I don’t care how high your SAT scores are: if you’re planning to attend any institution of higher education that isn’t blatantly obvious in its accreditation (Stanford, Yale, etc.), and you don’t take the so-easy-a-monkey-could-do-it step of checking your intended school’s official accreditation status, then you’re an idiot.

Go here or here and get it done. You’ll spend hours more time texting today than you will ascertaining that your institution will hand you a valid degree after you’ve given said school your blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. Avoid this woman’s mistake.

Accreditation Resources:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA)
U.S. Dept. of Edu. Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(graduation joy)

ConstructionManagementDegree.org has a list of 100 Awesome Business Blogs That Are Better Than an MBA. It’s like a goldmine of information for MBA do-it-yourselfers.

The list is broken down into the following categories:

Small Business and Entrepreneur Blogs and Resources
Marketing Blogs and Solutions
General Business Blogs
Human Resources and Ethics Blogs
MBA Survival Guides and Business Career Blogs
Economy Trends and News
Investing News and Financial Blogs
Resources for Business Women
Online Business Blogs and Tools
Management Resources and Information
Harvard Business Heavy Hitters

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

Any current or prospective MBA students out there looking for advice? Aswini Anburajan is currently working on her MBA at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge in the UK. In her post she explains what she’d been hoping for when she embarked on her current education adventure, and what she’s figured out along the way.

It’s not what she thought it would be; some bits are better, some aren’t, but all of it has helped her make solid realizations about the business world, the real world, and the interactions among humans that thread through everything.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image)

A year ago I was writing and reading wretchedly hopeless posts and articles about newly graduated MBAs who could not get jobs and were swarming back to their recently ditched high school digs to cite the Home is where they have to take you when you don’t have anywhere else to go! rule to their confused parents. Parents who had long since turned their kid’s bedroom into a taxidermist’s suite.

The job market still blows for MBAs (and almost everyone else). But it’s managed to move ever so slightly up the flagpole of income opportunity. I’d say it’s improved at least three eighths of an inch.

According to the Wall Street Journal[link], the meek and the less-than networked will be living on the streets or pursuing another career entirely. Any freshly MBA-ed twenty-something who wants to fulfill their business destiny has to be willing to network to the nth degree, drive the networking and coffee-buying machine, and work their pants off to even get one cup’s worth of sit-down face time with a breathing human who may (or may not) lead to an interview.

In the interest of acquiring the motivational energy required for pursuing a business career in this economy, I would advise first nailing down the minimum wage job most capable of making you loathe yourself and every sunrise you witness. Possibly the best launching pad available is hitting bottom and having to scrounge around in the slimy muck for a while. Which situation makes you run faster? The beautiful cornfields you pass on your evening jog? Or the pissed-off bull someone forgot to latch the gate on, that is now hell-bent on obliterating you on the lame-ass, country-road asphalt of life?

Basically what it comes down to is this: If you’re sniffing flowers and pondering sunsets and saying, “Aww…pretty!” you are not ready to traject (I made that word up). But if you’re hating your bull moment so intensely that you’re running fast enough to leave the words, “Son of a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii*ch!” far behind you, then you, my friend, are ready for the real world and will be kicking much business-world butt.

If you require more advice and fewer asterisks, please refer to the helpful articles below.

Further Reading:

State of the Job Market for MBAs
Where MBAs Are Finding Jobs
Post-Grad Assignment: Find Work

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(images: angry bull and cornfield)

Studying for the California Bar exam? Have an extra $1000 burning a hole in your freshly-law-degreed butt-pocket? Then by all means check out BarMax: California Edition. One of the only iPhone apps to cost that much money, its creator, Mike Ghaffary, a JD/MBA ‘06 Harvard grad, says it has everything one might require to study up for the bar.

Ghaffary has an MBA and as of December 2009, is a member of the California Bar; so he’s got that whole I’m business savvy and I studied for and conquered the bar exam thing going for him.

As with all things iPhone, it’s portable and weighs a lot less than the fifty pounds of books you’d be buying and dragging around town if you were to go the dead-tree route. So handy! Also, if you contact BarMax, they’ll send you a free trial version so you can evaluate the materials before forking over a decade’s worth of ramen money.

