New Kaplan GMAT Course

The folks over at Kaplan are making great strides to improve their GMAT course. I got the opportunity to participate in a webinar giving me a sneak preview at what changes they are making to the program. This was especially cool for me since I actually took a Kaplan GMAT course a few years ago (twice, actually). Needless to say, it’s a totally different program than the one I took!

One of the biggest changes they are making is to their online system. First of all, it’s completely redesigned and now very visually appealing and user-friendly. Taking advantage of the power of social networking, Kaplan has created their own online community where you can connect with other pre-MBA students. It’s good practice for all the networking you’ll be doing in business school. Also, on the online system, students can watch courses on demand (in case you miss a day), attend live online events and track your course progress. Your personalized center also gives you recommended next steps based on your scores using a technology called Smart Reports. You can also ask questions to your GMAT instructor through the new interface.

As far as the practice tests go, each student takes eight practice computer adaptive tests (CATs) throughout the course. Before, some of those tests you would have to take at home. Now, Kaplan students have the option to go to an official Pearson GMAT testing center to take any of those CATs to get an official test day experience. Honestly, there is nothing better than that. I remember I took a handful of practice tests both at home and in the classroom, but I had no idea what to expect on my actual test day. Had I had the opportunity to experience a real Pearson testing center, I probably wouldn’t have been so nervous!

If you are like me, the quant section is the hardest part of the GMAT. If only I were taking the GMAT now, I definitely would have signed up for Kaplan’s new math refresher course. Students enrolled in a GMAT course can purchase Math Refresher for $299. They receive three 2.5 hour sessions that strictly cover the hard math stuff plus two hours of private tutoring. For students not enrolled in a Kaplan GMAT course, Math Refresher retails for $499. (Note, we’ve also got a new video from MBA PodTV coming out full of tips on mastering the quant section on the GMAT. It will be live on our YouTube page soon!)

The best part about this new Kaplan GMAT course is that it’s the same price as before! So if you were already planning on taking a Kaplan GMAT course, you’re in luck. All these new upgrades are yours, as long as you signed up no earlier than Jan. 21. AND REMEMBER: MBA Podcaster listeners get 10% off Kaplan’s GMAT courses. Use the code MBAPOD10 when registering.

Check out kaplangmat.com to see all the fancy new upgrades yourself. Good luck!

The MBA Tour is Bringing Business Schools to YOU!

Still planning to apply to business school this year to start Fall 2010? One way to get an edge is to meet face to face with the admissions directors that will be reviewing your application! The MBA Tour gives you that opportunity. Over the next few weeks they are traveling all over the globe bringing the top business school representatives together to provide advice and networking opportunities. Here is a quick overview of their upcoming event calendar:

Jan. 21 - MOSCOW

Jan. 23 - DUSSELDORF

Feb. 6 - NEW YORK

Feb. XX - WASHINGTON DC (Cancelled due to extreme weather conditions! Contact alyssa@thembatour.com with any concerns.)

Click on the location nearest you to see a full agenda and list of participating business schools. And if you go, we'd love to hear about your experience in the comments section!

Getting Your Employer to Fund Your MBA - What You Owe Your Company

Getting an MBA is not cheap - between tuition and living expenses, the bills can run up to $100,000. Wouldn’t it be great if you could find someone to pay for your MBA? One place to look is your employer or potential employer. Many companies have tuition reimbursement programs, fellowships and other means to finance their employees MBAs. I’ve been working on an upcoming MBA Podcaster show titled “Getting Your Employer to Fund Your MBA.” In the podcast, we’ll explore a variety of situations including people who work for companies who have existing programs for funding MBA’s and those whose companies don’t. Some of the questions we’ll address:

     Why would a company fund your MBA?
     Does it make a difference if you work at a small company or a large company?
     Do economic hard times mean that continued education benefits are going by the wayside?

I’ll be asking these questions and more of my guests and keeping you posted along the way with blog updates.

One of the issues that came up with almost everyone I talked to is that while employers will pay for your MBA, there are often strings attached.

