I was just assigned a task to find what the average cost for an MBA is for the class of 2015 for both CMU and on average. I'm supposed to use human sources right now to get this information (so sending me to a calculator won't work).
For those who have been accepted or are applying this year, could you please tell me how much you expect your MBA to cost and what you think your salary would be when you graduate? I'm good with multiple estimates, for example:
- My MBA at Tepper will cost me $110,000
- My MBA at UT:Austin will cost me $70,000
- If I become a consultant at graduation, I expect my salary to be $115,000
- If I become a product manager at graduation, I expect my salary to be $80,000
Please don't include opportunity costs in the estimation, but feel free to add non-salary compensation, like bonuses.
This would be super helpful, thank you!
(This is an exercise in networking, so feel free to contact me via email at jharty (at) tepper (dot) cmu (dot) edu if you don't want to post a comment or just want to generally email me for requests - I also have a segment about keeping track of any time someone asks me for information :))
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Scale ratings aka how I can't be impressed.
About a year before I left my organization for my MBA program, a new directive passed down from the C-Suite: performance ratings had to be toned down. It seems like nearly everyone had super star employees; but the company wasn't performing like a superstar, so there must have been some sort of disconnect.
It turns out that the problem lay in the system. Like nearly every performance rating system out there, an employee was evaluated on a 5-point scale, with 3 being "performs as expected" and 5 being "performs extremely well" and 1 being "company is better off buying energy-saving lightbulbs than paying for this person to sit on FB all day." It turns out that nearly every department was rating their employees as 5s. The next round of evaluations, after this directive (plus other incentives - I think there was a limit on how many 4s & 5s a manager could give out, and he/she had to justify it), showed just how average everyone truly was since there were a lot of 3s.
This behavior always puzzled me because 3 is pretty self-explanatory - you did what your job requires you to do. A 5 should be a very rare occurrence.
Now, in some of my classes, we have to provide feedback to our teammembers in the form of an evaluation like this. To my surprise, the first time I did this, teammembers decided to give everyone 5s, regardless of the work. Again, a 5 indicates superstar performance, while 3 says "performs as expected." Second time around, I learned, and told everyone that I use the 3 as my baseline number - i.e. you do as expected, you get a 3. Go above and beyond my expectations, and that's when we get into the higher numbers. Thankfully, other people ascribed to this schema and also rated people with 3 as the baseline.
Now I'm in a class where we're constantly evaluated by our team members. I just had to provide a feedback form where there was a scale of 1-9 indicating our impression of a teammate: 1 is very negative, 5 no impression, 9 very positive. I rated people around the 5-7 mark; I can't say I had an immensely positive impression on people in my group. I went to check my own feedback report, and my average score was 8.53! Immediately I felt bad for the people I reviewed: they would walk away with my scores with a different impression than what I had intended.
Why do people think the baseline number for an evaluation is always the highest number? Especially when, in this case, our scores are aggregated and therefore anonymized?
My theory on this stems from the American education and grading system. I was a TA for an OB class in my undergraduate degree from the U.S. I was tasked to write up a quiz, so I did - according to how my degree program in Australia would do it. The Professor thanked me for the good job and said that the A students would get this, the B students would pass, but the C students would not do so well. I needed to simplify it so that the C students would easily pass the quiz.
In a conversation with another student this year, he remarked that the Australian university grading system was more flattering than the American system. In order of increasing magnitude, we have: 3- Low Pass, 4 - Pass, 5 - Credit, 6 - Distinction, 7 - High Distinction. Most students in the bellcurve fell in the 4/5 bracket; I had only ever seen less than 10 HDs per class I've been in, which weren't small by any means. He pointed out that a 4 seems less like a failure; whereas getting a B or a C seemed like a failure in the U.S. system.
So it seems like everyone is on the A basis and then gets dropped down, rather than starting from a C basis and working their way up (which is what I'm used to). I think this mentality of assessment (since school is the first and most frequent place we've ever had this kind of feedback) is what drives people to rate other people very highly without true consideration of what that 5 really means.
