The folk at mbaMission always recommend getting started with your MBA applications as early as possible. By taking action now, you can dramatically improve your chances of gaining admission to a top MBA program in the coming years. It is never too soon (and certainly not too late) to take several crucial steps to shape your MBA candidacy. So we’re presenting a five-part series to provide a step-by-step timeline to help guide you down the long road of applying to business school. These guidelines assume that you are setting out a year ahead of the January deadlines. Even if you are starting later, you should be able to leverage this timeline to help you prioritize each step along the way. This week, they lay out what you should be doing February through April. For more information on mbaMission and how they can help you in this process, click here.

View Part 1 here.

February

Meet with Alumni and Students
As you contemplate your choices and begin visiting campuses, consider augmenting your process of a priori discovery by meeting with your target school’s alumni or students, so that you can Read more

We recently discussed our move towards a more international market, with online classes geared towards students in East Asia and India as well as in-person classes in London and Paris.

However, while we are expanding abroad, we are also continuing to focus on our new markets in the U.S. We’ve recently started offering classes in Miami as well as San Antonio and we are also expanding to Salt Lake City in the near future.

Because of our strong belief in high instructor quality, we only expand where we find instructors who meet our stringent qualifications. If you want to see us expand further, and you know of anybody in the locations listed on our instructor hiring page, be sure to send them our way! Our application process is tough, but in the end, both our students and our instructors benefit!

The folk at mbaMission always recommend getting started with your MBA applications as early as possible. By taking action now, you can dramatically improve your chances of gaining admission to a top MBA program in the coming years. It is never too soon (and certainly not too late) to take several crucial steps to shape your MBA candidacy. So they’re presenting a five-part series to provide a step-by-step timeline to help guide you down the long road of applying to business school. These guidelines assume that you are setting out a year ahead of the January deadlines. Even if you are starting later, you should be able to leverage this timeline to help you prioritize each step along the way. This week, they will lay out what you should be doing at least one year before you submit your applications. For more information on mbaMission and how they can help you in this process, click here.

Pre-Stage

The steps that we lay out in pre-stage planning are somewhat timeless. It is never too soon to take on a leadership position in your community, sign up for a supplemental course, visit your target schools, etc. We have therefore structured this piece so that you can consider the steps outlined in these sections ongoing. Read more

After having established ourselves as a bastion of high quality GMAT prep in the United States, Manhattan GMAT has begun to expand beyond that country’s borders. With our eight Strategy Guides shipping to all parts of the globe, we realized the call for more comprehensive prep worldwide and have scheduled classes to meet the demand of students across the world.

Though Manhattan GMAT already has classes in London, we recently started offering classes in Paris as well, with the first class scheduled to begin on January 18.

Cognizant of the vast numbers of test-takers further East, we have also begun to address those students’ needs with an online class specifically scheduled at a convenient time for those in India and in the Middle East.

For those whose time zones make even the India class inconvenient, we’re also offering a class specifically scheduled for students in China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.

For a full listing of locations for Manhattan GMAT, click here.

At Manhattan GMAT, we take pride in the quality teaching of our instructors. In fact, we value their Socratic method so much that for a long time we have been worried about posting videos, which are a decidedly not interactive media (unlike our classes).

However, to show our continuing commitment to preparing our students for the GMAT, we have been hosting a live free study hall series called “Thursdays with Ron:” every other Thursday, our instructor, Ron Purewal, hosts a free 1.5 hour long session. Anybody can submit questions ahead of time, and Ron chooses some questions to answer. The event itself is interactive (in fact, you can submit your own questions and sign up to attend the next study hall session here) and therefore continues to help students in the way that we feel best suits their needs: having them actively participate.

