MBA Journal: B-School Update December 23, 2008, 10:20PM EST

Focusing on the Fundamentals

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At Tepper we encounter constant tension between the goal of a professional business degree—there really are just two options: getting a great job or building a successful business—and the highfalutin interest in education for its own sake. When you have a family to feed and a mortgage growing ever harder to pay, the whimsies of academia's marble halls can seem too dreamy to bother with. To that dose of reality, add that "grades don't count," since only a few companies (mostly consulting and investment banking firms) bother to consider them, as they say nearly zilch about applied business ability. (Several top programs feel similarly, as BusinessWeek reported back in 2005.

I asked John Mather, professor of marketing and executive director of Tepper's master's programs (both the MBA and the master's in computational finance), why bother with grades? Furthermore, how to reconcile the split needs to, say, attend job fairs around the country that occur during midterms? While maintaining his commitment to learning—he is, after all, a professor—Dr. Mather said that Tepper's "focus on the learning" is about "forming ideas and models to extract as much as you can." Grades, he said, reflect just a "discrete moment in time."

Building a Network

Tepper has some quirks, most notably the "mini-semester" system: Our terms are just seven weeks long, which affords us the happy opportunity to take up to 40 different MBA-level courses over the course of our degree (not including cross-registration at one of the country's top schools for computer science, engineering, and—oddly—acting). But it also means that we have term exams every 3.5 weeks. Yikes!

With a hellish schedule on top of life's daily commitments, we students would not survive without one another—which breeds the mutual reliance of a real-world teamwork incubator.

For instance: I write very highly effective cover letters, but it's a good day if I manage to count to 10. Thankfully, several of my classmates are mathematical geniuses—one of whom has grown into my business partner—who can supplement the professors' lectures, often more accessibly. We spend many hours together in the Masters Lounge poring over homework until everyone is on the identical page, because underlying our respective academic and career directions we realize we're a network—and the value of the MBA is only as great as the network.

Which brings me to my final point: Like gravity or inertia, we tend to wind up where we belong. Of course, aim to ace the GMAT; write cogent, spell-checked essays; do research before sitting for an interview; pick a town where you can live happily for two years (at least). But these preparations should be obvious to you—they're simply hallmarks of good business.

Do-Be-Do-Be-Do

Less clear is that business school admissions officers are exceedingly good at letting in students who will excel in their programs, so they may see a fit even before you do. Some schools pile-drive quant thinking into holistic general managers; others churn pragmatic engineers into PowerPoint-fluent CEOs; still others (like Tepper) offer unparalleled access to entrepreneurial networks.

Conceptions of "better" or "worse" that rely on a numerical rank alone neglect that there's a reason so many schools coexist: Most business schools with a name—even lesser-known ones—were given a large donation by a successful alumnus or devoted advocate. They got there the same way you will, by blending fundamentals, an accessible network, and savvy self-selling to live the immortal words of Frank Sinatra: "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere."

Jonathon Scott Feit is a member of Carnegie Mellon's MBA Class of 2010.