Yoichi N. works in the financial industry, so would like to keep his company and last name private. He goes to school part-time and works full-time. His company has a few programs that will pay for MBA’s, but employees need to have one year invested in the company before they are eligible.

“For anyone that works full time, they basically have what they call tuition reimbursement. It has to be an MBA program or some type of accreditation. The company will pay up to 90% or $10,000 whichever is less.”

And Yoichi must keep up his grades.

“When I started, they said [they required a] ‘B’ average, but they’ve actually lowered their requirements to a ‘C.’ If you don’t get anything better than a ‘C’, you’re not going to get reimbursed for that class. But in a graduate school program... getting a ‘B’ is not very hard, so it’s a fair deal for being reimbursed and you actually learn something from it.”

The 90%/$10,000 tuition reimbursement doesn’t require any back end commitment. Yoichi says his company has another program.

“They will pay the full amount if you commit at least 3 years after, but I’m not sure if I want to commit 3 more years to my company.”

Other people I talked to are taking advantage of a full-ride to B-school. Karla Krause worked for Dell for four years before she enrolled in the MIT Leaders for Global Operations program with full backing from Dell.

“I knew by accepting Dell’s sponsorship I am contractually obligated to go back, but I wouldn’t have signed the contract had I not wanted to go back to Dell. I definitely had a great experience at Dell in the 4 years prior to coming here. Dell’s been great to me and I’m excited to go back, but I am contractually obligated. I could pay back the sponsorship contribution and choose to go somewhere else, but I’m planning to go back to Dell.”

Take away: assess your situation, what your opportunities post-MBA will look like and what your company will require you to commit to and you can decide on what program is appropriate for you.

Learn more of what Yoichi N., Karla Krause and the other guests have to say about company-financed MBAs in our upcoming show that will be in a couple of weeks. Other guests on the show include:

• Lynda Boman, principal, Boman Accounting Group, who will address what you need to know for your tax return if your company pays for your MBA;
• John Gianvittorio, manager at Raytheon and student UCLA Anderson School, who says that the economy hasn’t affected Raytheon’s decision to fund MBA’s;
• Jay, small tech business owner, who will talk about what it would take for him to sponsor an employee;
• Yvon Le Renard, executive at Alcatel (a French telecommunications firm) and student at Kellog-Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Executive MBA program, who gives the best argument in support of your case for company funding;
• Jennifer Powers, Manager of Marketing and Business Development for the City of Brampton, in Ontario, Canada, who will discuss why she decided to fund her MBA herself; and
• Nicole, a financial services executive and student at a top 10 school, who will lay out the best way to have your company fund your MBA.

Staying Fit During the MBA Program

This blog post was influenced by one of our listeners! We received a question asking: "How do you stay fit while working toward an MBA after all those demanding hours?" It's definitely true that getting your MBA demands a lot of your time. That's why time management is such an important skill to master.

Since Mia and I are both currently in our MBA programs, we both gave our two cents:

Mia's response:

"It's really hard! I gained 17 pounds so far during the MBA program. I try to schedule work-outs into my calendar, but inevitably something always come up. Not to mention, that there are a plethora of opportinities to eat unhealthy food and drink alcohol. I'm hoping to squeeze in work-out sessions next semester!"

My response:

"I don't have time to feed myself! Just kidding! ;) Being extremely busy with school, group projects, club meetings and networking mixers forces me to be better at time management. That way, I can also make time to work out and have a social life."

Once you get into a regular routine exercising at least a couple times per week, it becomes much easier to maintain that lifestyle. Even if you only work out for 20 minutes, that's okay!

Lastly, if you just can't seem to get away from your books, check out 5 quick exercises you can do at your desk. Those include things like side stretches, butt squeezes and leg lifts. Any type of movement counts!