(Speaking of which, Tepper's grade basis is an A-; the CMU graduate schools all use B as the level of acceptable work for a graduate student with an A as the measurement of outstanding performance above and beyond what was expected.)
It turns out that the problem lay in the system. Like nearly every performance rating system out there, an employee was evaluated on a 5-point scale, with 3 being "performs as expected" and 5 being "performs extremely well" and 1 being "company is better off buying energy-saving lightbulbs than paying for this person to sit on FB all day." It turns out that nearly every department was rating their employees as 5s. The next round of evaluations, after this directive (plus other incentives - I think there was a limit on how many 4s & 5s a manager could give out, and he/she had to justify it), showed just how average everyone truly was since there were a lot of 3s.
This behavior always puzzled me because 3 is pretty self-explanatory - you did what your job requires you to do. A 5 should be a very rare occurrence.
Now, in some of my classes, we have to provide feedback to our teammembers in the form of an evaluation like this. To my surprise, the first time I did this, teammembers decided to give everyone 5s, regardless of the work. Again, a 5 indicates superstar performance, while 3 says "performs as expected." Second time around, I learned, and told everyone that I use the 3 as my baseline number - i.e. you do as expected, you get a 3. Go above and beyond my expectations, and that's when we get into the higher numbers. Thankfully, other people ascribed to this schema and also rated people with 3 as the baseline.
Now I'm in a class where we're constantly evaluated by our team members. I just had to provide a feedback form where there was a scale of 1-9 indicating our impression of a teammate: 1 is very negative, 5 no impression, 9 very positive. I rated people around the 5-7 mark; I can't say I had an immensely positive impression on people in my group. I went to check my own feedback report, and my average score was 8.53! Immediately I felt bad for the people I reviewed: they would walk away with my scores with a different impression than what I had intended.
Why do people think the baseline number for an evaluation is always the highest number? Especially when, in this case, our scores are aggregated and therefore anonymized?
My theory on this stems from the American education and grading system. I was a TA for an OB class in my undergraduate degree from the U.S. I was tasked to write up a quiz, so I did - according to how my degree program in Australia would do it. The Professor thanked me for the good job and said that the A students would get this, the B students would pass, but the C students would not do so well. I needed to simplify it so that the C students would easily pass the quiz.
In a conversation with another student this year, he remarked that the Australian university grading system was more flattering than the American system. In order of increasing magnitude, we have: 3- Low Pass, 4 - Pass, 5 - Credit, 6 - Distinction, 7 - High Distinction. Most students in the bellcurve fell in the 4/5 bracket; I had only ever seen less than 10 HDs per class I've been in, which weren't small by any means. He pointed out that a 4 seems less like a failure; whereas getting a B or a C seemed like a failure in the U.S. system.
So it seems like everyone is on the A basis and then gets dropped down, rather than starting from a C basis and working their way up (which is what I'm used to). I think this mentality of assessment (since school is the first and most frequent place we've ever had this kind of feedback) is what drives people to rate other people very highly without true consideration of what that 5 really means.
(Speaking of which, Tepper's grade basis is an A-; the CMU graduate schools all use B as the level of acceptable work for a graduate student with an A as the measurement of outstanding performance above and beyond what was expected.)
Monday, January 21, 2013
CMU Culture
I opened up my inbox today to receive a campus-wide email inviting CMU students to discuss the "culture" of CMU in response to an article that was posted in the (undergraduate) newspaper, The Tartan.
It turned out that a student committed suicide in December which triggered this particular article and subsequent discussion on the culture of CMU.
The author felt that CMU has a culture of stress and hard times, that the heavy workload on the student has caused many to feel depressed to that point of suicide. A number of people called out in support of that, feeling that the workload is too much for one person to bear. Tepper also has adopted this culture.
I'll admit, when I first read it, I was scornful. These kids came to CMU knowing it was an academic environment, not a "party" school, and yet complain because they can't "switch off".
