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Welcome to MBA Podcaster the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Catherine Girardeau. On today’s show, Prepping for a MBA, should you take classes before applying to business school? What about before arriving on campus? Let’s face it, getting into the MBA program of your choice isn’t always easy. This may be especially true for younger people with less work experience or would-be applicants with liberal arts or science backgrounds. Valid pursuits but not directly linked in an admission’s directors mind to making someone business school ready. In this show, we’ll talk with some experts, program administrators, a professor and a student to hear their advice for non-business major about getting some coursework under their belts before applying for or entering a MBA program.

First let’s meet our guests. In 2006 Meena Putatanda was a student in Vanderbilt University’s Summer Business Intensive the accelerated program, “I think going to accelerator was one of the reasons that I got into business school.” Later in the show she’ll tell you why. Next is Dale W. Maeder, an instructor with UCLA Extension. He teaches Mathematics for the business school bound, “It’s finite and it’s focused and you do it because you want to augment your preparation.” Keith Gatto directs programs at UC Berkeley Extension which he says can, “Help students kind of garnish their credential and make sure that they get into graduate school of their choice.” And Charissa Asbery is Director of Business Programs at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education, “What we offer is it’s almost like a mini-MBA, there are graduate level classes, they are taught at a very similar level to the classes you would get in a first year MBA sequence.” What do all of these people have in common? The two program directors are in the business of helping you get the academic background you need to get into business school. The instructor’s job is to make his subject matter relevant for future MBAs. And Meena, the former student was helped along in her quest for the skills and savvy she needed to succeed in her MBA program by people like them.

Let’s start with Meena Putatanda to find out why she took business classes before getting her MBA. After getting her degree in bio-medical engineering from Vanderbilt, Putatanda did glaucoma research at the university medical center but realized she didn’t enjoy lab work as much as she’d expected. “I wanted a career that is more people facing as opposed to being behind the scenes.” She decided a MBA might help her transition from research to a people centric career but then, “I realized most people who go for their MBA they do tend to have more traditional business experience which I obviously didn’t have.” Putatanda said her acceptance to Vanderbilt’s Owen School of Management was partly contingent upon her taking some prep courses so she applied to the highly competitive summer business institute there, the Accelerator program. “I did the Accelerator program the summer before going into business school. I thought Accelerator would give me a good frame of reference because in business school they talk about life experience when talking about the different concepts in business school. And I thought Accelerator would be a great way to get a lot of experiences in a short amount of time.”

Putatanda found that despite her lack of academic business background she did have some transferrable skills to bring to creating real life business solutions, “Because everything is a group project and everyone has to play to their strengths. Because of my engineering training I think I brought a lot of critical thinking skills, a lot of problem solving skills.” Going into Accelerator, Putatanda said she lacked some skills critical to succeeding in business, “First and foremost, confidence in being able to work in a business setting. In undergrad when we’re working as a group we’re doing numerical problems but in the business world they’re more soft skills. You have to try to target your project to their audience, to your client. That is something I had never done before. So basically taking the skills that I had and applying them in a very different way. Understanding the psychology of working within a team and trying to create the most innovative solution that we can together. So Accelerator just helped me gain more experience and more insight in how to do that. We worked with Dodge and tried to build a marketing strategy campaign targeting millennials for their new Caliber model. So how do you develop of a good marketing plan and how do you pitch to the executive and tell them that this is a good idea?” It turns out Accelerator was no petri dish. Putatanda said of the business projects and the clients, “This is the real deal. The executives actually came down, they were in our auditorium and we were presenting to them.”

So with a little help from some intensive and solid pre-business school preparation this medical technology undergrad who had expected to go into a life in the laboratory instead got her MBA and leveraged that into her current position as an implementation consultant for McKessen Provider Technologies, a decidedly people facing job.  “The greatest thing that the program gave to me is confidence that I can think differently, I can work with people who have very different backgrounds than me. With some hard work, with guidance, taking the time to understand my project, understand the industry in which I am working in, I can actually develop solutions that will be valuable to clients.”

