Anticipating Yale

B-school is only a few weeks away after a tumultuous period that included deciding not to attend Yale and then receiving a partial scholarship

By Linda Craib

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Linda Craib
Health Care Executive MBA Program
Class of 2010
Yale School of Management

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As I finish up my last journal entry as a prospective MBA student, I am less than two weeks away from the start of business school. Time, which, according to Einstein, only exists so that everything doesn't happen simultaneously, seems to be pushing both the bounds of relativity and his assertion. Anticipation, that delightful, child-like emotion that blends the pleasure of excitement with a twinge of anxiety, has become a part of my everyday experience.

It has been a tumultuous six months since my last journal. In mid-March, I was invited to participate in a marketing and recruiting class for the Yale MBA for Executives (MBA-E). Amanda Skinner (Yale MBA '08), a former midwife and now a health-care consultant, was facilitating a focus group as part of a marketing class. Several members of the class of 2009, as well as prospective and accepted students from the class of 2010, were also invited.

The evening promised work and fun: focus group meeting at the Omni New Haven Hotel, dinner at the Black Bear Saloon, and warm chocolate-chip cookies and coffee (or wine) at 116 Crown, a great little tapas and wine bar. It was an enjoyable evening full of debate and an open exchange of ideas and opinions.

Countdown to Camp Omni

We discussed how the program begins for every student and were warned about the stress of "Camp Omni," the first two weeks of school, when students are in residence at the Omni Hotel for orientation and intensive classes covering financial accounting, financial reporting, and economic analysis.

Descriptions of the two weeks were conveyed with a rather disconcerting combination of a rueful smile, a shake of the head, and ominous two-word phrases to describe the experience—as if using just one rather menacing word simply wouldn't do. Still, no one seemed to view Camp Omni (at least in retrospect) in a negative light. They said the intensity of those first two weeks served as a catalyst to forge friendships, teams, and bonds that have shaped their experience throughout the program.

The current students, all successful health-care professionals, many with advanced degrees in such fields as medicine, law, and the sciences, spoke of the transformational power of learning from a world-class faculty. They described how the program had changed them as leaders and as individuals in ways they had not anticipated. They described how fortunate they felt to be part of a relatively small, intimate program that can offer individual attention to each student.

No Fears About Job Prospects

Yale offers career counseling services to the students in its MBA-E program designed to fit the needs of mid-career professionals within the health-care industry. Students have access to a counselor whose expertise is mid-career job search and placement assistance, career workshops, alumni health-care panels, and a health-care headhunter panel during the course of each school year.

Postgraduation plans and opportunities of the current students included career transitions that took a major turn (i.e. from nurse-midwife to executive health-care consultant) to those that simply trended upwards on a linear path for students staying with their current employers. I couldn't help but listen closely to what the current students had to say about how their investment in time and money was playing out. For students who are older or who may not have the benefit of corporate sponsorship (or both), the thought of making this kind of six-figure investment in this economy was unsettling. I was pleased that none of the students openly expressed any concerns about his or her job prospects.

While the students expressed admiration and respect for the professors at Yale, the staff of the Yale EMBA program, and their classmates, some tough criticism was leveled at Yale relative to its financial aid policies regarding its professional schools.