Here at the Manhattan GMAT blog, we’re always interested in cool learning opportunities for b-school students. That’s why a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal caught our eyes. The paper reports MBA programs are securing real-world business experience for their students by farming them out as dirt-cheap consultants.

A student’s involvement with a company typically runs from 3 to 6 months, and companies have included Urban Outfitters and Harman International. Participants might help create a business plan or identify acquisition targets. For businesses, it’s a chance to benefit from a fresh set of eyes, typically at a very low cost.  And for aspiring MBAs, it’s a chance for practical professional experience.

For example, Green Mountain Coffee dispatched their b-schoolers to Nicaragua, assigning them to develop strategies for improving coffee quality and boosting production. “This will have impact on the quality, taste in cup and… the amount of coffees that [the farmers] harvest,” says Rick Peyser, a member of the company’s corporate responsibility department.

Improving a cup of coffee from the source”now that makes for a results-driven resume.

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.

You’ve probably spent lots of time weighing the merits of various business schools”professors, location, course offerings. But this month’s Bloomberg Business Week offers some food for thought about the individuals who lead the whole operation: deans.

The article profiles two programs that have recently hired former corporate executives as deans. Boston University has recruited Kenneth Freeman, formerly of Quest Diagnostics, while Viacom’s Neil Braun will start in the fall at Pace. And they aren’t the first, either. Corporate deans are still rare, but you’ll find them at both Wake Forest and Ohio State University.  Why the non-traditional choices? They can bring a new perspective, as search committee chair N. Venkat Venkatraman explains: “We wanted someone who could think outside the box, and the committee felt that Ken Freeman brought something new and exciting to the school. There’s also the appeal of a candidate with extensive management experience. The search committee told Freeman they wanted a builder, someone who could advance the school’s strategic plan”and that’s what they saw in the former CEO.

Don’t expect a sea change in the hiring of b-school deans, but this is certainly an interesting development in MBA education.

What’s the latest trend in MBA curricula, according to Business Week? It comes as no surprise to us here @manhattangmat: Courses on social media!

As more businesses realize the awesome power of Facebook and Twitter, they’re hunting employees who can navigate the tricky waters of social media. So b-schools see a rapidly growing field for which they can equip their students. “Social media skills are the ones that can set them apart. Those are the skills that employers are looking for,” argues John Gallaugher, who teaches Social Media & Web 2.0 for Managers at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Columbia now offers four Internet marketing classes”one of them taught by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. And if HBS’s Competing with Social Networks is any indication, students are enthusiastic, as well: When the course launched, it had three times as many sign-ups as spots in the class.

Once again, business schools are pushing out ahead of the curve!

Two weeks ago, we featured free classes available online for prospective and newly-admitted b-school students. Today, we’re featuring podcasts. Almost all universities have podcasts these days, and if you’re interested in a school, it’s worth poking around the website for lectures or interviews. But here are the top five that stand out:

1. Knowledge at Wharton: Wharton’s podcast follows a traditional radio-interview format. A host sits down with an interesting guest to discuss a meaty topic, like the next generation of Internet search or the future of the book business. Podcasts regularly feature Wharton professors speaking about their own research, as well as CEOs, government officials, venture capitalists, and others. And you don’t actually have to download the files”you can just stream the interviews from the website.
2. Darden School of Business, Speaker Series: UVA’s Darden School of Business uploads recordings of anyone who visits campus as part of the Darden Distinguished Speaker Series, the Darden Leadership Forum, or the 50th Anniversary Speaker Series. That makes for a lot of podcasts featuring a wide variety of leaders, from former Mexican president Vicente Fox to Under Armour founder Kevin Plank.
3. The London School of Economics, Public Lectures and Events: The LSE seems to host speakers constantly, and it’s no surprise the school draws some big names. Besides professors, the roster includes a number of presidents, plus social media guru Clay Shirky and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. This series is especially great if you’re interested in emerging markets or global business. But their offerings vary widely, and they aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. The archive includes lectures on contemporary art, climate change, and even Slavoj Žižek on the end of capitalism.
4. Insead, Leadercast: Also good to check out if you’re globally inclined is Insead’s Leadercast series. Professors sit down with European leaders like Thomas Rabe, CEO of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, and Todd Stitzer, CEO of British confectionary company Cadbury. You can either watch them as embedded videos or download the audio as mp3s, and next to each video is an overview of the company discussed, for further reading.
5. Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge: It isn’t updated regularly, but HBS has an archive of their Working Knowledge podcast, which features faculty members discussing their research, current events, and the like. It’s not extensive, but the available content is worth a look.

Have we left your favorite off the list? Let us know in the comments what other podcasts you like!

MBA programs are getting creative with their classes these days. Two recent trend pieces highlight schools’ new offerings that aren’t exactly traditional courses like accounting or stats.

First, the Financial Times spotlights the growing number of b-school classes on practicing philanthropy, which aim to teach future titans of industry how to give wisely. They teach how to measure the impact of one’s donation and smart practices like site visits to non-profits. At some point in their lives, most of these students will either be a corporate donor or an individual donor and my class teaches them how to do philanthropy effectively, says Boston University School of Management professor Kristen McCormack. Most general MBAs that I’ve taught marvel that there is this world out there that they never thought existed, and they are surprised by how hard it is to give away money.

