The MBA Bull Market Has Legs

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Having gleaned this information, Tamanini decided to take a deeper look into the issue. Would an e-mail address—professional or unprofessional—actually influence whether or not an applicant would be invited in for a company interview?

Once again, Tamanini sought out a group of undergraduates who were asked to imagine themselves as entry-level human resource screeners, working for a large company that advertises openings on an online job board. Their job was to screen résumés and determine whether or not they would invite an applicant for an interview.

The students were asked to evaluate a high-quality résumé with a professional and unprofessional e-mail name, along with a low-quality résumé that followed the same parameters. The two professional names used were mharmon@ and jsmith888@.

In this case, it turned out that the quality of the résumés mattered more to the students than the e-mail names, Tamanini said (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/13/07, "The Way to a Winning Résumé"). "When it comes time to say, 'Should I let this person through to the next stage,' the quality of the résumé was more important," he said. "But at the next stage, the e-mail may come into play again."

Handing in a résumé with a quirky e-mail name may seem like a foolish move, but more people do it than you might think, said Tamanini, who has spoken with recruiters about this issue.

Don't let your e-mail address get in the way of your job applications, he recommends. When applying for a job, pick an e-mail address that is as "conventional" as you can muster, Tamanini says. Use your given name if you can or your initials with generic numbers, he suggests. "Don't try to be creative because there's no need to," he says. "Let your credentials speak for yourself, so your e-mail name doesn't have any influence. It's just your contact information and that's it."

Research Rankings

A recent annual ranking of research productivity at business schools found that faculty at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has published the most research in top academic journals over the past year. The rankings tracked the publications of professors at leading business schools in 24 of the field's leading academic journals from 2002 to 2006.

Until a few years ago, there wasn't a place where B-school academics could go to see how their schools stacked up against each other in terms of scholarly output. Hasan Pirkul, dean of the School of Management at the University of Texas-Dallas, set about to change that by creating a ranking system that measures research productivity at business schools.

"If you really talk to the deans of B-schools, particularly the top 100 business schools, they will all say that research is very, very important," Pirkul said. "This is a very powerful tool to basically understand in a research dimension how you are doing and how your school is evolving over time."

This is the third consecutive year that Wharton, which claimed authorship for 330 articles, topped the list. The Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University came in second with 220 articles, followed by Harvard Business School, with 168.

Several schools cracked the list's top 10 for the time this year, including the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.