BarMax: California Edition, available now in the iPhone’s App Store for $999.99, is a study guide for the California Bar Exam. Harvard lawyers oversaw development of the app, which weighs in at 1 GB and includes outlines, lectures, a study calendar, and real questions and essays from previous exams. The only comparable app available now is from BarBri, but you must be enrolled in the company’s $3000 to $4000 classes to use most of the features.

TechCrunch reports that Mike Ghaffary, a former law student and current director of business development at TrialPay, envisioned BarMax as an alternative to BarBri’s pricey classes and digital offerings. Ghaffary partnered with successful app developers in Los Angeles, and enlisted some fellow Harvard Law alumni to guide development. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School has a new video microsite up for anyone who might be researching MBA programs. If you go here, you can watch what recent graduates of the program have to say about how well UNC prepared them for the business world.

Further Reading:

UCLA Anderson MBAs Go Global
The Cheapest MBA Program for Computer Science Students…
UC Davis Working Professional MBA Program
UA’s Two New Dual-Degree Engineering and MBA Programs
Washington State University Announces New Online MBA Program
Consider a Well-Rounded MBA
MBA Programs
Business Schools

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source*)

Having a home base to call your own is good. And as in love as I am with travel, one of the best feelings ever is the moment you get home and walk back in the door. It’s strange and new and comfortably enveloping and familiar all at once.

As marvelous as coming home to the place that’s yours in the world, the most profound bit a trip abroad can offer is a better understanding of a whole new group of humans. I don’t care how educated someone is or isn’t, or how much political-correctness training they’ve had; leaving home base and finding yourself among people you don’t consider familiar or anywhere near your own will open your eyes a smidge and will wedge some new information and thought processes into your noggin.

It doesn’t have to hit the “It blew my mind!” level of experience intensity; subtle works too. The more we humans grok the fact that the planet is full of other humans who are basically just like us, the better things will be. Global knowledge and understanding is good.

Even if their reasons aren’t planet-saving or brotherly love, I’m still glad UCLA’s Anderson School of Management will have an international requirement for their MBA students. Starting with the Class of 2012, students will have three requirement-fulfilling options:

1) Take an international elective.

2) Spend a term abroad at one of more than 50 premier global partner business schools.

3) Complete an international Applied Management Research (AMR) project.

It’s possible the business types are hoping to use their powers for global economic rule, but they’re still going to gain insight into other earth-dwellers—in non- business-y ways—whether they want to or not.

Further Reading:

UCLA Anderson: Compare MBA Programs
Business Week: UCLA Anderson School of Management
The Cheapest MBA Program for Computer Science Students…
UC Davis Working Professional MBA Program
UA’s Two New Dual-Degree MBA and Engineering Programs
Washington State Univ. Announces New Online MBA Program
Saving the Planet is a Solid Career Choice
Consider a Well-Rounded MBA
AllBusinessSchools.com

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

Big dreams and no money. Such is the situation colleges, universities, and the students who attend them are struggling with. The schools want to teach students to think outside the box, to be able to look ahead and improve the future of humanity. The students want to learn how to think wider and deeper and bigger and more. The President wants the schools to kick some researching butt and find ways to get us out of this mess (pick one).

Too bad there’s a global economic crisis, and the recession our country is experiencing is sucking the life and the funding out of everyone’s Big Dreams balloons. Now the schools and the students are walking around carrying sad little limp and deflated aspirations, jettisoning the deeper-thinking, big-picture courses and degrees for the more utilitarian/practical ones.

I won’t bore you with numbers, but there are an astonishing number of folks doing pre-professional undergrad work, and a ridiculous number of business degree holders in this country. I think we’re good on the ‘future of money’ front; someone learn something that’s helpful in a different way. Think outside the box, people. Don’t give up on the idea that knowing how to think in non-linear directions is conducive to the survival of mankind.

Read this piece in the NY Times:

The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education. Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery.