Meanwhile, other b-schools are attempting to teach the ineffable skills of leadership. And according to US News and World Report, they’re adopting some creative strategies. UVA’s Darden School of Business is using the performing arts to train future managers, with a course called “Leadership and Theatre: Ethics, Innovations and Creativity.” Instructor Ed Freeman explains actors have to know themselves before they can persuade anyone to believe in their characters. “I think being authentic, knowing who you are and working on trying to be more in touch with your emotions, that’s what leadership’s about,” he says.

More reasons to get excited about business school!

We like to take the occasional Friday here at the MGMAT blog to spotlight interesting paths taken by MBAs. Today: Gilt Groupe, which is bringing sample sales”long an urban fashion institution”to online shoppers.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled the up-and-coming online retailer. Here’s how Gilt Groupe works: Upon registration, members receive a daily email announcing the afternoon’s deals on luxury brands. Labels like Christian Louboutin and Marc Jacobs are regularly discounted up to 70 percent. Last year this clever scheme brought in $170 million in revenue, and the company is currently valued at $400 million. And Gilt Groupe might not exist if founders Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson hadn’t chosen to get MBAs. The two met as classmates at Harvard Business School, where they laid the foundations for Gilt. They launched the company with merchandise from designer Zac Posen”whom they had advised while still in business school. Back then, he was an emerging brand that was starting to gain a lot of visibility, but didn’t have a business plan in place or a way to finance the brand’s growth; we helped him take a look at that, says Maybank.

It’s a great example of how the networks you build as an MBA candidate can really make a concrete difference to your career.

The prospect of returning to school for an MBA can be a bit daunting, especially after a few years in the workforce. Once you get in, you might want to get a head start on your classes. Or maybe you’re considering applying, but you aren’t sure about the classroom experience”what it’s like, whether you feel prepared, if it’s something you really want to do. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can get a taste of the b-school curriculum ahead of time.

Many schools essentially offer entire classes online: lecture notes, classroom handouts, assignments. For example, MIT is a big participant in the OpenCourseWare program, an international consortium of schools that post course materials online, completely free of charge. So you can take a closer look at many of the Sloan School of Management’s offerings before you ever even make a campus visit. They’ve got bits and pieces of an impressive number of classes online, including:

• Economic Analysis for Business Decisions
• Optimization Methods
• Introduction to Financial and Managerial Accounting

Columbia has some seminars posted, and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business posts interesting videos of speakers and panel discussions at their YouTube channel. You’ll have to sort through commencement videos and the like, but it’s worth investing some time to see GE’s Jeff Immelt talking about leadership.

Even if you’ve already been admitted to your school of choice, you might want to brush up on your fundamentals before arriving on campus. You wouldn’t want to be ill-equipped for the dreaded cold call. There are a number of classes that will help lay a firm foundation for your first year coursework. Carnegie Mellon has a stats class, and Berkeley has audio of both micro and macro economics courses available.

Then there’s the just-plain-interesting. Yale University has made Professor Ben Polack’s Intro to Game Theory available here. (Follow it up with Sloan’s Game Theory for Managers.) You can even download lectures onto your iPod, but be careful not to get distracted by backward induction and evolutionary stability”we wouldn’t want you to walk into traffic. Johns Hopkins has a class on occupational health, while Tufts offers one on multilateral negotiation.

And that’s just the beginning of the intriguing b-school resources. Next week we’ll round up great podcasts for prospective and incoming b-school students.

Plenty of prospective MBAs don’t want to give up their jobs to go back to school. So what if the promotion you want requires an MBA?

Part-time programs have long been a popular solution to this dilemma. But the Wall Street Journal points to another, digital-age option: hybrid programs, blending limited class time with extensive online work. One Johnson & Johnson employee used Babson’s Fast Track MBA to land a plum gig overseas without having to take time off of work for school. Universities like the programs because they’re cheaper to run”if students aren’t on campus, they don’t need campus services.

But there are downsides. Students don’t spend as much quality time with their classmates, so there’s less opportunity to network. “There just isn’t enough team building or interpretation of emotional quotients,” says one dean, explaining why many business schools don’t launch hybrid programs. And career changers might want to think twice, because they typically don’t provide the same level of counseling.

Ultimately, traditional rules for choosing a b-school apply: Students have to go with the program that suits their needs best.

There are lots of factors to consider when choosing an MBA program, from curriculum to size. But with more b-schools opening their doors across the globe, there’s another thing to think about: location.

The Economist reports MBA programs”especially abroad”are placing more and more emphasis on their location. Cass Business School trumpets its location in London’s Financial District. SDA Bocconi points to its home in Milan and talks up its connections to the luxury goods sector. Other programs suggest there’s inherent value for future leaders in experiencing another business culture.

For European students, that foreign business culture might be the United States. According to this bit from MBA Channel, multiple European schools have recently taken the big step of opening American campuses. Spain’s IESE Business School just opened a branch in New York City. France’s SKEMA is currently working on its US location, which will specifically target Europeans who want to study in America. For European students America is a dream, says Alice Guilhon, SKEMA’s dean. And an outpost in the US will boost SKEMA’s prestige, as well: To be well-known in America is leverage for the visibility of the school in the world.

But as the Economist points out, location could soon become completely irrelevant. Young people have grown up interacting and building relationships online, and modern technology threatens to make distance an obsolete obstacle. In 20 or even 10 years, students might not need to cross an ocean to learn international practices.

Even so, Skype can’t replace eating gelato in front of the Duomo or strolling through Hyde Park.