The Right Coast vs. the Left Coast

lkao
Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:57:27 +0000

Not that this helps the original post, but I think Harvard “was” one of the only top schools to allow people without undergraduate degrees to apply for their business school.

Actually, I was very surprised that they changed their admissions guidelines (from their website). Earlier in the year, I remember a newspaper wrote an article about a student who never went to college. Instead, he worked on the Bush campaign and gave many contributions. He may even have had low GMAT score (but I could be imagining this). Anyway, the admissions officer had a really hard time about letting him in but in the end, felt that working so closely with the President woud result in an experience few others in his class would have, and so he got in.

Thus, the posting on the website was very surprising to me. Perhaps they changed it for 2008 or the article talked about a student sometime in the last seven years?

Still though, I’m sure if you did something super remarkable, you’d be able to waive this requirement.

For Bait&Switch, if you do want to get an MBA in the future, and you feel you might be too old to the average class (recently businessweek discussed with many top MBA deans and they are trying a youth movement) you can always try a top European school. They tend to have older and more seasoned students.

I don’t think you have to double major in business and engineering if you’re going to get an MBA anyway but you should really do what you feel is right. I asked my CFO and few other MBAs for advice about taking accounting and finance classes before starting my MBA and they all said, “DON’T DO IT!” I thought it would make sense coming from a comp. sci. background. My CFO told me, your school wants to teach you their methods and they know what they are doing. You should go watch movies or read other books this summer because next year, you won’t have time for anything.