American universities have long struggled to meet almost irreconcilable demands: to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values. And in the past decade and a half, such conflicting and unbounded expectations have yielded a wave of criticism on issues ranging from the cost of college to universities’ intellectual quality to their supposed decline into unthinking political correctness. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

…It costs $99 and it’s called the App Store. This post over at the FairSoftware Blog starts out funny, but ends up making sense. If you’re working toward a degree in Computer Science, you’ll be writing (one hopes) cool and useful programs. Unless your future plans for world domination necessitate a separate MBA degree, consider the quick and dirty (and extremely practical) business lesson that selling your iPhone app at the App Store will provide.

You’ll be out the $99 fee to become a registered iPhone developer. That’s less than a textbook would run you, and you’ll have the chance to make that cash back, assuming you learn your MBA lessons well and write a kick-ass iPhone app that people will want to buy.

According to FairSoftware, here’s what you’ll learn by doing:

Marketing: How do users hear about your app? How can you create some buzz to attract more people? You will learn that having an amazing technical product is nothing if you can’t communicate its value.

Customer support: You will be forced to look at your product with the eyes of your end user. Is the app really intuitive? How come every user seems to be making the same usability mistake? You will learn to respect your end user and project yourself to code for what they need, not what you think is neat.

Economics: By now you should be having fun. Some money is coming in. You’d want more. How can you manage that? Maybe it’s time to bring on board another student to help with support or graphics. How much will that cost you? Is that a good return on investment? You will learn to make your own business decisions.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image source)

Aaaaahh…back from vacation. I apologize for the technical difficulties (it sucks when one’s fear that controlling less and relaxing more will surely lead to everything going to hell turns out to be a well-founded fear). But now I’m back and have alerted the technical people and we can move on.

Here’s an informative higher education tidbit I came across: Will Sitch gives anyone interested in a working professional MBA program a thorough break-down of UC Davis’s version. The classrooms are located off-site, thirty minutes east of San Francisco, and because the course schedule is designed for working professionals, it requires in-class time only every other weekend. Mr. Sitch is three quarters in, and seems pretty happy with what the program has to offer.

In the post, Mr. Sitch answers questions about the caliber of the MBA program, professor quality, student quality, how well the schedule works for a working professional like himself, and why he chose UC Davis’s program over Santa Clara’s or UC Berkeley’s programs.

Being a huge fan of higher education and the college campuses that go along with it, I could still see his point regarding why he’s fine with missing out on campus life while earning his third degree:

“…the reality of the part-time MBA program is totally different from a full-time program. Believe me: you wouldn’t benefit at all from having class on campus (assuming the campus was closer). A part-time MBA is so much work! You’re not going to have ANY free time for any extra-curricular activity.

When I did my M.A.Sc. full-time at Carleton University in Ottawa, I really liked being on campus. I lived on campus. I knew all the Profs, chilled with all the other grad and post-doc students, ate at the cafeterias and worked out at the campus gym. I occasionally left campus, but not very much. It worked for me then, but I couldn’t imagine trying to attend a real campus while working.

Listen, when you go to class you’re going to be speeding because a morning meeting ran late. You’re going to get there, do the non-essential reading while you scarf down lunch/dinner, and as soon as class is over you’re going home. Maybe, if you’re one of the cool kids, you’ll get an adult beverage with friends before you speed home. There’s no time to hang out. There’s no time to talk to profs. There’s no time to hit the gym or go to the library or walk in the park.

The Profs at UC Davis WP-MBA come to the campus. They teach. They have an office hour. They go home. They’re all available through email (and some by cellphone), but you’re not going to need them much. Maybe it’ll be different in upper-year courses, but there’s so much instruction provided in course notes, books, textpaks, and course websites that you’ll have everything you need already.”

Further Reading:

UC Davis Bay Area Working Professional MBA Program
UC Davis Sacramento Working Professional MBA Program
UC Berkeley Evening and Weekend MBA Program
Santa Clara Univ. Working Professional MBA Program
Business School Resources
Distance Learning MBA Programs
Will’s Thoughts On His First, Second, and Third Terms in the UC Davis Program

Posted by Alexa Harrington