost entirely fill-in-the-blank questions and each blank is typically pre-filled with the first letter of the answer. Also, each question is preceded by a statement that includes the answer. Sounds easy, right? That’s because it is easy. My two-week old nephew could pass a pop quiz on the material covered in this book. Take a look at this question pulled from the chapter involving debits and credits.

In the language of accounting, the left side of an account is called the debit side, and the right side is called the credit side. Thus, instead of saying that increases in cash are recorded on the left side of the Cash account and decreases are recorded on the right side, accountants say that increases are recorded on the ________ side and decreases are recorded on the ________ side.

I blew through this Mad Libs version of accounting in a matter of days, missing only three questions along the way. I know I must have learned some accounting, it would be impossible not to have since the material is repeated ad nausem. However, I can’t shake the feeling that I only acquired a superficial knowledge of accounting and that come day two I’ll be lost.

I hope I didn’t screw up my MBA by not going to community college. Accounting can’t be this easy.

One of the reasons I am excited about business school is that it gives me a solid excuse to get a new computer. I’ve been abusing an iBook for the last three years and I’m not sure how much life is left in her, so the timing is great. However UF, and most other MBA programs, requires its students to own a laptop that runs either Windows Vista or Windows XP Professional. Well, that’s a problem for me because I made the switch to Apple three years ago and haven’t looked back.

I could learn to accept Windows again if I had to, but do I really want to? The switch back to Windows wouldn’t be easy. All of my multimedia is stored on a mac-formatted hard drive, so I wouldn’t be able to access my songs and photos from a PC. Also, Apple’s design and user interface is second to none, so a switch from OS X to Windows would be a regression in user experience. Finally, if I bought a Windows PC it would come pre-installed with Vista, which seems to be the most hated operating system in the history of mankind.

So what to do? I can’t keep my old iBook because it doesn’t meet UF’s minimum hardware requirements, nor does it run Windows. I don’t want to buy a Windows PC because Vista sucks and my entire digital life is formatted for a Mac. Thankfully Apple gives me a solution: The new generation of Apple computers are capable of running Windows! Just install Windows, in my case an old version of XP Professional, on your Apple hard drive and upon start-up chose to launch Windows instead of OS X. According to PC World it does a damn fine job. I spoke to the IT department at UF and they agreed this set-up would meet the business school’s requirements, but cautioned me against it because most of the IT staff is not trained to troubleshoot Apple computers.

“Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago.”
–ComputerWorld 06/28/08

The reason business schools require students to own a Windows based PC is because most companies run their business on Windows. Historically speaking this is true. However, according to ComputerWorld, “Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago.” This penetration percentage isn’t going to decrease in the future. Students graduating from college today grew up on iPods and many of them now own, or plan on owning, an Apple computer. This workforce is going to demand the right to use Apples at work and companies will either acquiesce or lose talent to more progressive competitors. (sources: BusinessWeek and CIO)

I would rather push the envelope now than receive the memo later, so I rolled a hard six and put in an order for a new Macbook Pro. Clearly Apple is making gains on Windows in the business world. Within the next five to ten years I think every workplace will have integrated Apple computers into their network and employees will have the option to work on either an Apple or a Windows PC. By that time the iPhone will probably have at least a 50% share of the smartphone enterprise market too, but that is another post for another day.

Now that I’m safely in business school I am happy that I will never have to take the GMAT again. Since this is an MBA Student blog I won’t talk much about the GMAT here, but I know you are probably wondering what my ‘GMAT Experience’ was like. I didn’t hate the experience as a whole, but I had to take the test twice to get into UF. That I hated.

For the most part, I liked studying useless and trivial topics that I hadn’t given a second thought to since high school. I felt the underutilized regions of my brain roar back to life and I was confident I would do well on the test. Unfortunately, I chose to study from The Princeton Review and Kaplan GMAT.

The Princeton Review and Kaplan GMAT books are average books that produce average results. I learned that the hard (and expensive) way. An average GMAT score will not get you into UF or any other respected business school. To do well on the GMAT you need to understand advanced material that Princeton and Kaplan don’t cover. The best books I found for studying advanced material were the ManhattanGMAT Strategy Guides.

