MBA & Business
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The case interview is an interactive word problem based on a real consulting situation. This will typically take 20-30 minutes and will happen after a behavioral interview. In this blog post, we will discuss the purpose of the interview, types of case interviews, the structure of case interviews, and how to stand out.
The amount of information in the world, according to Statista, has increased nearly 15x over the last ten years and much of this information is personal information on you and me. It is remarkable, then, that employers and business schools still require a resume, a simple, yet complex, one-page summary of all your accomplishments and experiences.
You got into business school - congrats! After taking a moment to celebrate, you'll want to start thinking about recruiting for the industry that you are interested in fairly early on. If you’re interested in becoming a consultant, that’s great! Consulting allows you to explore a number of different industries while gaining important ...
Counting is hard. At some point or another, virtually every business school aspirant stares down a GMAT quant problem that requires more mileage than what finger-counting can provide.
To solve many of the quantitative questions on the GMAT, it is essential to understand a couple key equations. This article will clearly lay out 3 very important formulas.
A question I often like to ask my students is, “If you didn’t know how to use a chainsaw, would you play around with it?”Usually the student jokes with me and says of course, but then admits that no, they probably wouldn’t.At least not until they’ve received some training.The reason is obvious: using a tool that you don’t know how to handle is ...
Applying for business school as a non-traditional candidate can be a nerve-wracking experience, especially when the top schools are constantly advertising their placement in consulting, investment banking and tech companies. But there is a reason business schools are not 100% filled with students from those backgrounds, as business school is ...
Investment bankers in real-life are very far removed from population depictions in media such as The Wolf of Wall Street. Instead, the day-to-day life of an investment banker is pretty similar to many other finance jobs consisting of meetings, emails, building financial models in Excel and creating presentations—just with the dial turned up to 11. ...
Out of the types of questions asked on the GMAT Verbal section, Sentence Correction questions may strike native English speakers as the easiest. After all, you usually know whether a sentence sounds grammatically correct or not. However, it is for this exact reason that Sentence Correction questions can be among the trickiest to solve if you are ...
An increasing portion of MBA graduates are seeking out tech jobs over traditional consulting or investment banking career paths. Why? Tech jobs come with desirable perks: above average salary, stock options, flexible work schedules, strong professional development opportunities and free food! As the tech industry continues to grow, so do its ...
ESG assets are on a path to exceed $53 trillion globally by 2025, which would represent more than a third of the expected $141 trillion of global assets under management. Although the EU and US are starting to develop and adopt regulations, they are still years away until robust ESG standards and policies are enforced in the financial sector. ...
There are two fundamental rules if you want to do well on the GMAT:
In "Computer Mediated Transactions" by Hal Varian, Varian offers an insightful look at how and why innovation has accelerated so rapidly within the realm of the internet. The piece offers some interesting insight regarding the historical development of the internet starting in the 1990’s, but it also makes some prescient predictions about the ...
HBS has a great reputation as being one of the top business schools in the world, and people are often keen to apply just for its reputation alone. However, it can be helpful to really understand what you’re signing up for when you start at HBS. Academics are such a critical component of the learning and growth you undertake during your MBA, and ...
While this post originally started as a “Why I chose CBS” post, I realized halfway through writing the post that the reader (you!) would be learning a lot more about me than about Columbia Business School. So instead of diving deep into why I chose to attend CBS, I want to spend more time telling you what surprised me the most about CBS.
In early 2016, I stood at a crossroads with the incredible chance to attend one of the elite MBA Programs: MIT Sloan. My two years in this program were rewarding, enriching, and absolutely unforgettable. Here's why I chose to attend this fantastic program:
As one of the top business schools in the world, Yale School of Management takes a slightly different approach than most. At Evans Hall, you’ll find students from a wide array of backgrounds, all attracted by SOM’s mission of educating “Leaders for Business and Society”. This is because SOMers believe that, at its core, business is about people, ...
The application process to get into top MBA programs in the US is daunting, even more so for international students, as there is additional work required for the applicant and different acceptance conditions to navigate.
In business, finding the right price for your product is crucial. Price it too high, and few people will buy; price too low and the business leaves money on the table. But how do you determine the right price? We will explore this question with a simplified example, looking at Umbrella Corp (UCorp). Note that in this simplified case, UCorp is a ...
For anyone else like me who’s naturally a planner, you’ve probably found yourself particularly frustrated by all the wrenches thrown at you and your MBA decision processes during the pandemic. You may find yourself asking questions like:
One thing about GRE quant questions and standardized test math questions more broadly: if a question seems impossible or like it will take a ridiculously long amount of time to complete… It isn’t as difficult as it seems! Let’s dive right into a practice problem to see an example. Take the following numeric entry problem:
One of the basic tenets of my coaching philosophy is to teach a student to teach themselves. The vast majority of the learning process should take place solo. Learning the LSAT or the GMAT is more like learning a language than it is like learning a subject, and there is just no way—no matter how long you stick with it—that you’re going to learn ...
