What is Dell Looking for When it Comes to MBA Talent?
When considering jobs and internships, MBAs may reflect on the diverse set of skills and experience they’ve acquired. And few industries are witnessing a greater reflection of those diverse skills than tech.
Dell Technologies is one organization that has demonstrated a major commitment to hiring MBAs for their fresh knowledge and ideas, as evident in its 2020 ‘Legacy of Good’ Plan.
10 Highest GPA Averages in the Business School World
The role of a GPA in MBA admissions is a hotly debated topic among both admissions officers and applicants. How much does it really matter? Does a low GPA destroy your chances of getting into a top business school?
One of the most important things to keep in mind when considering how your undergraduate GPA will impact the MBA admissions process is the fact that not all GPAs are alike. Far from a standardized figure, GPA and the way it’s measured can vary from school to school- even major to major. For this reason, it can be difficult to use the GPA’s of different applicants as any accurate predictor of success.
An student’s GPA will always be an important part of the admissions process, because it helps tell admissions officers about past academic success. Still, admissions officers are well aware of the high level of variability between GPA scores. Taking this into account, most officers working in MBA admissions will always look for more to an individual’s story than just the GPA. Numbers like a GMAT/GRE can often paint a much more exact picture of future academic success than the highly variable GPA. Designed for standardization and to test individuals on the specific challenges of an MBA, a GMAT score allows admissions officials specific insight into each application.
When considering GPA, a general rule of thumb is to not ride or die by this number—whether for better or for worse. A low undergraduate GPA doesn’t necessarily spell disaster for one’s MBA ambitions, and even a perfect 4.0 can’t save an application if the other factors don’t add up.
Overall, the exact number of an undergraduate GPA may be less important than the story behind it. If your low GPA was a result of illness or another external factor while in school, personal statements on the application are a great opportunity to give context behind the numbers and help tell your story to admissions officials.
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Nevertheless, getting a sense of the average undergraduate GPA for your prospective programs can help give provide crucial insights. Class profiles and statistics for business schools throughout the country can give prospective students a good sense of the typical student looks like in each program, and help applicants decide if they’ll be a good fit.
Below, we take a look at the top 10 MBA programs with the highest average undergrad GPA. Take a closer look at these top schools to get an idea of the average student in each program- and your potential future classmates.
10 Highest GPA Averages for MBAs
1. Stanford University Graduate School of Business
The highest GPA average for MBA students in the U.S. belongs to the class at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. For the Class of 2019, the average undergrad GPA was 3.74. This is down slightly from the school’s 2015 average of 3.75.
2. Harvard Business School
Often jockeying for position with Stanford, HBS took the number two spot this year with an average undergrad GPA score of 3.71. Three years ago, HBS still loomed large with a 3.66 average, and it just keeps getting higher.
3. Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley
Staying on the heels of Harvard, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley takes a top spot today with an undergraduate GPA of 3.7. This is a slight increase from the school’s 2015 average of 3.66.
The Haas School of Business GPA average for MBA applicants rose from 3.66 to 3.7 since 2015.
4. Yale School of Management
Significantly up from its GPA average of 3.6 in 2015, the Yale School of Management today has one of the highest undergraduate GPAs in the country at an average of 3.69.
5. Booth School of Business – University of Chicago
The MBA at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business has consistently maintained one of the top GPA averages for programs in the U.S., up from 3.59 in 2015 to 3.6 this year.
6. The Wharton School – University of Pennsylvania
The Wharton School, consistently recognized for having some of the country’s top business programs, is nothing if not consistent. With a 3.6 average for incoming students between 2012 and 2015, Wharton maintains a perfect 3.6 average GPA this year as well.
7. Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University
Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management is another school where consistency is key. From 2014 to today the school has remained at an undergraduate GPA average of 3.6
The average Kellogg undergraduate GPA for MBA students has stayed at 3.6 since 2014.
8. Tuck School of Business – Dartmouth College
The average GPA for incoming students at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business has gone up and down throughout the years, but has consistently stayed among the highest in the country- down slightly from 3.52 in 2015 to 3.51 this year.
9. Columbia University – Columbia Business School
The Columbia Business School has always received distinctions as one of the top MBA programs in the country, and their average GPA for incoming students at 3.5—which has stayed the same for more than five years—is no exception.