But it was after a second read that I realised that the article was not blasting the culture, but rather the lack of support services available for students who are overwhelmed by this paradigm shift. It made me wonder why some people would be so distressed over the workload. We have had, in my year at least, a couple of people drop out mid-program because the stress was too hard to bear.
I mentioned in a post much earlier on that I had developed a level of humility by being in this class of highly intelligent people - I had these expectations built of myself that I would follow what I did in undergraduate: be the top of the class and get straight A's in everything. The first couple of weeks showed me that that probably wasn't going to happen, since grades are assigned on a curve. It devastated me, leading me to believe that I wasn't good enough, but I was so determined to prove I was that I spent every waking moment working on this stuff. Eventually, I realised that I didn't need to prove myself in this regard and I became a lot happier. I still worked, but I didn't despair on my (supposed) lack of ability. I no longer needed to be "perfect". This mindset later became really essential in the internship recruiting season because my value was held up against other people. I took rejection as a positive thing - "there were others who were a better fit" - than as a negative - "I wasn't good enough."
Just over the weekend, I was given an article to read which outlined a woman's research into people's mindsets: some people have the mindset that ability in inborn (you're either have it or don't), and others believe that an ability can be learned. Those students who have the former mindset despair in the face of failure, because they believe it's a reflection on their lack of an ability. Those students in the latter - it's best summed up in a quote that I wrote down and posted on my wall:
"Those with learning goals take necessary risks and don't worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn."
To me, everyone who comes to Tepper has to adopt this mindset. I know a few people who still have the fixed ability mindset, and they've managed to alienate people with some of their coping strategies (like overwhelming arrogance). A couple of others, like I said, dropped out. But you can't fail at any subject at Tepper unless you really try, and even then I think it's very very difficult, and so a large majority of us have now embraced the mantra "grades don't matter" and subsequently take classes for the joy of learning. Putting the expectation of being the top of the class will lead to the dismay and depression - and, as it turns out, CMU doesn't have very good resources available if a student does go down that path.
It turned out that a student committed suicide in December which triggered this particular article and subsequent discussion on the culture of CMU.
The author felt that CMU has a culture of stress and hard times, that the heavy workload on the student has caused many to feel depressed to that point of suicide. A number of people called out in support of that, feeling that the workload is too much for one person to bear. Tepper also has adopted this culture.
I'll admit, when I first read it, I was scornful. These kids came to CMU knowing it was an academic environment, not a "party" school, and yet complain because they can't "switch off".
But it was after a second read that I realised that the article was not blasting the culture, but rather the lack of support services available for students who are overwhelmed by this paradigm shift. It made me wonder why some people would be so distressed over the workload. We have had, in my year at least, a couple of people drop out mid-program because the stress was too hard to bear.
I mentioned in a post much earlier on that I had developed a level of humility by being in this class of highly intelligent people - I had these expectations built of myself that I would follow what I did in undergraduate: be the top of the class and get straight A's in everything. The first couple of weeks showed me that that probably wasn't going to happen, since grades are assigned on a curve. It devastated me, leading me to believe that I wasn't good enough, but I was so determined to prove I was that I spent every waking moment working on this stuff. Eventually, I realised that I didn't need to prove myself in this regard and I became a lot happier. I still worked, but I didn't despair on my (supposed) lack of ability. I no longer needed to be "perfect". This mindset later became really essential in the internship recruiting season because my value was held up against other people. I took rejection as a positive thing - "there were others who were a better fit" - than as a negative - "I wasn't good enough."
Just over the weekend, I was given an article to read which outlined a woman's research into people's mindsets: some people have the mindset that ability in inborn (you're either have it or don't), and others believe that an ability can be learned. Those students who have the former mindset despair in the face of failure, because they believe it's a reflection on their lack of an ability. Those students in the latter - it's best summed up in a quote that I wrote down and posted on my wall:
"Those with learning goals take necessary risks and don't worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn."