Getting Your Employer to Fund Your MBA: Making The Argument

With tuition costs for MBA programs in the tens of thousands, if not reaching ten 10,000’s - (trick question), wouldn’t it be great if someone else paid for your MBA? If you don’t have a sugar daddy or mamma, maybe your employer has a tuition reimbursement program. If your employer doesn’t have a tuition reimbursement program, is hope lost? Not necessarily. I’ve been working on an upcoming MBA Podcaster show titled “Getting Your Employer to Fund Your MBA.” In the podcast, we’ll explore a variety of situations including people who work for companies that have existing programs for funding MBA’s and those whose companies don’t. Some of the questions we’ll address:

   Why would a company fund your MBA and how can you make it happen?
   Does it make a difference if you work at a small company or a large company?
   Do economic hard times mean that continued education benefits are going by the wayside?
   There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so what will having your employer pay for your MBA cost you - if it’s not money?

I’ll be asking these questions and more of my guests and keeping you posted along the way with blog updates.

If your company doesn’t have an institutionalized program, what’s the best way to go about convincing your boss that the company should pay for your MBA. I spoke with Nicole, a financial services executive who went to a top 10 school, for my last blog post and she had more insight to add for this posting. (That’s not her real name, but she asked to remain anonymous because she works for a large company that doesn’t have an institutionalized program that funds MBA students.)

Nicole says that the first thing you should do is pretty obvious - do really good work. She continues…

“The second thing is to provide the structure for them, let them know what it would look like, frame it for them in the context of what competing institutions, or even in terms of what alternative types of organizations, do. In my case, they had no idea how this stuff works, or that it even existed. It’s kind of amazing for a company that big to not know about this stuff, but it’s not well known. And the third piece [of advice] is being really clear on what you would want to do when you came back and the value you would add after that.... [Be] able to say here’s why I’m going, here’s what I’m going to learn, and here’s how I will be more valuable and this is specifically the type of role or the track I want to be on afterwards, so that they understand, [that] this makes sense to invest in and they’ll be someone I can plug into a particular role or path when they come back.”

Yvon Le Renard is in the part-time executive MBA program at Kellogg / Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He convinced his company Alcatel to pay for his MBA with very specific and solid arguments for his boss about how an MBA will broaden what Le Renard can do for the company.

“The industry is changing drastically. The telecomm industry used to be run by North American and European companies. This is no longer true, so there will be a lot of Chinese competition, here in these regions [Asia]. The second reason is that most of the research and development used to be done in North America and Europe internally, which is no longer true. We’re doing a lot of R&D in these regions, we’re doing a lot of external innovations and R&D as well. And this is an area that I really wanted to understand well. How you can grow externally by partnerships, acquisitions and not only internally and how you can drive and change your company from European centric to Asian centric, where the growth is going to be in the next five years.”

Learn more of what Nicole, Yvon and the other guests have to say about company-financed MBAs in our upcoming show that will be in a couple of weeks. Other guests on the show include:

• Lynda Boman, principal, Boman Accounting Group, who will address what you need to know for your tax return if your company pays for your MBA;
• John Gianvittorio, manager at Raytheon and student UCLA Anderson School, who says that the economy hasn’t affected Raytheon’s decision to fund MBA’s;
• Jay, small tech business owner, who will talk about what it would take for him to sponsor an employee;
• Karla Krause, student, MIT Leaders for Global Operations program, who will talk about Dell’s fellowship program;
• Jennifer Powers, Manager of Marketing and Business Development for the City of Brampton, in Ontario, Canada, who will discuss why she decided to fund her MBA herself;
• Nicole, a financial services executive and student at a top 10 school, who will lay out the best way to have your company fund your MBA; and
• YoichiN, a financial services manager and MBA student, who will discuss what he owes his company in return for tuition reimbursement.

Employer-Funded MBA: What's In It For Your Company

Let’s face it, getting an MBA is not cheap.  Wouldn’t it be great if the MBA-tuition fairy granted your wish and paid for your MBA?  So how do you summon such a fairy?  It turns out that it might not be that hard.  I’ve been working on an upcoming MBA Podcaster show titled “Getting Your Employer to Support Fund Your MBA.”  The answer is very company specific.  In the podcast, we’ll explore a variety of situations including people who work for companies who have existing programs for funding MBA’s and those whose companies don’t. Some of the questions we’ll address:  

Why would a company fund your MBA?

Does it make a difference if you work at a small company or a large company?