I bought the whole damn set and cannot recommend them enough. They are especially useful if you have been out of school for a while and need to create a study program from ground zero.

I scored much higher on my second GMAT attempt after I spent a couple of months buried in the MGMAT books. I did better on Quant than Verbal, which was a surprise since I have a liberal arts background. I would have scored higher on Verbal if it weren’t for the sentence correction material. I worked several years in scripted television and the number one rule in the Writer’s Room is that you write ‘to the ear’ and eff being grammatically correct. Uh, that’s a great rule when you write and proof dialogue for television, but completely counterintuitive to sentence correction on the GMAT.

Despite sentence correction, I scored high enough the second time around to get into my first choice school. If you are still at the beginning stage of your MBA journey know that the GMAT can be a burden if you have to take it more than once. Skip the Princeton and Kaplan books for your prep and dive straight into the MGMAT books. You won’t regret it.

For all you applicants out there…

The GMAT is an important factor in whether a business school will admit you into its program.  However, while you should strive to achieve a high GMAT score, it is not the end of the world if you don’t score above a 700.  Nor is it the end of the world if your score falls below the average GMAT score of the number one school on your list.  As long as your score lies within the middle 80% range of accepted GMAT scores you should be able to receive an acceptance letter.

But I scored 20 points below the school’s average.

It doesn’t matter.  You can still get into your number one school, as long as your GMAT falls within a school’s middle 80% range, by writing killer personal essays.  These essays are your best opportunity to balance the statistics in your application (GMAT, GPA, Transcripts) by bringing your life experience and personality to light.  The best way to infuse your essays with personality is to write them in a conversational tone.  You don’t like to read white papers and neither do adcom officers.  Avoid using big, bloated words and industry jargon and focus on telling your story and telling it well.

What is your story?

Your story should showcase your unique selling point, the one quality that elevates your application above all the other numbskulls whom you are competing against.  For career changers, your unique selling point is your work experience if it cuts against the grain of those of other applicants, like if you were a court stenographer or a museum curator.  These off the wall career fields aren’t a hindrance to your application as long as you can convey a story that proves your experience adds value to the program.

What if I worked in Finance, like everyone else.

If your work experience comes from a typical business school feeder industry, such as finance or engineering, you might have to dig a little deeper to find your unique selling point.  Perhaps your unique selling point isn’t what you’ve accomplished in your field but rather the actions you took to achieve your success.  If you are given an option to write an essay that discusses either a work or personal accomplishment, chose the personal accomplishment.  It might be harder to write because personal accomplishments aren’t as easy to quantify as work accomplishments, but I guarantee you it’s a story no one else is telling.

By finding your unique selling point and conveying it in an engaging and conversational style, you should be able to ace the application phase and score an interview.  Good luck!

It’s official, I’m going back to school and hitting the books this fall. After giving it a lot of thought over the past couple of years I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and earn an MBA. It wasn’t an easy decision to make but it was the right one and it has pushed me into a new and exciting phase of my life.

I picked the University of Florida for a variety of reasons. It’s home to one of the top public programs in the Southeast and is the number one MBA program in Florida. It also has a strong presence in Latin America and a respected marketing department. The University of Florida has shot up the MBA Rankings the last couple of years and was recently granted a $30 million dollar gift by one of it’s first graduates. The school is also expected to begin construction on a state of the art business building by the end of the summer. UF is clearly one of the fastest rising programs in the country and it’s exciting to sit astride this rocket ride to the top.

I’ve decided to blog about my trials and tribulations while earning a UF MBA because I think it could be a great resource for prospective applicants to get an insider’s view of the program.  Plus it’s a great creative outlet.  I also think there needs to be another voice in blogland to balance out the preponderance of MBA bloggers from top-tier programs. I think it’s fantastic that they are blogging about their MBA experiences and I know their voices are important, but where are the bloggers from the second and third tier programs? Those voices are important too. I think the stories and experiences that come out of those programs are more relevant to most MBA students and applicants. Hopefully Chompblast will be able to supply one of those voices. Stick around and let’s find out.