To me, everyone who comes to Tepper has to adopt this mindset. I know a few people who still have the fixed ability mindset, and they've managed to alienate people with some of their coping strategies (like overwhelming arrogance). A couple of others, like I said, dropped out. But you can't fail at any subject at Tepper unless you really try, and even then I think it's very very difficult, and so a large majority of us have now embraced the mantra "grades don't matter" and subsequently take classes for the joy of learning. Putting the expectation of being the top of the class will lead to the dismay and depression - and, as it turns out, CMU doesn't have very good resources available if a student does go down that path.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Week 1: Capstone
Over the Winter Break, I went back home to Australia to visit my family, introduce my partner to both family and country, and took a small trip to the Whitsundays to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef. During that time, I (purposefully) turned off my phone and email and rarely bothered to check my social networks. It was a switch-off from the last 1.5 years - no internship to worry about, no interview preparation, no networking, no worrying about loans.
It was thus I came back to my penultimate mini, relaxed, refreshed, and a tad disappointed*.
I'll post another entry in a couple of days for my usual end-of-mini elective summary, since obviously I had neglected to do so during the break. But my mini 3 is pretty easy. The only difference is is that I have a semester-long class that covers both minis and my capstone course (which also covers the two minis).
The Capstone course is meant to be the final jewel in your MBA crown, the summation of all you've learned in your degree program put to good work. Since I'm in a Track, my capstone is significantly different from what the "regular" students study (coincidentally, it also made me ineligible for the Germany-based capstone, where you spend 5 weeks travelling around Germany). It's called "Designing and Leading a Business" and it's with those in the Entrepreneurship track. Ideally, you take a product and make a business out of it. For those in the Technology Leadership track, the expectation is to be something that is technical, like hardware, software, whatever. We are also supposed to work in small groups.
The groups and the projects were already decided on by us at the end of last mini before the break. I was going to continue working on an entrepreneurial venture that I had tackled in a class in Mini 1: the facial-tracking software that was used in Avatar was a product of a CMU-faculty member who works for Disney, and we had decided that a good application of this technology would be in the video game industry (Disclaimer: this actually wasn't my idea! My team decided this). Ultimately, we decided that the inventor should open up his own studio and provide the motion capture services, similar to how Weta does. I had to leave the project after 1 mini, and two teammembers continued it through. However, when it came time to revisit the project to take it back up again for Capstone, the previous team said that the inventor had lost interest in the project and was unwilling to take it anywhere.
My team - consisting of a good friend and I - went to speak to our Track advisor about our predicament, since neither of us were willing to continue with a project that would go nowhere. A few ideas were thrown around, all of them based on one or both of us joining an existing team with their business idea/product. Then the professor mentioned a project of his called Livehoods. This technology had already been investigated as a business idea by another team in the Mini 1 class, and I remembered their presentation - they had concluded it was good for urban development. The concept seemed boring to me, and I wasn't too enthused, until I had heard that that team had pulled it together somewhat last minute for the class. The professor proceeded to show us emails from parties who were interested in using the technology and talked enthusiastically about the possibilities beyond basic marketing. I started to get a lot more interested. To cut a long story short, determining the business possibilities for Livehoods is now my capstone business project! Ideally, we want to go beyond targeted advertising (which is the easy answer) to something more exciting and useful.
It should be an interesting challenge in the weeks to come! We'll be working with students from the school of Computer Science, so this should be fun.
It was thus I came back to my penultimate mini, relaxed, refreshed, and a tad disappointed*.
I'll post another entry in a couple of days for my usual end-of-mini elective summary, since obviously I had neglected to do so during the break. But my mini 3 is pretty easy. The only difference is is that I have a semester-long class that covers both minis and my capstone course (which also covers the two minis).
The Capstone course is meant to be the final jewel in your MBA crown, the summation of all you've learned in your degree program put to good work. Since I'm in a Track, my capstone is significantly different from what the "regular" students study (coincidentally, it also made me ineligible for the Germany-based capstone, where you spend 5 weeks travelling around Germany). It's called "Designing and Leading a Business" and it's with those in the Entrepreneurship track. Ideally, you take a product and make a business out of it. For those in the Technology Leadership track, the expectation is to be something that is technical, like hardware, software, whatever. We are also supposed to work in small groups.