Next, let’s find out more about the inner workings of a pre-MBA course of study. Keith Gatto directs programs at the University of California Berkeley’s Extension including the MBA Foundation, a concentration in the business certificate program. He said one purpose of the program is, “Helping the student come into a validated program that will give them the basics in business, the language, the tools, the theory to kind of augment their applications so that a prospective school can see that they can act successfully and actually do the academic work successfully at that level.” What does the curriculum cover? Gatto explains, “Our first course that we suggest you take is our Essentials of Business course and as you can kind of tell by the title it really is an overview or a survey type of course to really give them an overview of the business world. Then have our Academy for Managers course and this course is basically designed for people who are not necessarily going to accounting functions but are going to be presented with accounting tools such as spreadsheets and different reports and so how a manager will look at that information and use that information to make decisions on the job. And that’s what this course kind of helps you do. We then of course have our introduction to micro-economics. We have an introduction to statistics which is very necessary for any MBA program. We also have organizational management and again this is giving the student a look at how organizations work, the structure of organizations, management techniques and then we allow them to take an elective and their elective some of the ones we suggest would be Fundamentals of Finance, Introduction to Macro Economics, Essentials of Marketing, Management and Human Resources or even an Information Technology Management course. However, one of the things we do like to do with the electives is to really look at the students background and round out the students overall academic background.”

Gatto said since the program is geared for working adults it can take between a year and two and half years to complete but working isn’t a strike against you Gatto said because the teachers take advantage of work experience students bring to the classroom. “One of the functions of the teacher is to facilitate to reach into the student and use their experience to bring out the concepts that the instructor is trying to teach. And that’s really different that a traditional undergraduate and in a lot of ways the traditional graduate program which is really about delivering information to the students and the students then assimilating.” I asked Gatto when the best time would be for someone to take the MBA Foundation coursework, “As a rule of thumb, if you’re thinking about going on for a higher education and a graduate degree I would say take a course or two and see if you really kind of gel with the academics and this is something that you really want.” Vanderbilt Accelerator alumni, Meena Putatanda agreed, “I think a pre-business school program is a great way to actually see if a person wants to even enter the business world at all.”

UC Berkeley program extension Gatto said if you’re a liberal arts or technology undergrad, “And you really want to go for a MBA I would take a certificate program, have that on my application to prove to the committee that I can do post-bachelorette work.” Gatto said beyond beefing up their applications for MBA programs students in the business certificate MBA concentration at UC Berkeley Extension benefit from very committed teachers, “Our instructors not only do they have the academic background necessary to teach at this level but they are also practitioners in the field. Here at Berkeley we’ve really worked very hard to create a community so when students come to Berkeley they’re entering into a community of learners and our instructors are very dedicated to that whole idea of building community. The instructors are very willing to sit down and give their knowledge on what the business world looks like, what the options are for the student and how some of these courses that they are learning will actually help them in their everyday business life. You know no one gets rich teaching part-time at a college. What they are here for is because they really feel like they want to give back to their industry, these are accomplished people who want to give back and they’re here to do that and the way that they are doing that is helping future generations to prepare to be good, ethical business people.”

Let’s take another reason for taking prep courses; if your GPA isn’t quite what you wish it were or it’s been a few years since you solved a quadratic equation you may want to refresh those math skills. But instead of taking a general mathematics course at UCLA extension you can take math tailored for the MBA bound. Instructor Dale Maeder said he usually first meets his math students in his GMAT prep course, “And then usually they tell me, you know I think I need a little bit more, my GPA was a little low, I wasn’t that great in math, I think business school would like to see me show some initiative. Extra math courses sometimes are a nice way to show the schools that you have initiate and that you really do have math skills it’s just it’s been a few years and you want to show them that you can do it. Business department I teach a Pre-Calculus course called Mathematics for Management, a Calculus course called Business Applications of Calculus.” So when students do decide to take one of Maeder’s math courses what is their reasoning? “I think about half of them tell me that they’re beefing up their application. The other half say no I want to learn some skills that I will need. I’d like to be ready when I am in business school so that when we talk about regression analysis or when we talk about probability you know in business applications problems I will have some knowledge there.”