10. MIT – Sloan School of Management
Typically placing much higher on the list, the average Sloan School of Management at MIT has decreased in recent years, from 3.54 in 2015 to 3.49 for this year’s incoming class. The number nonetheless still remains among the highest average GPAs for MBA programs throughout the country.
Improv, Luxuries, and Napoleon: Check out These 10 Unique MBA Courses
Business can often be unfairly characterized as a dry field. But not every business school course fits the stereotype. Check out these 10 unique and interesting MBA electives.
Napoleon’s Glance
Columbia Business School offers this fascinating course in strategic intuition. The curriculum uses the teachings of early strategy literature as its foundation, though the bulk of readings and lectures are based on the content of two contemporary books on the subject: Napoleon’s Glance and The Art of What Works. William Duggan, the author of both books, leads the course. Duggan is a strategy expert and won the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2014.
Food and Agribusiness
This Harvard Business School course allows MBA’s to delve into the study of the global food industry. This course is helpful for B-schoolers specifically seeking a career in agriculture, or simply those pursuing consulting or investment banking, since the food industry is so expansive. The course explores the nuances of agribusiness, including how the once strictly local industry has become increasingly globalized.
Luxury Marketing
Another eyebrow-raising Harvard Business School course, Luxury Marketing helps students understand the nuances of luxury brand management. Specifically, the class will be structured in terms of three larger topics: The art of creating luxury brand equity, understanding the luxury sector, and the future of luxury. The course has seen lecturers like world-famous fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni.
HBS doesn’t just offer traditional MBA courses. Students interested in the finer things can also study Luxury Marketing.
Improvisational Leadership: In the Moment Leadership Skills
Improv as a means of facilitating team building and creative thinking is a growing trend in business. That’s why MIT’s Sloan School of Management offers an entire course on improv in business. The first two weeks essentially function like an Improv 101 course, with students learning the fundamental principles of improvisational performance. The subsequent four weeks focus on application, allowing students to practice applying improv principles to real-world business decisions.
Sure, it’s not Second City, so don’t expect students to make a Comedy Bang! Bang! appearance any time soon, but the course can help one develop skills not actively taught at most other business schools.
Leveraging Neuroscience for Business Impact
At University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the faculty understands the value of understanding the human brain in honing business acumen. This course demonstrates just that, as it educates MBA’s in the most recent neuroscience breakthroughs and how this information can be used to predict consumer behavior, manage employees, build teams, and enhance workplace productivity, as well as honing leadership skills.
Next Gen Fashion Retail
Though clothing fads aren’t the first thing people usually associate with MBA education, fashion is its own industry, and a cutthroat one at that. As part of its Luxury and Fashion MBA, New York University’s Stern School of Business offers a course on the future of fashion retail. In this course, students learn about the ever changing fashion landscape and the challenges that lie ahead as the internet cuts out the middleman between brand and customer.
Creativity
Though analytical thinking is important for many aspects of business, creativity is the driving force behind most innovation and problem-solving. NYU Stern’s Creativity class nurtures students’ potential for true out-of-the-box thinking in both work and life. MBA’s learn about the science of creativity and experiment with different creative approaches to problems.
Nobel Thinking
In the Nobel Thinking course at London Business School, students use actual Nobel Prize-winning topics to explore what makes a groundbreaking idea and how to emulate the type of thinking that leads to real breakthroughs. Each session chooses a topic, led by a faculty member, and explores the idea, motivations, and contributions that led to the Nobel award. The elective makes full use of LBS’s notable faculty as well as a number of guest lecturers.
The Nobel Thinking course at LBS utilizes the school’s vast array of celebrated guest lecturers.
Self Awareness
London Business School also offers a Self Awareness course that helps B-schoolers learn about themselves, and their own needs and motivations. Though studying self awareness may seem more like therapy than school, more and more MBA programs are emphasizing the value of authenticity in business. Relationships are essential in business, and the Self Awareness elective trains students to understand how they are perceived by others, so they can build connections and trust as they navigate their industry.
Cleantech to Market
At UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, MBA’s who take the Cleantech to Market course get to team up with scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to work on marketing advances in in solar, biofuel, battery, and smart grid/energy management tech. Business students help scientists commercialize the latest advances in sustainability.
The UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Cleantech to Market bridges the talent’s of the schools MBA candidates and scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Kobe Bryant Speaks at USC Marshall, and More – Los Angeles News
Take a look at some of the biggest news stories of the week from our favorite Los Angeles business schools.