The groups and the projects were already decided on by us at the end of last mini before the break. I was going to continue working on an entrepreneurial venture that I had tackled in a class in Mini 1: the facial-tracking software that was used in Avatar was a product of a CMU-faculty member who works for Disney, and we had decided that a good application of this technology would be in the video game industry (Disclaimer: this actually wasn't my idea! My team decided this). Ultimately, we decided that the inventor should open up his own studio and provide the motion capture services, similar to how Weta does. I had to leave the project after 1 mini, and two teammembers continued it through. However, when it came time to revisit the project to take it back up again for Capstone, the previous team said that the inventor had lost interest in the project and was unwilling to take it anywhere.
My team - consisting of a good friend and I - went to speak to our Track advisor about our predicament, since neither of us were willing to continue with a project that would go nowhere. A few ideas were thrown around, all of them based on one or both of us joining an existing team with their business idea/product. Then the professor mentioned a project of his called Livehoods. This technology had already been investigated as a business idea by another team in the Mini 1 class, and I remembered their presentation - they had concluded it was good for urban development. The concept seemed boring to me, and I wasn't too enthused, until I had heard that that team had pulled it together somewhat last minute for the class. The professor proceeded to show us emails from parties who were interested in using the technology and talked enthusiastically about the possibilities beyond basic marketing. I started to get a lot more interested. To cut a long story short, determining the business possibilities for Livehoods is now my capstone business project! Ideally, we want to go beyond targeted advertising (which is the easy answer) to something more exciting and useful.
It should be an interesting challenge in the weeks to come! We'll be working with students from the school of Computer Science, so this should be fun.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Classroom vs. Real Life
I'm going to be spending some time in an aircraft in about a week. PIT -> LAX -> BNE (that's Brisbane Australia. Yes, I'm going home :)). The flight from PIT to LAX is quite long - about 5 hours, and we leave early evening. Normally, I would have a book with me, but it tends to put me to sleep (and I don't want that yet), so my other activity, cross-stitching, is going to be pulled out. It's rather tough for me to cross-stitch solely, I usually need some kind of aural entertainment.
When I went to Seattle/San Francisco at the beginning of the year, I had uploaded some podcasts about the life of consultants onto my iPod and listened to them while cross-stitching. Ultimately, it was those podcasts that showed me that I am not a good fit for Consulting. Remembering that I liked to listen to those podcasts, I spent some time looking for podcasts on the iTunes store. I bounced around the different categories - I went straight to Games and Hobbies first, then Careers, then just the Business section... and discovered the HBR podcasts.
Merrily, I started to download all the ones that sounded interesting. Career building was a must; there were a bunch around leadership, innovation, a few from HR-viewpoints... and then one caught my eye.
It's podcast "139: Is transparency always the best policy?" It was not the title that caught my eye, but rather the author - Paul Levy. Interestingly, in my last Power class, we had a case on Paul Levy and his role as CEO of the Beth Israel Deacon Medical Hospital. While the case itself was pretty dry, the last ten minutes of the class become quite lively when one of my classmates brought up the fact that he had had an intimate relationship with a female consultant he had brought on board. This was not covered in the case, and we started to talk about whether moral deficiencies had a right to be considered when studying the work of a leader (she was complaining that his having the affair was grounds to not talk about the case in class since it exemplified that sort of behavior).
In my opinion, what someone does in his or her private life has no bearing on that person's competence on the job. Now, this consultant did gain from being in a relationship with him, but had the relationship not been intimate, there would have been little to no outcry of favoritism - it's a given that in the business world, the adage "it's who you know" runs very true. And she seemed to be very competent in her job. It's very well known that if a new high-ranking person steps into a position in a company s/he will fill the lower ranks with her/his own people - VERY relevant for CEOs since they tend to clear out the executive suite when coming in. Is the presence of sex really that much of a difference? Or is it more that the consultant was female and that's the trope we as a society tend to fall on - that she slept her way to her position.
