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Part I: Speaker
Article 1:
WHERE WILL WE FIND TOMORROW'S LEADERS
[Rephrase 1]
[Dialog, 8:45]
Source:http://blogs.hbr.org/2008/05/harvard-business-ideacast-93-w/
Part II: Speed Article 2: What's Wrong With Wharton?
[Time 2]
Something at Wharton doesn't add up. Applications to the University of Pennsylvania's business school have declined 12% in the past four years, with the M.B.A. program receiving just 6,036 submissions for the class that started this fall. That was fewer than Stanford Graduate School of Business, with a class half Wharton's size. Wharton says the decline, combined with a stronger applicant pool and a higher percentage of accepted applicants who enroll, proves that the school is doing a better job targeting candidates.
But business-school experts and b-school applicants say Wharton has lost its luster as students' interests shift from finance to technology and entrepreneurship. "We're hearing [applicants say] Stanford, Harvard or nothing. It used to be Stanford, Harvard or Wharton," says Jeremy Shinewald, the founder of mbaMission, an admissions advisory firm. Wharton over the past century built its reputation as a training ground for Wall Street titans, but the financial crisis closed off many paths to such careers. The school in the mid-2000s regularly sent more than a quarter of its students to jobs at investment banks and brokerage firms. That figure has slid into the teens. Top institutions—and the Philadelphia-based school is still in that class—responded to the downturn by restructuring their courses and seeking students from less-traditional business backgrounds. Many schools also strengthened their ties to hot technology companies, like Amazon Inc. and Google Inc., and found opportunities for finance jobs at Fortune 500 companies. [239 words]
[Time 3]
The efforts paid off at several schools. Harvard Business School reported a 3.9% increase in applications this year, and Stanford posted a 5.8% gain. But Wharton's applications dropped 5.8%. Columbia Business School reported a 6.6% increase, recovering from a 19% decline last year. And Duke University's Fuqua School of Business stabilized after an 8.4% drop last year. Some admissions advisers and Wharton professors say the school didn't react aggressively enough when the spigot of finance jobs was turned off and that recent moves, such as a rebranding campaign begun in the spring of last year, did little to clarify the school's profile. Ankur Kumar, Wharton's director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid, says quantity doesn't equal quality. The average score for Wharton applicants on the standardized b-school entrance exam, the GMAT, rose seven points this year, to a record 725 out of 800. "Our focus is on the quality of our applicant population, and that remains as high as ever," Ms. Kumar says. Only those who really want to attend Wharton are applying, she says. The school's yield, the portion of accepted applicants who enroll, rose several percentage points this year to a record, she says, though she declines to disclose the figure. Some education consultants offer a different take. Wharton alumnus Eliot Ingram, the chief executive of admissions-counseling firm Clear Admit, says one client turned down a $70,000 scholarship from Wharton this year to attend Harvard because he felt that school had a stronger global brand. Wharton held the No. 1 spot on BusinessWeek's semiannual Top M.B.A. ranking from 1994 through 2000, at which point Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management displaced Wharton. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business has maintained the crown since 2006. To appeal to new audiences, Ms. Kumar now holds admissions events for students considering entrepreneurship and who are interested in such industries as retail and real estate. The school this month also unveiled a business-and-management satellite-radio channel with Sirius XM Radio Inc. [330 words]
[Time 4]
Fiona Fong says she was attracted to Wharton's strong marketing program and data-driven curriculum. She worked in marketing at cosmetics company Estée Lauder Cos. before school and is looking to return to the field. "When you come out of Wharton, you get the reputation that you can handle numbers and analytics," says Ms. Fong, a second-year Wharton student. The year after Ms. Fong applied, Wharton introduced a group discussion to its selection process, requiring candidates to demonstrate leadership and teamwork abilities in front of admissions representatives.
"Our guess is that might have made some students reluctant to apply," says Wharton Vice Dean Howard Kaufold. He says he isn't concerned about the application decline and is pleased with the caliber of the school's students. Dan Lee says he briefly considered Wharton but instead focused on schools that he believed had stronger general management training. Wharton is "typecast as the finance school," he says. For Mr. Lee, a first-year student at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, "going to business school was not about going into the financial sector." Virgil Archer says he wanted "a frothy tech scene." Mr. Archer, who is in his first year at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management, says Wharton didn't have the same entrepreneurial atmosphere. Wharton also has lacked continuity. The school has had four admission directors in the past decade. Ms. Kumar's counterparts at Harvard and Stanford have been at their schools for more than a decade. "If you put a baseball team on the field that's new every year, it's going to be tough to get chemistry and an overarching strategy," says former Wharton admissions officer Graham Richmond, the founder of higher-education consulting firm Southwark Consulting. [286 words]
Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/whats-wrong-wharton-142100893.html;_ylt=A2KJ3CZJ.lFS9w0A9.WTmYlQ
Article 3: Wharton's M.B.A. Admissions Director to Resign [Time 5] Ankur Kumar, director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, is leaving her post effective Friday.The move comes as campus leaders are questioning whether Wharton has done enough to distinguish itself in the marketplace. Wharton's M.B.A. application volume has declined in recent years, even as competitor schools have rebounded from dips caused by the financial crisis and waning Wall Street job opportunities. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that some admissions consultants, applicants and even some professors say Wharton has lost some of its cachet and is no longer perceived as on par with Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School.
