Welcome to Poets&Quants

Why Poets&Quants? Because it’s part of the language and culture of every MBA school. Poets are MBA candidates with liberal arts undergraduate degrees. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they often struggle with the finance and statistics courses. Quants are students with business, financial or engineering backgrounds who are undaunted by spreadsheets and statistical analysis but may have some trouble writing a well structured, smartly argued paper.  Many MBA programs consciously combine poets and quants in teams so they can take advantage of each other’s skills. At P&Q, our goal is to help both the poets and the quants make the best possible choice for an MBA education.

Back in 1988, when I was management editor of BusinessWeek magazine, I created the first regularly published ranking of business schools. I wrote four editions of the best-selling BusinessWeek Guide to the Best Business Schools and expanded our coverage to include rankings of executive education and EMBA programs. Then, in the mid-1990s, I helped to build out the BusinessWeek franchise online, with real-time chats with b-school officials and business school profiles. For years, I supervised BusinessWeek’s coverage of business education, until moving on to many different things, including Fast Company, where I succeeded the founding editors as editor-in-chief, and BusinessWeek, where I returned to become executive editor of the magazine and later editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com.

Poets&Quants is the first of a dozen websites we’re launching as part of my new company, C-Change Media. Our goal with P&Q is ambitious: it is to become an invaluable source of information and analysis on the world’s best business schools. In time, we hope that it will become the place on the web for analysis, news, and features on global business education. You’re part of our success formula: we have a place to create true community here and unlike other places on the web, we’ll be active partners with you in raising the level of conversation in that community. Please register and participate. And let us know what we can do to make the site more valuable to you as an applicant, a student, an alum, or just someone keenly interested in the quality and state of graduate business education.

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