New MBA Journal Writers Chosen

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MBA Journal Preview: "My employer, which was extremely dependent on the housing industry, started hemorrhaging money. The company sold several divisions. There was talk of massive layoffs. The very week after I started my MBA classes, the department in which I worked was cut by 70%. I was one of the lucky ones—I survived. Not that my employer was alone in this plight. In my class, there were a dozen students who deferred enrolling in the program by a year due to the economy. Many conversations in class started with the query, 'How is your company doing?'"

Incoming Student: Prem Chandrasekaran

Program: Rice University, Jones Graduate School of Business (Jones Full-Time MBA Profile)

Chandrasekaran is a people person. He is drawn to people all over the world—from Japan to India. Chandrasekaran's main purpose in earning an MBA is to help the "invisible people"—the destitute and ignored—to be seen.

Before entering the Jones School, Chandrasekaran worked at Accenture (ACN) in Austin, where he last served as a production support consultant. He is fluent in Tamil and has a working knowledge of Hindi, according to his résumé. A Jones academic scholarship recipient, Chandrasekaran earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004.

MBA Journal Preview: "Improving the problems faced by this group of 'invisibles' is one of my personal goals in life. While seemingly better suited to be a student of cultural studies or public policy, I feel it to be an important issue for business students. After all, a sick society cannot harbor healthy companies."

Incoming Student: Urshala Brown-Bowles

Program: University of Chicago Booth School of Business (Chicago Booth Full-Time MBA Profile)

Armed with an undergraduate degree in computer science that she earned in 2000 from Fayetteville State University, Brown-Bowles' last position before starting business school was as a senior software engineer at L-3 Communications (LLL). Like most engineers who enter business school, she is looking for a career change.

What led her down this other fork in the road? Curiosity in financial investments that would help her prepare for retirement. Brown-Bowles' dream is to open a financial advisement firm to educate minorities about markets and investment products and help them avoid unsavory investments that could separate them from their savings.

MBA Journal Preview: "Someone once told me, 'If passion is your driving force, then nothing can stop you.' It is my passion for finance, markets, and creating wealth that led me to the decision that now is the right time for me to switch from an engineering career to investment management."

Incoming Student: Jonathan Stern

Program: University of California at Los Angeles Anderson School of Business (UCLA Anderson Full-Time MBA Profile)

Anyone in journalism knows that the industry is having an identity crisis, and there's little money in it, especially if you ever plan on retiring. When Stern realized that his career in journalism wasn't going anywhere—he was laid off from MTV Radio (VIA) in December 2008—he chose between law and business schools. Business won when he noticed that he didn't know any happy lawyers.

Earning his undergraduate degree in U.S. history at Columbia University in 2003, Stern is what you'd call a nontraditional business student. A boy who once dreamed of playing in the big leagues and then writing scripts in Hollywood is now aiming to use newly acquired business skills to find his niche in new media, according to Stern's first journal entry. Having supervised and edited the work of the staff at MTV Radio, he already has some leadership experience under his belt to get him started.

MBA Journal Preview: "Like myself, most of the people I encountered in the media world had never heard of MTV's radio department. In fact, neither had the majority of employees within MTV. That did not bode well for my future at the company. Working in the radio business in general didn't seem to be so fruitful either. Four years into my tenure, I was beginning to realize that in an industry evolving at a breakneck speed, it probably wasn't the best idea to toil in one of the oldest technologies within the field."

Incoming Student: Lorena Sánchez García

Program: MBA and Master of Engineering Management program at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management (Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile)

Unlike the other MBA Journal applicants, Sánchez García writes that she sees the opportunity to write this column as a way to pay back BusinessWeek for the admissions resources on the site that she used while applying to programs and to keep in touch with her family while attending school. As an internal consultant in a Mexican company, Sánchez García felt drawn to the cosmetics industry, a sentiment she carried from an internship with L'Oréal in Germany. This desire to move to a different field motivated her to apply to business school.

A citizen of the world, Sánchez García earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering with a minor in industrial engineering from ITESM at Campus Monterrey in Mexico in 2004 and has lived in many different countries. She writes that the business school application was exciting, mostly for the opportunity it afforded to meet new people.

MBA Journal Preview: "I have always been a social person, and explaining to my interviewer why Kellogg was the best place for me was fairly easy. My connection to Chicago was the next logical step after spending the past 10 years in industrial cities, such as Monterrey, Mexico; Toronto, Canada; Hamburg, Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Birmingham, England. I love the buzzing of business cities, and the explanation of my stories in those places strengthened my relation to Kellogg's SMART values: Social, Modest, Academic, Responsible, and Team-workers."

Stay tuned to the BusinessWeek Business Schools channel for complete journal entries from the new crew and the second-year MBA Journal writers you've already gotten to know.

Di Meglio is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com in Fort Lee, N.J.

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