Kobe Bryant, at USC Marshall Event, Shares His Grit and Competitive Edge – USC News Room
The Performance Science Institute, a multidisciplinary center at the USC Marshall School of Business, recently hosted five-time-NBA champion, Los Angeles icon, venture capitalist, and recent Academy Award-winner Kobe Bryant, who spoke to a sold out crown at USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Bryant discussed a number of topics, from his early days of playing basketball to the challenges of changing course from basketball to business. Bryant has become a leader and innovator in the field of business in addition to his basketball success. He established a $100 million venture capital fund in 2013 and debuted Granity Studios, a media and animation studio, after his retirement in 2016.
Bryant speaking at USC / Photo via William Vasta
The event also included the awarding of the Jake Olson Vision Awards, a new scholarship established by USC student leader Jake Olson. The scholarship, which was established as an award for students who have had to overcome adversity to join USC, was awarded to Cailin Stroyke and Isiah Dixon at the start of the event.
To read more about Kobe Bryant and his visit to USC Marshall, click here.
The 29 Most Powerful Business Degrees in the World – Business Insider
A new ranking covered by Business Insider names the Anderson School of Management at UCLA among the most powerful business degrees in the world. Along with the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and the Stanford Business School, Anderson is one of three schools from California to make the list.
The ranking was compiled by the education company QS, which compiles a list of top business degrees around the world each year. The ranking takes into consideration factors such as an institution’s reputation among employers and in the academic community, in addition to the number of research citations the school gets in published papers within the fields of business and management. The Anderson School of Management dropped two places this year from 16th to the 18th highest ranked business degree in the world. While the list includes several schools from throughout the United States, top schools from the U.K. and Europe—like the London Business School—as well as top schools from Australia also make the list.
Click here to read more about the most powerful business degrees in the world.
Digital Transformation: At a Crossroads – UCI Paul Merage School of Business Newsroom
The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine recently hosted the annual Road to Reinvention conference at the end of March, hosting a number of top speakers within the industry to share their insights on digital innovation. The event was hosted by the Center of Digital Transformation (CDT) at Merage, with the CDT’s founder—professor of information systems and computer science Vijay Gurbaxani—as the keynote speaker.
“We are at a crossroads,” Gurbaxani said in his opening speech. “Technology is extraordinarily powerful and can lead to fantastic things for society and the economy. But, we have to manage the risks. It is incumbent upon every one of us to lead this change responsibly.”
Read more about the insights shared at the 2018 Road to Reinvention conference here.
Inside the Relaunch of the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association
Entrepreneurship at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley is getting an upgrade. Right now the university is working to rebrand and relaunch the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association (BEA). While the newly updated BEA isn’t available yet, it’s in the works and will have many exciting announcements over the next weeks and months.
We were lucky enough to get an inside look at what’s coming to the BEA in a talk with Luca Cosentino, MBA’19, the President and Co-Chair of the BEA and the man behind the re-launch. Here’s the inside scoop!
MetroMBA: What is the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association (BEA)?
Luca Cosentino: The Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association is meant to be the one-stop shop for entrepreneurship at Berkeley. Ideally, everything that happens around entrepreneurship should be coordinated or monitored by the BEA. It’s not just for business school, but also for students across the campus. It’s the umbrella under which all entrepreneurship initiatives, partners, mentors, funding, and resources will rest.
The BEA has been at Berkeley for a while as a collaborative effort, and it did a great job before, but we are adding to it. Prior to this relaunch, the BEA focused on one-off events and bringing founders to school. They did a great job regarding inspiring people to entrepreneurship. We want to keep doing what they did—the education side—but add the practical side. In this sense, the innovation is massive.
We are rebranding BEA. We are moving from one-off events to something that the potential to be around for twenty years and could be translated into a core university program matching what the University currently offers on entrepreneurship.
The one thing I want to underline is that is that every university has entrepreneurship programs where you’re matched with other people, but the value here is that we’re connecting people from different schools around the community of entrepreneurship. We are working to build the entrepreneurial community at Berkeley. The value of this community is that it won’t be agnostic to one specific initiative but will serve as an umbrella for all.
MM: Why is the BEA important and what is its goal?
