The First 100 Days

It's become a bit of a cliche to have a 100 Day Plan whenever you take over an organisation or project. I don't necessarily recommend this but looking back on my first 100 days at B-School I've come up with some tips for utilising the first 100 days effectively.

1. Meet as many people as you can - spread your net wide, as wide as possible, before you know it you'll be sub-divided into cohorts/streams/groups/teams and you'll struggle to meet people outside of those groups. But for a few glorious weeks, it's your chance to meet anyone who happens to be at the bar when you are.

2. Student Club positions, you really need a few. As disturbing as it sounds your class mates will treat the Fall Term start as rather like the first few rounds of Monopoly, and will race around the board picking up as many properties as they can. They say in Monopoly that the outcome of the game is decided in the first 3 rounds. I don't think this is the case for B-Schools in that club VP positions clearly don't matter THAT much, but don't sit by smug and aloof and watch others scrabble around for these jobs - you'll regret it later.

3. Competitions - Enter them. Yeah, they're lame, yeah, they're time consuming and ultimately futile. But come January and internship recruitment time, those pesky recruiters are going to start asking "So what else have you done at Business School?", and apparently an A+ in Statistics doesn't cut it... There's an IPO Challenge, Case Challenge, Marketing Challenge, odd combinations of all of the above ad nauseam. Get involved even if you don't want to.

Myth #1 - It's hard to get into a good B-school

Schools go to great lengths to propagate the idea that they are really, really hard to get into. This is mainly because of the Groucho Marx principle that you wouldn't want to be part of any club that would want you as a member. No, instead, rather like the "Cartmanland" theme park adverts in South Park, we're told "There's so much to do at Business School, but you can't come!".

Schools do this by emphasising one particular ratio - applications per place, eg statements like "We had 5,000 applicants for 200 places last year". Implicitly we are supposed to assume that we each have a 1/25 or 4% chance of getting in. Receiving your offer then feels like receiving a valuable prize and you are more likely to accept.

But don't be fooled dear readers, there's one piece of information missing. The ratio of offers made to offers accepted by successful students, commonly referred to as the "Yield". So in our example if the school has to make 1,000 offers to fill its 200 spots, then we understand that our probability of gaining the option of attending the school is actually more like 1/5 or 20%. Still tough but an order of magnitude better.

The Yield is a powerful figure because it measures applicant behaviour for a serious, long-term, and financially costly decision. If you knew that most people receiving offers from your school turned them down, wouldn't that make you think again? Social proof is a powerful motivator.

So it's not surprising that Schools go to great lengths to keep their yields secret. As long as applicant pools are similar, comparing yields across schools would be the most objective way of ranking b-schools. Unfortunately I don't think this is going to happen...

Welcome & objectives

Welcome to the blog. I'm a student at a european business school and I want to communicate some my experiences to those thinking about, or already in the process of, applying for an MBA. There are a lot of myths and misinformation perpetuated on online forums like business week and pagalguy, and a lot of marketing spiel put out by the schools themselves, but not much in the way of genuine feedback. This is what I'm setting out to do.