Still, in 90 minutes of lesson, there are some sections that help you understand certain aspects of the GMAT better, without requiring too much additional interaction. We’ve found those highlights of our Thursdays With Ron series, and we’ve posted them in easily digestible chunks on our youtube channel. Below is a sample of one of the most popular videos, in which Ron explains a new way to easily find the point of a reading comprehension passage:

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© 2010 Graduate Management Admission Council*

The GMAC recently released some interesting charts on how much time GMAT students spend studying. Not surprisingly, those who spend more time studying tend to score higher “ up to a point. But is it really all about hours you spend with your GMAT book open? How do you structure the time you spend studying so that you get the most out of it? Our instructors, Stacey Koprince and Dan Gonzalez, had some feedback about the GMAC’s report. Read more

Our friends over at MBA Mission were excited to see the new BusinessWeek Rankings come out, although they made sure to point out that rankings aren’t nearly as important as fit when it comes to choosing the best business school for you. Check out the rest of their blog, and find the original posting of their article here: mbamission.com/blog
Read more

We recently read an article that listed seven reasons why the author thinks you don’t need to go to business school.

Going to business school is clearly a major commitment of an individual’s time, energy, and resources. It’s a complex decision, and there’s no right answer that applies to every person. To balance the aforementioned article, we asked Chris Ryan, our Director of Product and Instructor Development, who has his MBA from Fuqua, to give us seven good reasons that business school is still worthwhile. He gave us eight for good measure:

1. The Connections You Build in Business School Will Help You Throughout Your Career

Connections and networking are a huge part of the appeal of business school for many potential applicants. Many ventures, from Revolution Foods Inc., bringing healthy lunches to schools, to Brooklyn Boulders, New York’s largest rock-climbing gym, to BuddyTV, an up-and-coming entertainment website, have been started by people who met in business school.

In fact, our very own Eric Caballero, graduate of Sloan, has found his MBA network indispensable during his career:

I tap my network constantly, hunting for angel investors, marquee clients, channel partners and executive recruits. So long as you understand Networking 101 “ never ask a favor without offering a greater, specific one in return “ you should find your network ready to help. Ironically, the benefits do not end with your professional life. I once contacted an MIT alum, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of a major U.S. airline, to discuss a frustrating customer service issue with my honeymoon flights. He helped me cut through a forest of red tape in half an hour.

2. The Skills You Learn at Business School Cannot be Taught in Books

For some, like Chris, the most instrumental skills learned at business school include how to be a good leader and a good team player. Chris could lead a class of high-school students, but business school taught him how to relate to and lead his own peers in a way he would not have developed otherwise. Sure, you could learn economic theory and business management from books, but when you get your MBA, you’re learning them within the context of an environment that helps shape who you are and helps you become who you want to be.

3. Going to B-school Helps You Figure Out What You’re Good At

From the very first time you look at your application essay questions, business school forces you to make decisions about who you want to become and what you want to do. Even the process of applying helps you clarify your goals, because you have to discuss them in a convincing way.

In addition, business school helps round you out as a person. For example, many schools will film you while you present. They then make you review and improve your presentation skills by going over the video with a coach. “From what I hear, that doesn’t happen in law school,” says Chris.

4. Business School Can Be Useful for People at Any Age

Chris began his career teaching high school students, but chose to change fields in his 20s.  “At 28, less than a year after I was teaching physics, I was a management consulting intern at McKinsey,” says Chris.  “This would not have been possible without business school.”

But even if you aren’t switching careers, business school can still help you focus your career path, restructure and move ahead at a faster pace. A businessman who had worked in large companies, Dave Bosher, who graduated from the University of Richmond MBA program, noted: “The MBA program is a great way to round out your knowledge base and to take your career to the next step.”

5. Business School Broadens Your Personal Perspective and Outlook

At its best, business school forces you to learn to work with a diverse range of people in the business world. Because you are forced to make choices about your own career before you even attend, you meet people who have a variety of different goals, from traditional routes like consulting to unconventional ones like founding a new private business.

In fact, the best business schools help train you to work in diverse teams. Chris worked in a team with a student from Venezuela, and the experience helped him when he was working on a Mexican-Brazilian film post-MBA.  As a former teacher, Chris found that the opportunity to learn from “real” businessmen taught him a lot as well, and certainly the former bankers learned plenty from a physics teacher!