LC: Before getting started with BEA, I spoke to a number of people from different business schools around the country. I wanted to know how each school dealt with entrepreneurship and how it was defined. What I noticed was that there were a bunch of great resources for helping students understand what entrepreneurship is, but it was really hard to find programs that helped students move from zero to one—from a basic idea to “Okay, let me try.” Students have access to many great initiatives where they can brainstorm and talk about their ideas, but to move from an idea to start effectively doing something around that idea is a completely different story.
We believe that if we give business students all the weapons and tools they need to start working from day zero, it’s going to have a massive impact on everyone’s career.
We also noticed that, too often, schools separate skills. For example, the computer science department is separated from the data scientist group and the information group. But we all know that entrepreneurship, great ideas, and great companies come from different skill sets, backgrounds, and diverse teams. We want to encourage that.
A student’s life is busy. Their schedule is packed, so going out and finding people that you like and that you want to work with that are aligned with your ideas is pretty difficult. We want to make this process faster. We believe that this is a great value we’re going to bring to students.
The application of the BEA is very big and far-reaching. There’s a strong impact on entrepreneurship itself, but also for employers and students. We all know that employers are keener to hire people from an entrepreneurial background. There’s a definite advantage for companies who bring on employees who have gone through capitalist discovery, testing, etc. This program really offers 360 degrees of benefits.
CA: What will the BEA offer?
MM: As an organization, we have a few missions starting this year and moving into next year.
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Encourage Entrepreneurship
Our first mission is to encourage people to start companies. When you think about the typical MBA student who takes two years off to come to school and study, their main goal is to gain more experience and skills. Many MBA students also come to business school because they want to do something different, or possibly, follow their passions. But, when it comes to business school, entrepreneurship, generally, has a less relevant place compared to companies who offer internships or full-time positions. What we’re trying to do is encourage students to start companies and give entrepreneurship a try.
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Create Entrepreneurial Collaboration
The main innovation that I’m most excited about and what we’re working hard to start in the fall is a program that connects students and individuals from across different schools and different backgrounds. For the first time in Berkley’s history, it will be an initiative led by students and coordinated across different schools. I believe it will be the largest program ever created at Berkeley connecting technical and business students, student clubs, VCs, mentors, funding sources, and institutions.
The goal of the program is to take great ideas and start them along the process, through customer discovery to business model evaluation. The steps are as follows:
- First, the program will allow people to present their innovative ideas.
- From there, the BEA would match the idea to a team of three or four people with different interests.
- Then, over three to four months, that team would work together to gather every resource they need to transform the idea into a workable concept company.
Currently, the program name has not been announced, but it will be released in a few weeks. For now, everything has already been put in place, and Berkeley is ready to launch their first cycle in Fall 2018.
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Connect the Entire Entrepreneurial Community
The next focus for the BEA is to connect students with startups. There are many students and MBAs who are not 100 percent keen to start their own company but are curious about what it’s like. Our goal is to offer them a part-time experience, while in school, that offers them a unique chance to test their skills in a start-up environment.
Part of this focus will also be to connect the startup ecosystem at Berkeley. That means connecting startups, accelerators, VCs, etc. Already, we have collaborations with many different communities including:
- Participating Clubs: Computer Science Undergrad Association (CSUA), Computer Science Graduate Association (CSGSA), FemTech, Mobile Developers at Berkeley, Data Science Society, Upsilon Pi Epsilon Computer Science Honor Society, and many more coming.
- Collaborations: Xoogler community (community of ex-Googlers), Google Launchpad, Startup Grind, Dorm Fund, Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship, SkyDeck Startup Squad, Citris Foundry, Food Club, and more.
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Entrepreneurial Education
Finally, the last thing we’re launching is an educational program that will include courses, a new website, a new blog, and a new podcast (all launching soon) that will include information from entrepreneurs, venture capitalist, product managers, blockchain, and more.
Other educational programs that we will be launching include:
- A cross-schools educational event that we hope will help bridge the cultural gap between students in different schools.
- Life as an Entrepreneur: a seven-week class with a variety of speakers including founders, VCs, etc.
- Educational events around hot technical topics.
Currently, the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association is still in its early relaunch phase. The newly updated website will be up in the next few weeks so check back on the school website and the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program regularly to catch its launch.
How To Join The Supply Chain Management Job Revolution in San Francisco
Like blockchain, the phrase supply chain management has been retconned into an inexact wallpaper of business jargon. But it doesn’t change the fact that supply chain managers (SCMs) are in higher demand than ever.