Regardless, I could go on forever about this since it's something that I have strong feelings about (being assessed on factors other than job competence and performance not sleeping to the top), but I'm not going to. I mention this situation to my partner, explained my position, and he makes this comment that for a business student, he's surprised at my lack of ethics. This made me scratch my head, because I had thought the relationship-benefits was a morality choice and the only thing that was unethical was that he had kept this potential conflict of interest from the Board.
While this post seems to ramble, it's highlighting three important things for the week:
- I'm less than a week away from going home - this is the first time in 2 years
- HBR, their podcasts, and other similar auditory experiences are worth investigating
- I can't really vocalize the difference between morality and ethics, or at least the difference in my mind.
When I went to Seattle/San Francisco at the beginning of the year, I had uploaded some podcasts about the life of consultants onto my iPod and listened to them while cross-stitching. Ultimately, it was those podcasts that showed me that I am not a good fit for Consulting. Remembering that I liked to listen to those podcasts, I spent some time looking for podcasts on the iTunes store. I bounced around the different categories - I went straight to Games and Hobbies first, then Careers, then just the Business section... and discovered the HBR podcasts.
Merrily, I started to download all the ones that sounded interesting. Career building was a must; there were a bunch around leadership, innovation, a few from HR-viewpoints... and then one caught my eye.
It's podcast "139: Is transparency always the best policy?" It was not the title that caught my eye, but rather the author - Paul Levy. Interestingly, in my last Power class, we had a case on Paul Levy and his role as CEO of the Beth Israel Deacon Medical Hospital. While the case itself was pretty dry, the last ten minutes of the class become quite lively when one of my classmates brought up the fact that he had had an intimate relationship with a female consultant he had brought on board. This was not covered in the case, and we started to talk about whether moral deficiencies had a right to be considered when studying the work of a leader (she was complaining that his having the affair was grounds to not talk about the case in class since it exemplified that sort of behavior).
In my opinion, what someone does in his or her private life has no bearing on that person's competence on the job. Now, this consultant did gain from being in a relationship with him, but had the relationship not been intimate, there would have been little to no outcry of favoritism - it's a given that in the business world, the adage "it's who you know" runs very true. And she seemed to be very competent in her job. It's very well known that if a new high-ranking person steps into a position in a company s/he will fill the lower ranks with her/his own people - VERY relevant for CEOs since they tend to clear out the executive suite when coming in. Is the presence of sex really that much of a difference? Or is it more that the consultant was female and that's the trope we as a society tend to fall on - that she slept her way to her position.
Regardless, I could go on forever about this since it's something that I have strong feelings about (being assessed on factors other than job competence and performance not sleeping to the top), but I'm not going to. I mention this situation to my partner, explained my position, and he makes this comment that for a business student, he's surprised at my lack of ethics. This made me scratch my head, because I had thought the relationship-benefits was a morality choice and the only thing that was unethical was that he had kept this potential conflict of interest from the Board.
While this post seems to ramble, it's highlighting three important things for the week:
- I'm less than a week away from going home - this is the first time in 2 years
- HBR, their podcasts, and other similar auditory experiences are worth investigating
- I can't really vocalize the difference between morality and ethics, or at least the difference in my mind.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Unwritten Tepper Rules
An exercise that we had to do in a class of mine was to list all the "unwritten Tepper rules." Some so-called "rules" were thrown in, such as:
- Unattended food in the Master's Lounge is fair game
- Don't turn up late to Margot's Optimization class
and a few others I forgot. But the one that has stuck to me since then (and it was an exercise that happened a couple of weeks ago) was this:
- Don't trust Student Services; their "randomizer" is never random.
The reason it has stuck with me is because it has become a real point of disillusionment and resentment amongst my fellow classmates. Normally the "randomizer" shows up when we are given tickets for an event at the Console Stadium. David Tepper owns a box there (as well as the Penguins), and so he passes tickets along to the school if he's not attending. When the NHL wasn't striking, it was pretty often we'd get the email out for getting put into a drawing for tickets to a game. We all knew that it was up to one of the staff members of Student Services to choose who was going based on whim; the only randomness was who actually signed up for a ticket. Since we had nothing to lose, the majority of us didn't really care.