Why would someone take mathematics for business class as opposed to just any mathematics class? What’s the difference? “Math is a language, it’s not really difficult on its own it’s a language for many disciplines so if you took Pre-Calculus for poets or Pre-Calculus for Physics or for Journalism there would be many different applications and you really have to show people that is works here with annuities but it will also work with this probability example, this will also work over here when we talk about logic or linear programming. I do my best to apply all of the math to this particular field when I teach these courses.”

Maeder cautioned that while his students say his courses were invaluable in helping them on their applications and in getting through their first year of B-school, an extension course is not a substitute for a MBA. “It has its purpose and it’s finite and it’s focuses and you do it and you do it because your counselors suggest the idea and you want to augment your preparation but it isn’t the same as the real thing.”

Is the credit earned in prep courses transferrable to MBA programs? Not at Columbia said Charissa Asbery, Director of Business Programs in Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education, “As a general policy the top rank schools such as Columbia do not accept credit from anywhere. If you take a business class from Harvard’s Graduate School of Business they will not give you credit for it. They will allow you to take an exemption exam so you pass out of the class.” But Asbery said that doesn’t diminish the value of taking prep courses in her program before your MBA, “If you can successfully complete a very demanding series of graduate courses from what’s basically a world class university it makes an impression, how could it not? What we offer is it’s almost like a mini-MBA. They are graduate level classes, they are taught to a very similar level to the classes that you would get in a first year MBA sequence. Because the requirements for program you don’t have to have calculus, you don’t have to have some of the math skills. It’s not always at that level but it’s very close. It looks pretty impressive they’ve seen most of the business subjects when they apply and honestly the students I talk to often when they get into a MBA program and start classes were just relieved their first year is so much easier.”

Asbery says the program she runs can level the playing field between non-business and business undergrads by providing a solid background in business studies. “Students will have exposure to a finance class, probably an economics class, definitely marketing, management, accounting. It shows that they’re well rounded in business studies and that when they go to business school the work is just significantly easier so they are on-par with the other students; they are not struggling to master basic concepts.”

Both Columbia’s Charissa Asbery and Keith Gatto of UC Berkeley Extension said they aren’t able to track concrete date on whether their MBA prep programs actually get people into business school. “Partly because we are unable to require students to report on their admissions whether they pursue the admissions or where they were accepted. So we hear back from those that choose to report. I can say that from the students, I teach in the program and also directed and have for years, that the response to the program is overwhelmingly positive and it’s not at all unusual for me to hear back from several students every year who say that it was a great experience whether they pursued the MBA or to enhance their position in business that it was invaluable.”

Asbery said one of the things that makes the business programs at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education unique is their small class sizes and access to electives. “We are allowed to really target the specific interest of every student and that is unusual. We have a lot of advisors and a lot of elective classes and if someone comes in with more of an interest in finance we’ll tailor the program to what they want to do.”

How will you know if taking pre-MBA prep courses is right for you? We’ll give Dale Maeder of UCLA the last word, “First and foremost, talk to some academic counselors. I mean clearly go to the schools that you’re interested in and just lay it on the table and say here’s my undergraduate grade point average, here’s my GMAT score or here’s what I think I’m going to get on my GMAT (if you’re not there yet), here’s my interest, here’s my work experience, here’s the field that I’d like to go into. And lay it out and then say I know you can’t give me a decision here, I’m just asking for a casual comment but how important would it be for me to supplement my education now through some kind of extended learning program and you know what class do you recommend?”

Many extension program courses such as those at UCLA and UC Berkeley extensions are available online making them accessible to everyone. Whether you can be physically present on campus or take course remotely in this competitive year it’s worth evaluating your application to see if you might need the extra edge a few well placed, business focused classes could provide.

For more information, a transcript of this show or to register for your weekly MBA podcast visit mbapodcaster.com. This is MBA Podcaster. I’m Catherine Girardeau. Thanks for listening and tune in next time when we explore another topic of interest in your quest for a MBA.