What Kellogg Looks For In MBA Applicants

Blast from the Past:

Where Top MBAs Work in Hedge Funds

If you’re an analyst, you’re probably dreaming of moving to hedge funds. Who wouldn’t? You’ve heard those tales of billion dollar paychecks. Unlike yetis and unicorns, they’re actually real. Sure, private equity and investment banking are safer bets. And you can sleep three hours with those gigs. But they just don’t have the same lure of power and prominence that comes with managing billions of dollars. Sure, it’s high risk-high reward. Make a big return and you’re sailing around the Mediterranean. Tank it and you’ll spend your remaining days evading the Feds (and maybe the hit man that your investors send for you).

So how do you get into asset management? You’ll need a strong track record at a brand name firm, not to mention a deep network of big investors. Before then, you need the right academic pedigree…an MBA from programs where PEs and IBs hire top performers. Is that Booth? Columbia? Wharton? Check out Poets&Quants’ exclusive research on which schools produce the most managers at particular firms.

Source: Poets&Quants

Video of the Week

10 Things that Distinguish Admits from Rejects

Source: Shawn O’Connor

MBA Humor

Rules of Project Management (Excerpted)

1) Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.

2) You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.

3) At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.

4) A problem shared is a buck passed.

5) A user will tell you anything you ask, but nothing more.

6) Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient is the correct one.

7) There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again.

8) The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of making a date is forgotten.

9) What is not on paper has not been said.

10) A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.

11) If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.

12) There are no good project managers – only lucky ones.

13) A project is one small step for the project sponsor, one giant leap for the project manager.

14) Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.

15) If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.

16) The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.

17) Metrics are learned men’s excuses.

18) For a project manager, overruns are as certain as death and taxes.

19) Some projects finish on time in spite of project management best practices.

20) Fast – cheap – good – you can have any two.

21) The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale.

22) A two-year project will take three years; a three-year project will never finish.

23) When the weight of the project paperwork equals the weight of the project itself, the project can be considered complete.

24) A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected – a well-planned project only twice as long as expected.

25) Warning: dates in a calendar are closer than they appear to be.

26) Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.

27) There is no such thing as scope creep, only scope gallop.

28) Activity is not achievement.

29) If you don’t know how to do a task, start it, then ten people who know less than you will tell you how to do it.

30) The person who says it will take the longest and cost the most is the only one with a clue how to do the job.

31) The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.

32) The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.

Source: CVR-IT Consulting