Oxford Saïd MBA Students Suggests a Few 2018 Resolutions
The start of every year is a great time to reflect on what went well the previous year—and how you can improve in the next. Indeed, the time-honored tradition of setting resolutions for the new year can be especially valuable for MBA students and applicants. Whether you’ve just completed your first or third semester of an MBA program or are still working on perfecting your MBA applications, there are always a few resolutions that can help make the most of how ever much of your MBA experience is still ahead of you.
We’ve compiled a list of business school New Year’s resolutions from current MBA students at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. While some are specific to Saïd’s program, they all represent great business school advice you’d do well to read regardless of whether you haven’t yet started or are closing in on graduation.
Business School New Year’s Resolution One: Balance Your Time
Whether you’re busily working on your applications, are about to start your first semester in an MBA program, or whether your final semester stretches out in front of you, learning how to balance your time is key to success in any MBA program. Marla Woodward (MBA ’18) explains how important it is to take care of all aspects of your life.
“To balance your time, pick an activity for your mind, an activity for your body, and an activity for your spirit,” Woodward wrote in a blog. “For example, this term I’m leading a project for the Oxford Strategy Group for my mind, I’m participating in fencing for my body, and I’m maintaining weekly family dog walks for my spirit.”
Containing the amount of time spent on schoolwork is also important. During your MBA, you’ll be presented with countless readings and assignments. Each class will load your schedule with things to do, and the best way to achieve success is to plan out how you’ll budget your time to get everything done for class while not overwhelming your life.
“Map out all readings, exams, and group projects in your calendar, so you know what’s coming when,” Woodward recommends. “This will help you anticipate how to budget your time when you have multiple group projects all due on the same day, and it will also come in handy when, heaven forbid, you can only find time for a portion of the readings and you need to decide which are the most valuable.”
Business School New Year’s Resolution Two: Take Advantage of Your Network of Classmates
This resolution is especially important for applicants who are preparing to start an MBA in 2018. Instead of thinking of it as entering a world of strangers, Bremen Leak (MBA ’18) advocates taking the attitude of poet W.B . Yeats who said, “There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet.”
When Leak first started his studies at Oxford Saïd, it seemed like everything that could go wrong did. He was waitlisted. Then, once he was finally accepted, his housing fell through, and he was left without a place to live. But after starting school, he was offered a place to live by a classmate he had just met. And this was just the first of many times that he says a classmate helped him out.
“Since my first day inside the business school, I’ve watched my classmates—some 330 MBAs from 60 countries—band together to help one another succeed,” Leak wrote in a blog. “They’ve divvied up reading assignments and formed study groups and tutoring sessions. They’ve shared jokes, drinks, encouragement, and advice… Who were these people but strangers just a few months earlier?”
If it wasn’t for the fact that Leak had learned to treat his classmates like close friends, no matter how long [or short] their acquaintance, he could have missed out on many opportunities.
Business School New Year’s Resolution Three: Use Every Resource Available to You
From the moment you first start considering an MBA, there will be countless resources available to help you make the best decision. Here at Clear Admit, we offer dozens of articles each week containing the latest MBA news, advice from admissions teams, and interviews with current students. Of course, there are also the rankings from outfits like U.S. News & World Report, the Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others to help you find the best program for you.
Perhaps most important of all are the resources provided by individual MBA programs themselves. There are the websites, of course, and the information sessions and the school fairs. But many applicants tell us that the most invaluable resources provided by the schools are the students themselves and everything you encounter on campus is a visit is in any way possible.
That’s what Nikhil Dugal (MBA ’18) discovered when he first started considering an MBA. In fact, the availability of resources was one of the main reasons he chose Oxford Saïd—in particular, the resource of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.
“Coming from a background in economics and math, I wanted to study business in a place that was focused on supporting social entrepreneurs and actively involved in the changing narrative on the nature of business. Due to this reason, I had a very specific list of MBA programs,” Dugal explained on a Skoll Centre blog. “Saïd Business School was at the top of this list, especially due to the countless resources they offer to social entrepreneurs and the presence of the Skoll Centre.”
Those resources helped Dugal receive the Skoll Scholarship, which provided him with the opportunity to pursue his goals without worrying about his finances. Since starting his MBA, there have been many other opportunities.
