Have A Question About MBA Career Strategy? Ask Ivan, Our Resident Expert

Ivan Kerbel

Ivan Kerbel

How helpful is an MBA degree to someone who wants to switch careers? What’s the best way to know if you could make a go of it at McKinsey or Google? How can you land the ideal internship that ends with a job offer nearly a full year before you get your MBA? What do you need to do before you arrive on campus to make sure you’re able to take advantage of the full MBA experience?

These are among the questions Ivan Kerbel will help to answer as Poets&Quant’s new resident expert on MBA career strategy – along with any and all questions you might have on what MBA careers look like in different industries and companies. Ivan is uniquely qualified for the job.

As the former MBA Career Director at Yale SOM and Sr. Associate Director at Wharton, Ivan has deep experience in the key success factors for students pursuing competitive MBA internships and full-time jobs. Ivan also gained broad industry experience working for Katzenbach Partners, a NYC-based strategy consulting boutique, for GE’s Office of Litigation & Legal Policy, for a Silicon Valley start-up, and for a molecular medicine journal, The FASEB Journal. He is a Wharton MBA alumnus, a graduate of Master’s programs in International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS and at Auckland University (where he was a Fulbright Fellow), and an undergraduate alum of Yale. He’s also one of the most generous and kind-hearted people you will ever meet.

Ivan currently serves as CEO of Practice MBA, which offers intensive, personalized training for newly-admitted MBAs on topics related to career strategy and maximizing return on a student’s overall investment in business school. Ivan provides one-on-one coaching on successful career-switching and the pursuit of pre-MBA internships, on networking and effective outreach in the American business context (for international students), and on extracurricular leadership and academic preparation via guided online self-study.

In 2016, Ivan teamed up with MBA Prep School to provide a focused Career Coaching curriculum for both MBA and non-MBA job-seekers, a partnership that offers expert guidance designed to accelerate career progress and provide end-to-end service to MBA applicants as well as current MBAs.

Ivan also partners with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) to offer 7-day outdoor Wilderness Skills courses in Washington’s Central Cascades Mountains … an opportunity for rising MBAs to socialize with classmates at peer institutions while gaining leadership experience and enjoying time in the monumental glacier-carved landscape and evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Ivan has agreed to serve as a sounding board and source of advice at Poets&Quants for all MBA career-related questions. No question is out of bounds. … If you have questions about being a career-switcher, about the MBA recruiting strategies of key employers you’re interested in, about conducting an off-campus / ‘enterprise’ job-search, about understanding differences between various industries and functions, about assessing your own skills and interests and creating an ‘elevator pitch’ for use in interviews, and/or about leveraging the unique resources, relationships, and geographic advantages of the MBA programs you’re applying to, fire away in the comments section below! Ivan will do his best to answer your queries.

 

 

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