You don’t need another reason to get excited about your MBA, but here’s one anyway: Business schools spawn some awesome ideas, and they aren’t limited to finance or IT.

Take two submissions to recent business plan competitions. About a week ago, the New York Times covered Tough Mudder, born as a semifinalist entry in Harvard Business School’s annual business plan competition.  Founder Will Dean believed he could convince 500 people to pay to run a grueling, muddy obstacle course. After graduation, he launched the business with just Facebook ads and a website for marketing. And so far, he’s pulled it off”the company just staged its first race with an impressive 4,500 participants.

And just this past Sunday, the Financial Times featured some Scottish participants in a short entrepreneurship program at MIT’s Sloan School of Business. It’s not a traditional MBA, but it is a testament the nifty ideas you can cook up in the environment of a b-school. Michael Laurenson, a mussel farmer, was a member of the team that won the competition. Their concept was neither a social media start-up nor a new medical product. Instead, it was a device for improving fish farms. When we were at MIT the thing they said to us was: ˜Do what you are good at’, he says. His native Shetland isn’t ideal for finance or IT start-ups, so he stuck with what he knew: Aquaculture.

These examples fit nicely with our recent post on alternative careers chosen by MBAs. B-school grads can take their degrees in any number of directions. So pursue what inspires you!

The 12th Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review is an awesome resource, likely the best available, and we heartily recommend it to all of our students. Indeed, the Official Guide and its supplements are included with all of our courses and form the core of our curriculum.

However, if there is one weakness that students often cite, it is that the Official Guide’s explanations are sometimes confusing and/or unhelpful, particularly on some of the math problems.

To address this need, we are very proud to announce the imminent publication of the Official Guide Companion! This book includes thorough, step-by-step explanations to every math problem in the Official Guide, using the principles of our curriculum for consistency. Problems that customarily give students headaches are flagged as part of ‘Horacio’s Hotlist,’ named after ace Instructor Horacio Quiroga. There is also an online version of the OGC for easy reference.

Note that all of the referenced questions appear in the Official Guide itself, which is necessary to make use of the Official Guide Companion (hence the name).

All of our course students will begin receiving the book May 17th, as part of their course materials free of charge. The online version will be active one week earlier, on May 10th. It’s good to be one of our students!

Thanks to Chris, Dave, Carrie, Graham, and all of the other Instructors that worked so hard to make the Official Guide Companion possible! Many students are about to have a problem solved (pun intended). 🙂

Our partners over at mbaMission recently wrote a post about what it takes – and doesn’t take – to get into a good business school.  Based on data released by top business schools like HBS and Stanford, many would be surprised to find that graduating from a non-Ivy school  does not decrease their chances of acceptance.  As Jeremy Shinewald puts it:

The admissions committees are more interested in your performance “ academic, professional, volunteer, personal “ than your pedigree. Further, the admissions committee is interested in diversity. We don’t feel that we are going out on a limb stating that Wharton does not want and cannot have a class of 850 UPenn undergrads, because they simply want the best potential business leaders out there and thus must jump into a much deeper pool.

You can read the full post here.

This week, we’re going to tackle a challenging GMATPrep problem solving question from the topic of Rates & Work.

Let’s start with the problem. Set your timer for 2 minutes. and GO!

*Circular gears P and Q start rotating at the same time at constant speeds. Gear P makes 10 revolutions per minute, and gear Q makes 40 revolutions per minute. How many seconds after the gears start rotating will gear Q have made exactly 6 more revolutions than gear P?

(A) 6

(B) 8

(C) 10

(D) 12

(E) 15

Given info about two different gears, P and Q, we have to figure out something about how quickly they move relative to each other. In particular, we’re supposed to figure out when this is true: (# of Gear Q revolutions) = (# of Gear P revolutions) + 6.

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