“Over the next year I plan to use all the resources we are offered here, including programs such as Map the System, Skoll Academy, and Skoll Venture Awards to refine the mission of my organization and explore levers for change to help us scale our impact,” Dugal wrote. “I’ve had the opportunity to attend a few sessions at the Skoll Academy already and am extremely impressed with the program the Centre has been able to put together as an alternative to the Consulting Development Program and the Finance Lab offered to the rest of the MBA class.”
With just a week into the New Year, there’s plenty of time to make good on your business school resolutions. What are you waiting for?
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.
Bloomberg Ranks Ted Rogers MBA Among World’s Best
Just a few weeks after Bloomberg Businessweek debuted its list of the top U.S. MBA programs for 2017, the publication revealed its ranking for the best international schools, with the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University being lauded as not only one of the best schools in Canada, but one of the best in the world.
The Bloomberg Businessweek ranking looks at factors such as the success rates of alumni in starting careers, starting wages, and surveys from recruiters, current students, and graduates of the program.
This marked the first time the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking has featured the Ted Rogers MBA, but the program’s success has not gone unnoticed, especially in Canada. The school is also regarded as one of the 100 best MBA programs in the world by The Economist and by the Canadian Business’ Top 10 Canadian MBA programs four years in a row. The program also placed in the top ten this year among the Bloomberg‘s ranking of top salaries and job placement for recent graduates.
Since its creation in 2006, the Ted Rogers MBA has been highly regarded for its innovative approach to business education and location at the center of Toronto’s business district. “From the beginning the Ted Rogers MBA benefitted from strong leadership, a commitment to excellence, and a focus on students’ careers,” Ted Rogers MBA Director Kim Bates said in a press release following the release of the annual ranking.
“As a startup program, we were able to configure our programs to reflect the new century and differentiate from our established competitors,” she adds. “Our career results are excellent, program delivery and commitment of faculty and staff are exceptional, and we have had support from our academic leadership to admit only high-quality students.”
French business school INSEAD led the way in this year’s ranking, taking over for the London Business School (LBS), which swapped the number one and two spots from last year. Ted Rogers, 24th overall, was one of five Canadian business schools to land on the list, with the Ivey Business School at Western University Canada earning the highest ranking among the group—11th overall.
Check out the entire 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek international MBA ranking here.
Harvard Business School Tops Bloomberg Businessweek Ranking
For the third straight year, Harvard Business School reigned supreme in the annual Bloomberg Businessweek “Best Business Schools” ranking, topping the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT Sloan School of Management. In joining HBS on the medals podium this year, those schools both saw significant gains over last year, climbing from sixth and seventh respectively.
Rounding out the top five this year is the University of Chicago Booth School of Business —holding steady year over year at fourth—and Stanford Graduate School of Business, which fell from second place in 2016 to fifth this year.
The methodology Bloomberg Businessweek uses to arrive at its annual MBA ranking involves weighting each of five principle factors. Employer surveys account for 35 percent of a school’s score. Alumni surveys account for another 30 percent. And a combination of current student surveys, salary rankings, and job placement together account for the remaining 35 percent of the final score.
High Risers
Ten out of the top 20 ranked schools in the 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking advanced at least one spot over last year. Wharton and Sloan each managed to leap four spots, boosted by high praise from employers and hefty salary benefits for recent graduates. The University of Washington Foster School of Business also managed to jump from 19th to 15th overall this year, thanks largely to its top ranking as the nation’s best business school for job placement.
The Cornell S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management and the UCLA Anderson School of Management both saw a rankings jump of three spots, with Johnson moving up to 13th and Anderson coming in at 19th.
The year’s biggest winner, however, may be the Penn State Smeal College of Business, which jumped a whopping 12 spots from last year’s 37th to come in at 25th in 2017. It wins the award for the year’s biggest overall rankings increase. The USC Marshall School of Business also saw a momentous climb this year, sidling up eight spots from 38th last year to 30th this year.
In the latter half of the rankings came another one of this year’s biggest risers, with the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia jumping 11 spots from last year, up from 65th overall to 54th. Elsewhere, the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, and the Pepperdine University Graziadio School of Business and Management all saw a jump of at least seven spots in the new ranking.
Once Mighty, Now Fallen
Stanford GSB, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Jones School of Business at Rice University may all be feeling a wee bit dizzy. Last year Stanford shot up to second from seventh the year before, but this year it finds itself demoted to fifth. Duke’s Fuqua School, which last year celebrated a momentous jump from eighth to third, this year fell back down to seventh. Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, which had one of last year’s biggest gains, rocketing up nine spots to break into the top five from a mere 14th place finish the year before, this year finds itself at seventh. Similarly, Rice Business, as the Jones School likes to be called, which last year catapulted 11 spots to number eight, this year slipped to tenth. But at least all maintained their footing within the top 10.
