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OCTOBER 2002 MBA JOURNAL: ADMISSIONS Mike Grossman: Admissions -- How I got into B-School "Extracting myself from New York City was like performing dental surgery on myself. I've heard many people say that business school is only two years, but that doesn't go by quite as quickly as people think." Make sure your references like you both personally and professionally. They're the only objective, non-academic criteria the schools can rely on to evaluate the value of your work experience. For mine, I used my former bosses. One of them was a partner at the first firm I worked at; the other was my boss at Cendant, who had since started his own company. I think that having sent them written instructions on the importance of and the procedures surrounding recommendations helped the process along immensely, since neither had ever written a recommendation for business school before. The essays are your chance to pitch your story, and grab the attention of the admissions officers, so they're critical. The questions are often abstract and of a highly personal nature, so budget at least seven hours of writing and editing time for each application. Now, I personally like to proofread and edit all my own stuff. Kids, don't try this at home. I suggest that everyone (including me) have someone else read their essays, since very few people can really look at their own writing objectively. I happen to have a bit of a hang-up about anyone reading my work before I think it's perfect and 100% ready to go. And, of course, by the time it's polished I don't think it needs anyone else's opinion because I've convinced myself that it's already perfect. If you are going to be silly like me, you should, at the very least, step away from your essay for a day or two (if not longer, time permitting), so that you can get a fresh perspective about your work the next time you look at it. It's the next best thing to having someone else read it. As for the GMAT, I bought almost every software application on the shelves. If I had it to do over again, I would do a search on Amazon.com, read all the reviews of the GMAT software available, and then decide how much money I wanted to spend. I am not a math person in the least, so I was satisfied with my score there. My performance on the verbal section far exceeded that on the math section. For me, going to business school was a highly emotional decision. I had never wanted to go to graduate school of any sort or leave New York City once I moved there after college. And in the height of the '90s boom, I could find ample evidence that there was little need. But life has a funny way of reprioritizing things. And when I started to look for MBA programs, I used search criteria that might strike some as highly arbitrary or unorthodox. But they're mine, and here they are: Quality and style of program: This came first and foremost. I wanted to be at a place with a team orientation and a quantitative bend. Johns Hopkins taught me that math is not my strong point, so the laissez-faire atmosphere at certain schools would work against me. At the same time, I wanted a school that would strengthen my greatest weakness, which was a shortage of knowledge in fields like statistics and accounting. I was tired of everyone else knowing the secrets of spreadsheets and data interpretation. Why not me? I just didn't want to get slaughtered trying. The ultra-competitive nature of Wharton and the University of Chicago disqualified them, for my purposes. Iowa, however, while still competitive, had a quantitative focus that would help me address my weaknesses, and a team-based program that would give me the breathing room to do so without going insane. I felt Tippie was one of the few high-quality MBA programs where this former Political Science major would be on safe ground. Cost: Speaking for myself, my liquid assets are highly illiquid, in light of the depreciation of their value in the stock market. This had a double-whammy effect. On one hand, I was very uncomfortable with spending $100,000 or more for an MBA, since a lot of that would have to be borrowed. And, on the other hand, there is no way to tell what the job market or the returns on a start-up business will be like in two years time. And if things are slow my first year or two out of the gate, $50,000 to $100,000 worth of debt looks awfully unappetizing. With my expenses, I would be paying at least that for Columbia or NYU. UCLA and Georgetown were also beyond the realm of what I was willing to pay, in light of how much it would cost me to live in Los Angeles or Washington, DC. But I still had three high-quality local choices in Fordham, Hofstra, and City University of New York. All three have respectable programs with tuitions ranging from approximately $18,000 (Hofstra) to about $8,000 a year (CUNY Baruch). At least as important from my perspective, I would be spared the pain of leaving New York City. These factors helped to make applying to these three local options seem worthwhile. The University of Iowa has out of state tuition of about $18,000, about double in-state tuition. But if anyone who opts to do a graduate assistantship (GA's, as they are known, are campus jobs that permit one to work for a faculty or administration member, doing something along the lines of research or teaching) is automatically given instate tuition. This gives Iowa a very big bang for the buck. Location: This was another big issue. Extracting myself from New York City was like performing dental surgery on myself. I've heard many people say that business school is only two years, but that doesn't go by quite as quickly as people think. With all due respect to Baltimore (my city of birth), I partially blame the city (or at least my dissatisfaction with it) for making college seem a lot longer than four years. In fact, I couldn't see myself living anywhere in Maryland, so this ruled out The University of Maryland. Upstate New York is just too darn cold (I grew up in Syracuse), so that nixed the University of Rochester. Friends who are quite familiar with both me and Austin advised me against moving there, due to both my hatred of the heat, and the need for a car (I hate driving). This helped eliminate The University of Texas. Fordham, Hofstra, and CUNY all offered the advantage of being within easy commuting distance, which would mean I could stay in my apartment, which I loved and had bought five years earlier. But I found Iowa City to be a town with a soul. I live downtown, which is only four blocks from the Pappajohn Business Building, so I'm near everything and I don't need to drive. I wasn't surprised when someone told me that the 1999 edition of Editor and Publisher Market Guide (which provides highly detailed statistics on every city with a daily newspaper) had rated it the best place in America to live. I felt it was the sort of place I could look forward to moving to, rather than just lamenting leaving New York. And I might add that in his book On the Road, Jack Kerouac asserts that the most beautiful women in the world are in Des Moines, Iowa. Apparently Jack Kerouac never got over to Iowa City very often (paying attention, fellow single guys?). One final point regarding my criteria: I never used starting salaries as part of my selection process. I had spent almost my entire work experience up until this point chasing money, and I had come to feel it's a short-sighted strategy for long-term happiness, even if my happiness does, in fact, necessitate making a lot of money. I visited and interviewed at all four schools I applied to, although I didn't have a formal interview at Hofstra. The most intriguing and eventful of the interviews by far was the one at Baruch (CUNY). The interviewer, in painstakingly slow and meticulous fashion, asked me about every facet and aspect of my life and experience since high-school. Although friendly as can be, he conducted the closest thing to a classic stress interview that I have heard of on the MBA school circuit. He had even assembled a list of every single course at Johns Hopkins in which I had gotten below a B, and inquired about every single one. During this segment of the interview, I dearly regretted living in a fraternity house, and, let's just say, listening to a lot of Pink Floyd. Explaining how I got a D in a class called Dinosaurs was as close as I came to squirming (only at Johns Hopkins could a course be billed as an introduction to dinosaurs and their flying companions, and really be a highly detailed examination of dinosaur anatomy and biology). In all fairness, though, it was a very interesting experience, and reflected a tremendous amount of interest on the part of Baruch about who it admits to its Honors Program. I must have done reasonably well, since they offered me a scholarship on top of their already super-low tuition. By the time that I had finally sent out my applications, Iowa had become my first choice on the basis of its strength in all three of the criteria I had chosen. I was accepted to all the schools to which I applied (Iowa and the three local New York choices), and happily accepted the offer from the Tippie School of Management. I haven't regretted it for a single moment since. GMAT: 660, AWA 5.5 Undergraduate GPA: 3.1 (Political Science) Work Experience: 7.5 years Age: 29 If you have any questions concerning the Tippie MBA program here at Iowa, feel free to drop me a line at michael-grossman@uiowa.edu.  Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | OCTOBER Learn about your online education options |
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