Student Life at BU Questrom School of Business: June 2011

June 29, 2011

Optimizing The Summer Before Your MBA

Are you wondering how to best prepare for your first year of B-School? Are there things you can be doing before you start the program?

Rising second year student, Anya Thomas shares here tips:

Find housing and move in by the beginning of August (don’t wait until September 1^st, your classes start before then and you’ll be stressed if you’re still moving)

If you can . . . take a few weeks off of work and use the time to move to Boston, rest, travel, spend time with family. Basically get refreshed and be ready to give 100% when the semester begins.
Do informational interviews. You’ll get more training for this during Pre-term, but take advantage of contacts you’ll be leaving behind in NYC, San Francisco, Lima, Beijing etc. Use the fact that you’re a student to put people at ease and to learn about roles, functions, and industries that you were always curious about.
While you do not need to spend a lot of time preparing for specific subjects, you can get a head start or review key principles by reading some of the following books:

FINANCE: Corporate Finance (Plus MyFinanceLab Student Access Card Package (2nd Edition)
By Jonathan Berk, Peter DeMarz
STATISTICS: The Manager's Guide to Statistics
by Erol A Pekoz
ECONOMICS: Managerial Economics
by Susan Samuelson
D. The Accounting Primer will be sent to you. Try and check this over before school starts.

**(note the professors will not post the updated reading list until August, so you may want to check these out from a library or just wait until the exact edition is posted

4). Connect with your future classmates through facebook, BU clubs/organizations you plan to join, contacts you made at Open House. Also, there are several 2^nd year students who are in Boston over the summer and they would love to meet you.

5) Make a list of companies that you are most interested in learning about or working for and search your LinkedIn network to see if people in your social sphere work for these companies.

6) When you get to Boston, visit the gardens in Boston Common, go on a Duck Tour, eat Italian food in the North End, or Clam Chowder at one of Boston’s famous seafood restaurants. Get to know your new city.

I hope that gives you some good ideas. All of us here at BU look forward to welcoming all the incoming students to campus in the coming months!!

Publish Post

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June 9, 2011

My Take on the First Year of the MBA Program

Post by:

Ivan Busulwa: MBA, MPH 2012
Health Sector Management & International Health
MBA Council

One of those late nights in the grad lounge.
(L-R: Juan Machado, Sergio Floris, Roman Sverdlov, Ivan Busulwa)

First Semester

Now that I’m done, I’d like to share with you my assessment of the first year of BU’s MBA program. I have come to realize that the program is as much about time management as anything else. There are lots of on-campus & off-campus activities, optional courses to take elsewhere, keynote speakers to listen to, and extracurricular events like the cohort cup to participate in. Oft-time, I wish I could be in two places at once!

Despite all the class work that will be thrown at you especially during the 1^st semester, I strongly encourage you to participate in the extracurricular events, get involved with the clubs, and get to know the second year students and mentors that will be assigned to you. I found these quite helpful since they usually went out of their way to listen to students’ issues and guide 1^st years on how best to navigate the hurdle that is the first semester I. My only regret is that I didn’t get involved with as many clubs as much as I’d have liked to.

And did I mention there’s a lot to see in Boston? Fellow students from the area gave me a useful list of places I should visit before I ever think about leaving the city. There’s the Quincy market, the Aquarium, Fenway Park (which you’ll get to see a part of during orientation), all the pubs along Comm. Ave, and inevitably, a Red Sox game. Being the fair weather fan that I am, I’ll probably go to one of their games before the close of the year.

Cohort B after the finals. Goodbye first year… Enter second year!

Second Semester

I felt the 2^nd semester went way better than the first one, especially since I got an internship early. This allowed me to focus on lots of other things without having to worry about where I was going to be in the summer. Besides the internship, there was a lot more to be happy about. The winter blossomed into a beautiful spring and the class work got more manageable. I also felt I got to spend more time with friends and to participate in events like the cohort cup. I decided to wrap up the year with a trip to New York City. I haven’t been to many places yet but I can certainly say NYC ranks up there as one of the grandest I’ve visited (after Boston). And the best part is that it’s only a $15 bus ride away and 4 hours from school. At such prices, I’m considering making the trip down there a weekly ritual.Although I had been forewarned, only now do I notice that MBA hours move faster than the real time. I just watched the 2^nd years graduate and I still can't believe I'm less than one year away from joining them.

Overall, at the expense of sounding cliché, I feel the biggest value one gets from the MBA is the ‘experience’ with other students. Just sharing classes and spending time with various people from different backgrounds and having diverse personalities & perspectives, is one of the MBA's greatest values – and it's difficult to attach a price to that. There's definitely the in-class knowledge from the professors but I don’t think that even comes close.

In fact, at the close of the semester, I felt somewhat sad since we weren’t going to be seeing much of each other during the 2^nd year as we’ll no longer have the same classes in the same cohorts. Despite all the hard work though, I can confidently say that this has been one of the finest nine months I've ‘experienced’!

Some Cohort B members after the MBA talent show. Still don’t understand how we didn’t win the cup! (L-R: Kerri Carlson, Ivan Busulwa, Assad the Assassin, Siddharth Garg, Akshay Bhargava, Rachel Dacwag)