Then came the Germany Trek signup. For the final mini in the second year, a small group of Tepper students are able to go on a four-week trek around Germany as their capstone project. It's highly popular and space is very limited. When the people who threw their names into the ring didn't get into the trek, some grumblings occurred.
Then came the Corporate Restructuring issue. This class is taught by Dean Dammon. It proved to be extremely popular with our class, with 113 people designating it their top class when pre-registration happened a couple of weeks ago. Even when another class slot was opened, there were too many people to accommodate for the 40-person class. So, Student Services "randomly" placed people in the class and the waitlist. Coincidently, a lot of the people who got into the Germany trek also got into this class; a lot of the people who didn't get into Germany got waitlisted. One that I know of also had an issue with being waitlisted for Corporate and Renewable Strategy in addition to being waitlisted for Germany and now Corporate Restructuring. Foul play was now being cried (although not loud enough for Student Services to hear it).
It puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth that blatant favoritism occurs in an environment that, by all manner of speaking, should be objective. While I understand, from my Power & Influence class, that life isn't fair and getting ahead is about buttering people up... I didn't expect it with my educational experience. Add this in with the general dissatisfaction I hold for the school services in general (all the other things that come with going to Tepper, NOT the education) this year, and that's a lot of unhappiness on my end. I'm not going to get into the services issue in detail - but tuition increased for the incoming class, and yet funding for our clubs and activities decreased significantly this year. We now have to pay more out-of-pocket for specific Tepper events, such as the Winter Formal that just passed. Tepper is the 6th most expensive school. I really wonder where our money goes towards, and whether it's worth putting our education and experiences on the line for fickle administrators who play favorites.
- Unattended food in the Master's Lounge is fair game
- Don't turn up late to Margot's Optimization class
and a few others I forgot. But the one that has stuck to me since then (and it was an exercise that happened a couple of weeks ago) was this:
- Don't trust Student Services; their "randomizer" is never random.
The reason it has stuck with me is because it has become a real point of disillusionment and resentment amongst my fellow classmates. Normally the "randomizer" shows up when we are given tickets for an event at the Console Stadium. David Tepper owns a box there (as well as the Penguins), and so he passes tickets along to the school if he's not attending. When the NHL wasn't striking, it was pretty often we'd get the email out for getting put into a drawing for tickets to a game. We all knew that it was up to one of the staff members of Student Services to choose who was going based on whim; the only randomness was who actually signed up for a ticket. Since we had nothing to lose, the majority of us didn't really care.
Then came the Germany Trek signup. For the final mini in the second year, a small group of Tepper students are able to go on a four-week trek around Germany as their capstone project. It's highly popular and space is very limited. When the people who threw their names into the ring didn't get into the trek, some grumblings occurred.
Then came the Corporate Restructuring issue. This class is taught by Dean Dammon. It proved to be extremely popular with our class, with 113 people designating it their top class when pre-registration happened a couple of weeks ago. Even when another class slot was opened, there were too many people to accommodate for the 40-person class. So, Student Services "randomly" placed people in the class and the waitlist. Coincidently, a lot of the people who got into the Germany trek also got into this class; a lot of the people who didn't get into Germany got waitlisted. One that I know of also had an issue with being waitlisted for Corporate and Renewable Strategy in addition to being waitlisted for Germany and now Corporate Restructuring. Foul play was now being cried (although not loud enough for Student Services to hear it).
It puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth that blatant favoritism occurs in an environment that, by all manner of speaking, should be objective. While I understand, from my Power & Influence class, that life isn't fair and getting ahead is about buttering people up... I didn't expect it with my educational experience. Add this in with the general dissatisfaction I hold for the school services in general (all the other things that come with going to Tepper, NOT the education) this year, and that's a lot of unhappiness on my end. I'm not going to get into the services issue in detail - but tuition increased for the incoming class, and yet funding for our clubs and activities decreased significantly this year. We now have to pay more out-of-pocket for specific Tepper events, such as the Winter Formal that just passed. Tepper is the 6th most expensive school. I really wonder where our money goes towards, and whether it's worth putting our education and experiences on the line for fickle administrators who play favorites.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Recruiting & International Image
I had lunch with some prospective students earlier this week, and one of them asked a couple of questions that I couldn't answer.