For many people, Critical Reasoning questions are among the toughest verbal questions on the GMAT. The Critical Reasoning arguments on the GMAT can get pretty convoluted! We are presented with a series of statements and assumptions, followed by some conclusion. Then, we are asked to either strengthen the argument, weaken the argument, or consider ...
We have all encountered factor trees at some point during grade school. When I first encountered them as a kid, the whole exercise seemed unnecessary and silly. I thought to myself, “Great. I can list all the prime factors of 48. But, to what end?” It was not until much later that I realized the utility of prime factorizations. On an exam like the ...
Focus on one aspect of the sentence to narrow down your options. Face it. GMAT Sentence Corrections can be a little overwhelming! And, if you are like most people, you might approach a sentence correction by carefully reading through all five responses and picking the answer that “sounds best.” You may even answer many questions correctly using ...
For many people studying for the GMAT, Work/Rate/Time problems prove to be a particularly sore spot on the Quantitative Reasoning section. In this lesson, we will learn an efficient and effective way to tackle these problem types algebraically.
Questions that ask you to determine if a number is prime are ubiquitous on the GMAT. You can expect to come across at least a few on exam day, so knowing how to quickly determine a number’s “primeness” will be necessary if you’re looking to break the 700 ceiling.
Trusting your ear can get you far, but knowing some key grammar rules gets you even farther! Many people describe their approach to Sentence Corrections on the GMAT in the following way: they read through all five answer choices and simply choose the answer that sounds the best. Honestly, this is not a bad approach. Many of the wrong answers will ...
What are business schools really looking for?
Maybe you have just begun studying for the GREs; maybe you’re about to write your personal statement for applications; maybe you have a set of formulas you need to memorize. Whatever it is you are setting out to begin, your relationship to that work and how it fits into your life isn't just a matter what it is you want to accomplish, but how you ...
Assessing fit within MBA schools
Excel has been a through line of my academic and professional career. It is a skill that, once mastered, helped me in many spheres of my life. I've had to help a lot of people with varying levels of Excel proficiency. In this post, we’ll talk about how to autofill formulas in Excel. If you’d like to learn about additional strategies in Excel, you ...
Should you take the GMAT or the GRE for MBA applications? First, let’s start with the key difference between the tests:
What is a cell reference? In Excel, it is when a cell derives its value based on the value of another cell. The below is a simple example of a cell reference. Note that the value in cell A3 is derived from the value in cell A1. How do you create a reference to another cell? In the cell that you want to create a cell reference, press the '=' key on ...
I’ve introduced many friends, colleagues, and students to the Goal Seek feature in Excel, and I usually get a similar reply: “Woah – how cool!” No matter the person, most everyone is surprised that they hadn’t heard of the tool before, and lament the fact that they hadn’t known about it sooner.
Focus on weaknesses, but capitalize on strengths The GMAT has no shortage of intimidating problem types. For many test takers, Data Sufficiency and Critical Reasoning alone are enough to induce heart palpitations. Understandably, many students focus on these very intricate, complicated question types - and rightfully so! It is no easy feat to ...
"Give it to me in Excel." There's a high probability that you've heard this phrase in school, at work, or from someone that needs data. Excel has made it tremendously easy to sift through data and make it more interpretable. The vast majority of users in the business world use Excel, so it pays to be well-versed in this powerful tool. During my ...
How do you feel about math? Let’s take a minute to think about math and how we feel about it. Good memories or bad? Or both? If I were to draw an analogy about math and anything else, it would be a foreign language. You can’t forget what you learned in arithmetic and expect to do well in algebra, just like you can’t forget how to conjugate ...
So far in our series of Casing 101 blogs, we have reviewed structuring the problem via an initial framework and navigating case math. In this edition, we will cover another problem-solving exercise that is common in case interviews: market sizing. At first, market sizing may seem daunting – how can we possibly estimate the number of televisions ...
When we last left off in this series of Casing 101 blogs, we had structured a detailed framework that broke the problem into its unit-level variables and presented it to the interviewer (see link here). But this is just the beginning. From here the interview will move into a series of problem-solving exercises including math problems, ...
After all your preparation, it’s all come down to this moment. For months you have networked, practiced your “fit” stories, and done countless mock case interviews with friends. You sit down at the table with your interviewer and exchange introductions. Before you know it she says “let’s start the case” and proceeds to read you the interview ...
This past weekend, I ventured back to Philadelphia. A lot was going on: the Wharton MBA reunion; the Wharton Class of 2017 graduation; and a much needed trip back to the Penn Museum. Walking through campus, seeing the familiar and iconic pit stops - Claes Oldenburg’s button, the Benjamin Franklin statue nearby, and our beloved Huntsman Hall (where ...
You’ve spent months preparing for the GMAT and writing countless essay drafts. The interviews were stressful - but only another step in a series of MBA application obstacles. At work, you check your email and phone constantly, hoping that an acceptance (and not a rejection) will arrive at any moment. It comes. You’ve been accepted to Wharton. A ...
When logic beats vocab While a college vocabulary is certainly larger than a high school vocabulary, particularly for students of the humanities and social studies, there are still a precious few of us who regularly use or even see words like “tyro” or “contumacious.” The majority of text completion (TC) and sentence equivalence (SE) questions do ...