Do economic hard times mean that continued education benefits are going by the wayside?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so what will having your employer pay for your MBA cost you - if it’s not money?

I’ll be asking these questions and more of my guests and keeping you posted along the way with blog updates.

One of the first people I talked with was Nicole, a financial services executive who went to a top 10 school.  That’s not her real name, but she asked to remain anonymous because she works for a large company that doesn’t have an institutionalized program that funds MBA students. 

In her case, her company offered to pay for her MBA because they wanted to hold onto her.

“It’s not something they offered; it’s something that I floated as a possibility to my boss indirectly.  I guess once I tendered my resignation and let them know that I got into the school that I wanted to, that I was going to leave, they said well what if... we were to pay.  My immediate boss said what type of a contract, what do you have in mind, what does it look like, what does it cost, how have you seen it done in other firms - make us a proposal because we’re open to it.”

When I asked Nicole why her company offered to pay, her answer was brief.  “I did good work and we had a good relationship.”

She must have done REALLY good work and had a really good relationship with her boss. But it is not uncommon, especially at higher levels for companies use tuition reimbursement as a benefit to hold onto good talent.

Learn more of what Nicole and the other guests have to say about company-financed MBAs in our upcoming show that will be in a couple of weeks. Other guests on the show include:

• Lynda Boman, principal, Boman Accounting Group, who will address what you need to know for your tax return if your company pays for your MBA;
• John Gianvittorio, manager at Raytheon and student UCLA Anderson School, who says that the economy hasn’t affected Raytheon’s decision to fund MBA’s;
• Jay, small tech business owner, who will talk about what it would take for him to sponsor an employee;
• Karla Krause, student, MIT Leaders for Global Operations program, who will talk about Dell’s fellowship program;
• Yvon Le Renard, executive at Alcatel (a French telecommunications firm) and student at Kellog-Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Executive MBA program, who gives the best argument in support of your case for company funding;
• Jennifer Powers, Manager of Marketing and Business Development for the City of Brampton, in Ontario, Canada, who will discuss why she decided to fund her MBA herself; and
• YoichiN, a financial services manager and MBA student, who will discuss what he owes his company in return for tuition reimbursement.

Photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arghmonkey/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

First Friday Freebies

First Friday Freebies

Here at MBA Podcaster we like to reward loyalty. If you haven’t noticed, we give away a lot of cool stuff to our listeners and fans – business books, gift cards, iPods, one-on-ones with admissions consultants – we’ve got a lot to go around. Now we want to make it easy for you to win. All you have to do is be an active member of our online community. We have pages on all the major social networks because we love chatting with you and hearing about your personal MBA application process. Your comments on our Facebook wall, Twitter page, YouTube videos, LinkedIn group and our blog are all ways we love to hear from you.

The first Friday of each month, we will randomly choose one person that has left us a comment or question on one of our social networks to win the prize of the month. Every time you post a comment or question, your name will be entered into a raffle for that month. So the more times you interact with us online, the better your chances are of winning! The winner will be contacted via the social network he/she used. (Note: If you leave a comment on our blog, please leave your email or Twitter name so we can contact you in case you win).

To review, here are the ways you can win First Friday Freebies:

Facebook: Write on our wall, discussion board or write a review on the Reviews tab. You must be a fan of MBA Podcaster on Facebook to win.

www.facebook.com/MBAPodcaster

Twitter: Send us a message through an @ reply, retweet us, or suggest @MBAPodcaster on #FollowFriday. You must be following @MBAPodcaster on Twitter to win.

www.twitter.com/MBAPodcaster

YouTube: Leave a comment and rate one of our videos or leave a comment on our channel. You must be subscribed to our YouTube channel to win.

www.youtube.com/MBAPodcaster

LinkedIn: Participate in one of our group discussions or start a new one. You must be part of the MBA Podcaster LinkedIn group to win.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=1916644&trk=anet_ug_hm

Our Blog: Comment on one of our blog posts from the month.

www.mbapodcaster.com/blog

If you have questions about First Friday Freebies, please email info@mbapodcaster.com for clarification. Good luck and we look forward to chatting with you online!