Emory’s Goizueta Business School and the Texas A&M Mays Business School, for their part, slipped out of the top 20 altogether. Goizueta slipped just slightly, from 20th to 21st, and Mays slid from 18th to 22nd. The University of Virginia Darden School of Business also stumbled, slipping from 12th last year to 17th this year. But the Charlottesville school at least managed to remain in the top 20, thanks in part to strong scores in the student survey and salary categories.
No school, however, lost more ground than the George Washington University School of Business, which fell an eye-popping 14 spots from last year, losing its place among the top 50 business schools in the United States.
Bloomberg BW has made multiple changes to its methodology in recent years, resulting in significant volatility in terms of where schools fall on the list even when not much has changed year over year at the individual schools themselves. This has led many to question the credibility of the ranking overall. That said, Clear Admit’s Alex Brown found this year’s results easier to swallow than some in recent years. “This ranking seems more reasonable to me this year,” he says. “Each of the M7 programs are in the top 10, and the schools I would consider in the top 16 are all in the top 20.”
You can view the complete 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek rankings here.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.
Highest Paid Starting Salaries for Toronto MBA Grads
Earning an MBA in Toronto can be a practical decision for a myriad of reasons. Forbes named Canada the best country for business in the G20, with Toronto as its formal financial and business capital. It stands to reason Toronto may be one of the strongest areas for business not just in North American, but around the world as well. Its advantageous position close to the U.S. border makes the city a hotbed of international commerce, and as the fourth largest city on the continent, Toronto provides a wealth of opportunities for motivated professionals.
As though these reasons weren’t incentive enough to pursue higher education in Toronto, the city has the second highest quality of life in North America, according to the Mercer Quality of Living Survey. The city’s vital university system is full of talented and aspiring industry leaders ready to launch their own careers, readily taking advantage of everything the city has to offer.
For those of you planning to pursue your MBA in this cultural and fiscal epicenter, we’ve laid out which school grads have the highest starting salaries in the city.
The Highest Paid Toronto MBA Salaries
Ivey Business School—Western Canada University
Graduates from Ivey Business School will not be disappointed with the opportunities made possible by their degree. In 2016, 90 percent of graduating MBA students looking for jobs had received an offer by September and, by December, an impressive 96 percent of students were fielding offers. The average starting salary for grads in 2016 was $104,007 ($84,098 USD). The base salaries ranged from $40,000 to $192,000 ($32,344 to $155,255 USD), with the higher end of this range going to students who pursued consulting jobs. Since this program is just one year long, the high average starting salaries for students indicate a considerable return on investment, in terms of both money and time. Bloomberg BusinessWeek also ranked Ivey’s MBA as the best MBA program in Canada for the past three years.
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Rotman School of Management—University of Toronto
Those looking for an MBA education that will provide ample chance to earn a generous starting salary may be impressed with the possibilities open to Rotman School of Management grads. The average base salary for graduates in 2016 was $92,524 ($74,819 USD). The 2016 class had an employment rate of 80 percent within three months of graduation and an 85 percent employment rate after six months. The range of starting salaries for the class of 2016 went as high as $214,737 ($173,486 USD) in the legal services industry. Moreover, the Financial Times has named Rotman the best business school in Canada every year for over a decade.
Schulich School of Business—York University
An average starting salary of $91,860 ($74,282 USD) for the class of 2016 makes a Schulich School of Business an ideal place for motivated students to jump-start their careers. With 89 percent of MBAs from the class of 2016 hired within three months of graduation, Schulich grads clearly have a competitive edge in the business community. Schulich’s program is also renowned for its flexibility. Students can switch seamlessly between part-time and full-time enrollment, and can choose to accelerate their program for the opportunity to earn their degree in just eight months.
Full-Time MBA Battle: San Francisco vs. Seattle
Whether it’s 49ers vs the Seahawks or Apple vs Microsoft, it may seem like there are a lot of differences between San Francisco and Seattle. Putting these minor dissimilarities aside, however, and you’ll find common ground between two of the northwest’s biggest cities: Both metros are known as top locations for prospective MBAs looking to earn an advanced business degree full-time. Continue reading…
Getting Paid: The Highest MBA Salaries in Atlanta
Looks like the secret’s out and ATliens’ extraterrestrial days might be numbered.