6. Your Business School Becomes Your Brand

The name of the school you attended will carry weight for the rest of your career. You will be able to find favors with other alums, and the name next to “MBA” will make your resume will stand out during job searches.

7. You Put Your Finger on the Pulse of the Future of the Business World:

You and your classmates will be the next class of business leaders. By virtue of being constantly surrounded by intelligent and driven individuals, you can see what the future of business will look like from a unique perspective.

It’s not just your classmates from whom you’ll learn, either. Business schools make a point of bringing in today’s business leaders. Just ask the women who started Gilt Groupe: they met at Harvard Business School and founded their online store with the help of designer Zac Posen, whom they had advised while still in business school. Or try sitting in a room with the founders of Threadless. They might not have gone to business school, but the students at MIT certainly gained a lot of insight from their background! Overall, the CEOs, founders and business bigshots you meet at b-school give you an opportunity to see the business world in a whole new light.

8. B-school can be a lot of fun:

Whether it’s making videos to show to your classmates, or wrestling with the complexities of a business case with your team, there is both real fun and geeky fun in going to school, even while you learn and shape yourself into something better.

Need more convincing? Check out Why MBA? to read why other students chose business school.

A while ago we wrote about the Manhattan GMAT Grant program. We are now pleased to announce that we have awarded 2010 Non-Profit Staff Grants to two incredibly worthy organizations.

The first is The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School in Washington Heights (established by Manhattan GMAT founder Zeke Vanderhoek). A number of MGMAT employees had the pleasure of visiting the school during its first year of operation and seeing the impressive progress already made in its 5th grade classrooms.

The second organization receiving a 2010 grant is Coro, an organization that prepares high school students, young and mid-career professionals, and individuals working with immigrant communities to become active civic leaders in their city. The MGMAT team had the chance to attend the 2010 Coro Civic Leadership Awards in New York this year and learn about the wonderful work being done by the Coro Fellows, Youth Ambassadors, and recent program alums.

Both TEP and Coro will receive $5,000 grants from Manhattan GMAT this year. We are thrilled to be supporting two such worthy institutions, and look forward to seeing more great things from them in the coming year!

There’s big news from the GMAC.

Perhaps because they are feeling the competition as more schools begin to accept the GRE, the GMAC has announced that it will add a new section to the test called Integrated Reasoning.

According to the GMAC, this new section is designed to measure people’s ability to evaluate information from multiple sources.  It was created with a goal of making the GMAT ever more relevant to business school. The GMAC has been polling faculty at business schools for the past four years, and this new development stems directly from their feedback.

The Integrated Reasoning section, writes BusinessWeek, will involve analyzing charts and data points, and even include audio. It will last 30 minutes and replace one of the current essays (the AWA.) The total exam will remain three and a half hours long, and the AWA and Integrated Reasoning sections will be graded separately from the quantitative and verbal portions of the test.

So what does this mean for GMAT test-takers?

Chris Ryan, our director of product and instructor development, noted that because this new section will not affect the main section of the test, GMAT-takers should not worry about huge differences.  Students should continue to focus most on the verbal and math portions of the test.

While the Integrated Reasoning section may give the GRE’s data interpretation section a run for its money, Chris sees it as a smart move on the GMAC’s part to integrate what could be quite similar to a mini business case.

As for admissions, Chris believes that because members of the business school faculty were instrumental in suggesting and implementing the change, the new Integrated Reasoning section may take a higher place than the AWA, but the unchanged verbal and math sections will still be the most important parts.

Students do not have to feel like it’s going to change the preparation for the test all that much, said Chris Ryan.

For more information, check out these articles:

GMAC press release

BusinessWeek: The GMAT Gets a Makeover

Financial Times: GMAT revamp focuses on reasoning

Inside Higher Ed: Multiple Task Questions

Bloomberg: GMAT Test for Business School Has Biggest Change in Decade