Anna Ivey gives you ruthlessly practical admissions advice
All that talk by Jack Welch about how important it is to feel passion for your job is the perfect segue into an announcement I want to make about a career workshop I'm co-hosting in NYC in January and February 2008:
How to Choose a Career That’s Right For You
2-Session Workshop
Sat. Jan 19 & Sat. Feb 2, 2008
Each from 10am – 3:30pm
NYC Seminar & Conference Center
I'm very excited to be co-hosting this workshop with Sunny Lurie, PhD, founder of Fast Focus Careers.
The WSJ had a great interview recently with the VP of Industry Relations at the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) about how business schools are adapting to the preferences and quirks of Gen Y. She talks about the same tendencies I've noticed about Gen Y in the workplace ("Memo to Corporate America"), although it's clear to me that some of those tendencies have special significance for MBAs in particular.
There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth after the LSAT this past weekend, so I wanted to share this story abut Sara Blakely, who founded a $150 million company after she choked on the LSAT. The company is called Spanx (cheeky, right?), and they make the insanely popular footless hosiery sold in fancy-pants stores like Neiman Marcus and featured on Oprah's "Favorite Things." Not a bad outcome for someone who "failed," although I'm sure she felt pretty crummy in the days after the LSAT. It's a great reminder not to let one test define who you are or what you're capable of in life.
From the BusinessWeek article:
Q: You've said that failure was a huge part of your success—how so?
A: Because I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I'd have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.
I had the honor of guest-blogging for one of my favorite blogs, Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Check out my 8 job tips for new graduates here.
Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana is coming out with a new book called From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management Education. His publisher is kind enough to be sending me a review copy, and I'll be excited to read it and interview Prof. Khurana in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, if you're in the Cambridge/Boston area, you can come hear him speak this afternoon at 3 pm at Harvard Book Store. More details here.
Readers of the Ivey Files and also my book (The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions) know that I've been discouraging people from attending all but the top law schools in the country [updated to clarify: AT FULL PRICE], mainly because of simple math. As I wrote in The Ivey Guide:
You need to think of your legal education as an investment, and you should calculate your expected return on that investment.
And another article in which I discuss what I perceive as one of the downsides of conventional college rankings: that they focus on and try to measure the quality of incoming freshmen (SAT scores etc.) rather than the quality of education they receive at their respective colleges or the value added by those colleges. Basically, it's an input vs. output argument. I'm not the first or only person to make it (the Spellings Commission has been grappling with the output side of the equation for a while now), but it's something to keep in mind as you use rankings to help you think about different schools, whether at the college or the graduate school level.
It's peak admissions season and I'm a bad, bad blogger as a result -- lots of client work to turn around (bless them!). But... in the meantime, I have to share the weirdest, juiciest story I've read in a long time. The opening paragraph:
This is the story in which you learn how a graduate of Columbia Law School—that’s me—and almost 80 other people, who really should have known better, got suckered into giving away all our personal details as well as up to two months of our lives for “jobs†that never actually existed. And then you learn why it all happened the way it did.
Read on here.
True story? Fiction? Who cares? I want more.
This time of year I field lots of questions about the secret to success in law school. I don't know that there's a magic secret out there, but I do like these tips from Vikram Amar, professor at UC Hastings:
(I have to love a man who throws around words like "equipoise." Beautiful.)
If all of the above gives you the illusion of control over your law school grades, there's always this.
There I days I don't miss being an admissions officer. Last week I attended an MBA admissions panel. I used to do those roadshows, where five admissions officers sit on a stage talking to an audience of hundreds about the admissions process in vague generalities and answer audience questions with vague generalities. Admissions officers are very limited in the candor they can express in public, but there were some nuggets that were dead on, so I'll condense them here and paraphrase a little bit:
1.
An eagle-eyed Ivey Files reader sent me the following, a great follow-on to my original Brain Drain posting:
Anna,
Check out this story ("Profits vs. Partners: Are the Country's Top Law Firms Going the Way of the Dinosaur?"). I think anybody considering law school and Big Law (or even just a law firm life in general) should read it.
Hylô! Bore da! Cymru am byth! (I’m showing off my limited Welsh.)
My vacation is supposed to be over today, and I’m supposed to be flying back to Boston as I write this. United has completely bungled its flights out of Heathrow, so while it turns out I’m not flying today after all, I’m officially getting back in the blogging saddle.
Two things I learned from my holiday:
I've been known to be a mean drill sergeant when it comes to making twenty-somethings change their voicemail greetings to make them sound more professional and, well, grown-up. Now comes the Holy Grail solution: a new service called YouMail, which lets people record different voicemail greetings for different audiences. Oh, and you can use YouMail to exercise some tough love with your helicopter parents as well. From an article in the Boston Globe:
Aaron Edelstein's mother in Lexington got a surprise when she called him in New York last fall. "Hi, Mom," his recorded message greeted her. "This is Aaron's voice mail. I might not be picking up because you call me too much."
