P&Q Live: How Service 2 School Helps Vets

In the fourth edition of P&Q Live, our new weekly podcast on all things business school, Poets&Quants Founder John A. Byrne takes a look at the booming interest in impact investing on B-school campuses, interviews the co-founder of Service2School which helps help veterans win admission to the best universities, and handicaps the MBA odds of a 25-year-old Latino man who works as a project manager for a tele-medicine company leading marketing and process improvement initiatives.

Staff writer Nathan Allen takes listeners behind the scenes for his recent story on the impact investing boom and highlights the business schools doing the best job in this growing area of finance. He sheds light on the curricular and co-curricular impact investing initiatives at 18 leading business schools around the world from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business to Oxford Said.

Then, Byrne interviews Tim Hsia, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, who used to Stanford University to make his transition into civilian life. At Stanford, Hsia picked up both JD and MBA degrees, and then joined the Bay Area startup world. While at Stanford, he founded with three other vets Service2School, a unique organization that offers free mentoring and coaching to active-duty veterans who want to get either an undergraduate or graduate degree. “We’ve changed the game for vets going into school,” says Hsia. Poets&Quants recently published the candid essay of a Service2School member: Confessions Of A Military Vet Who Went To Harvard Business School.

And finally, HBSGuru.com Founder Sandy Kreisberg is back to assess the chances of a 25-year-old Latino man with a 690 GMAT score and a 3.2 grade point average from Vanderbilt University. The young professional worked for one and one-half years as a business analyst at a major health IT company, then moved on to a healthcare marketing firm as a marketing analyst, and recently joined a young tele-medicine company as a project manager. He wants to use the MBA to transition into either strategy consulting with McKinsey, Bain or BCG or into a role at a major healthcare company. His target schools: Stanford, Harvard, Duke, Vanderbilt, and the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.