The first question:
"It seems as though a lot of students are getting jobs and internships from off-campus sources than on. Is this true?"
From statistics of the Class of 2011 (2012 is soon to be published in a new website format), about 70% of fulltime offers were from campus-based sources. They include Career Fairs as part of campus recruiting. I fall under the 30% who got my internship (and potentially my full time job) off-campus from my own networking - but, as I have said before - the CoC has been very helpful with my own recruiting efforts.
For students who are looking for more traditional MBA career paths, like banking, corporate finance, consulting and some marketing positions, there is a fair amount of on-campus recruiting. Consulting is huge here - all the big firms (except BCG, although I think that has just changed) come on campus.
Similarly, firms who have structured MBA programs also tend to recruit more on-campus than those who don't. It's probably too expensive to fly around the country to hold interviews for one position where an MBA would be helpful to have, as a lot of the job postings I'm looking at are.
But we were just told recently that our class of 2013 currently is beating the class of 2012 in terms of number of people with full-time offers. No-one in our class didn't get an internship who wanted an internship, so that was also heartening news. Turns out the class of 2014 is also being very proactive with their internship searches.
The final line here is to say that, yes, our CoC facilitates a lot of on-campus recruiting efforts. They're also very helpful for off-campus recruiting initiated by the student. But, there should never be an expectation that the CoC is there to find a job for you.
The second question:
"What is the value of Carnegie Mellon's MBA degree outside of the US?"
I spent some time chatting to people, which lead to some interesting conclusions. It turns out it's the Carnegie Mellon brand that holds the sway, not the Tepper name. Especially in China and India, Carnegie Mellon has a reputation for being highly innovative and technical.
The Economist has Tepper ranked as No. 17 internationally for B-schools.
Otherwise, I cannot answer this question. Does anyone have feedback for this?
The first question:
"It seems as though a lot of students are getting jobs and internships from off-campus sources than on. Is this true?"
From statistics of the Class of 2011 (2012 is soon to be published in a new website format), about 70% of fulltime offers were from campus-based sources. They include Career Fairs as part of campus recruiting. I fall under the 30% who got my internship (and potentially my full time job) off-campus from my own networking - but, as I have said before - the CoC has been very helpful with my own recruiting efforts.
For students who are looking for more traditional MBA career paths, like banking, corporate finance, consulting and some marketing positions, there is a fair amount of on-campus recruiting. Consulting is huge here - all the big firms (except BCG, although I think that has just changed) come on campus.
Similarly, firms who have structured MBA programs also tend to recruit more on-campus than those who don't. It's probably too expensive to fly around the country to hold interviews for one position where an MBA would be helpful to have, as a lot of the job postings I'm looking at are.
But we were just told recently that our class of 2013 currently is beating the class of 2012 in terms of number of people with full-time offers. No-one in our class didn't get an internship who wanted an internship, so that was also heartening news. Turns out the class of 2014 is also being very proactive with their internship searches.
The final line here is to say that, yes, our CoC facilitates a lot of on-campus recruiting efforts. They're also very helpful for off-campus recruiting initiated by the student. But, there should never be an expectation that the CoC is there to find a job for you.
The second question:
"What is the value of Carnegie Mellon's MBA degree outside of the US?"
I spent some time chatting to people, which lead to some interesting conclusions. It turns out it's the Carnegie Mellon brand that holds the sway, not the Tepper name. Especially in China and India, Carnegie Mellon has a reputation for being highly innovative and technical.
The Economist has Tepper ranked as No. 17 internationally for B-schools.
Otherwise, I cannot answer this question. Does anyone have feedback for this?
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