So much for "No one can take your call right now." [Hah! More like, ""Whassup, it's so-and-so, leave a message." -- Anna]
Edelstein is among the thousands of early adopters of YouMail, a personalized voice mail service for cellphones being readied for formal launch later this year by a California start-up. Instead of a one-message-fits-all voice mail prompt, YouMail users can record a personalized prompt for anyone on their contact list. What individualized ring tones did to identify incoming callers, YouMail does to individualize outgoing voice messages.
For Edelstein, a 25-year-old pharmaceutical consultant who moved to Brooklyn two years ago, that means a straightforward message for his landlord and his electrician and his trainer. "Hello. You've reached Aaron Edelstein. Unfortunately, I can't come to the phone." For friends, it's a breezy, higher-pitched "Hi, [insert name of caller here], this is Aaron." His fiancée gets "Hey, Nettie Bear."
What a perfect, perfect product for Gen Y, not just because it feeds their need for customization and personalization, but also because it solves one of their biggest challenges: how to be themselves in some venues while suiting up for others.
It's that time of year when Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen both rank very highly on my TiVo Season Pass list, and catching up on those episodes, I'm reminded of how bone-crushingly physical kitchen-work is. I'm also reflecting on a NYT article I read last month called "Top Chef Dreams Crushed by Student Loan Debt." An excerpt:
In the way that the work of directors like Martin Scorsese flooded film schools with students in the 1970s, and the television show ''L.A. Law'' packed law schools in the 1980s, the rise of celebrity chefs has been good for culinary schools.
But would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. As a result, as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans. The national average for all students last year was roughly half that, at 5.1 percent.
Although the restaurant industry is expected to create two million new jobs in the next decade, the Department of Labor reports that in 2005, the latest year for which data were available, the average hourly wage for a restaurant cook was $9.86.
''The problem isn't getting a job, the problem is getting a high-paying job,'' said Susan Sykes Hendee, a dean at Baltimore International College and a member of the American Culinary Federation Foundation Accrediting Commission, which accredits many culinary schools....
''Truly the worst horror stories are from private culinary schools,'' said Alan Collinge, who founded the grass-roots lobbying group Student Loan Justice and collects information from people with student loan problems. ''The story is always the same. The school convinces the student they are going to be the next Julia Child or Wolfgang Puck, and the student will sign anything.''
I'm all in favor of people pursuing their career passions, but, as always, I encourage them to know what they're getting themselves into and to ask themselves whether they really need an expensive degree to get from here to there. Is culinary school worth it? Read the debates at Chowhound, Accidental Hedonist, Portland Food and Drink, and David Lebovitz (former pastry chef at Chez Panisse; check out what his blog posting has to say about culinary school "recruiting techniques").
I gave an interview recently to the Boston Business Journal on the subject of helicopter parents in the workplace. You can check out what I said here, but I thought I'd also paste in some interesting statistics cited in the article:
According to nearly 25 percent of the 750 employers responding to the Collegiate Employment Research Institute's 2007 Recruiting Trends survey, parents are indeed taking on more than their share of their kids' job searches.
The Boston Globe reports that Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore plan to opt out of the US News college rankings. The departure of these heavy-hitters should have some impact, but I suspect that until Harvard, Yale, and Princeton boycott the rankings, the rankings will continue to lumber along.
I wonder if US News will just start making up data for the departing schools, as it did with Sarah Lawrence College? Also interesting: BusinessWeek uses regression analysis to "fill in" historical data for business schools that it hasn't surveyed before in its MBA rankings.
On a related note: I've heard from several people who attended this year's Admitted Students Weekend at Stanford Law School that Dean Kramer repeatedly flaunted the school's US News rankings in his sales pitches. Ironic, given Kramer's caterwauling to the NYT about the lunacy of the rankings methodology. Guess he thinks he can have it both ways.
I've written previously about the intense interest in private equity careers among my MBA admissions clients. From the CNNMoney.com article I referenced in that post:
Thirteen percent of Harvard Business School's 2006 MBA class took jobs in private equity, making it the most popular finance destination, topping even investment banking.
I did a really fun segment on CNN recently about helicopter parents in the workplace. We discussed the usual bugaboos -- parents who show up for job interviews and that sort of thing. A couple of things made me laugh afterwards: (1) the number of people who called me saying they had seen me on TV while they were working out at the gym (good for you!), (2) the cheers I've gotten for going on CNN and advocating "tough love," and (3) the fact that I didn't get preempted by Paris Hilton -- an indignity I don't think I would have survived!