People familiar with the matter said Ms. Kumar told staff of her decision last week. Such departures are rare in the middle of the admissions season—Wharton closed out its first round of applications on Tuesday afternoon. Neither Ms. Kumar nor representatives from the school responded to requests for comment, but in a note to colleagues and friends on Wednesday, Ms. Kumar said that she has been "pursuing several different opportunities in New York City in the past few months" and would have news of a new job soon. Ms. Kumar, who received her M.B.A. from Wharton in 2007, joined the admissions staff in 2009 and took over as director in 2011. [222 words]
[Time 6]
Wharton Dean Tom Robertson said in a note to students and faculty that the admissions team will continue to operate under Maryellen Lamb, the school's former careers director who in late August was named deputy vice dean for M.B.A. admissions, financial aid and career management. Ms. Kumar and school officials have said the lower application figures, combined with a higher yield, indicate the school has been better targeting candidates. Applications fell nearly 12% in the past four years. The school doesn't disclose its yield or acceptance rates. To be sure, Wharton students are in great demand in the corporate world. Nearly 98% of job-seeking graduates from the class of 2013 had full-time offers from top companies, including Amazon, AMZN McKinsey & Google and General Mills. There has been a revolving door at Wharton's admissions office in recent years. Rose Martinelli left the school in 2005 to oversee admissions at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her successor at Wharton, Thomas Caleel, arrived at the office that year after a career in startups, retail and private equity; he left after the class of 2008 graduated. And J.J. Cutler, who came to Wharton in 2009 from a marketing position at Aramark, left two years later to return to the company. Corrections & Amplifications： Ankur Kumar has been director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School since 2011. An earlier version of this article said she has held the post since 2009. [246 words]
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304176904579111132792838174.html?mod=WSJ_mgmt_LeftTopNews
Part III: Obstacle
Article 4: Why Most Applicants to Wharton Fail
[Paraphrase 7] Wharton is a super elite business school, make no mistake about that. Note and shameless plug: The Wharton/Lauder program is even more exclusive. Every year thousands of applicants submit their applications in hopes of joining the ranks of Wharton MBAs with a unique life-long access to cutting edge business thought and education, an exceptional and powerful alumni network, very handsomely paid jobs (for the rest of their lives), and a good chance at extreme wealth and power anywhere they go. A Wharton MBA changes one’s life for the better. It has changed my life for the better, and I know my life and career will remain on a steep upward trajectory for very many years. There is a lot to gain, stakes are high, and people from all over the world spare no effort or expense to get into Wharton. They take the GMAT over and over until they enter the much coveted 700 points club, they hire very expensive consultants to hold their hand and “improve their profiles”, sacrifice vacation time to visit campus, schmooze with current students, try to befriend the professors, and write hundreds and hundreds of emails to the adcom with questions about the wonderful school life at Wharton. They also spend days and days in front of the computer on the wonderfully informative GMAT Club forum (I am a regular contributor) and a competing resource on BusinessWeek.com (not a fan at all) in hopes of getting that tiny bit of information, if only a hint, a slight glimpse into the future and what awaits. However most applicants fail to gain acceptance, and the failure tastes very bitter. There is a number of reasons why this happens, and one of them is bad luck, but everything else being equal, it is the quality of application itself and a lack of the overall application strategy that prevent the email-spewing “profile improvers” from getting in the door. Below is my attempt at painting a picture of an applicant who will never get in: Five main traits of an applicant who will never get admitted to Wharton 1. Cluelessness My experience with dozens of applicants shows that the absolute majority of these people are clueless kittens. Often people approach me after they have submitted an application to Wharton, and after a few minutes of conversation it becomes clear they have absolutely no clue about the application process or the components of the application itself. Most importantly, they lack any substantial understanding of themselves, and so their applications most certainly revealed that. Without this understanding they cannot really tell the world who they are and why they are unique in any detail. Despite the fact that absolutely every book on the topic of MBA admissions out there stresses the importance of self-reflection before you sit down and start writing, few people do it in a systematic way. Most applicants assume they have all the information about themselves stored in their heads anyway, and all that examination of self is for someone else to do. A very thorough examination of one’s weaknesses, strengths, dreams, aspirations, sins and merits is an absolute must if you want in at Wharton. 2. Low scale Many candidates are afraid to think big or pursue mega goals. Mega scale scares the living soul out of them, and so they settle on tiny tactical goals, which they pronounce “realistic” and therefore “believable” and “comfortable” when they explain why they need the education. Quite often applicants conceal their true goals and claim other “more interesting” goals in their blind quest for the non-existing magic recipe to get in (many people mistakenly think that candidates with certain goals have a better chance than others). This is exactly the opposite of “change the world” type of aspirations—true and sincere aspirations—one would meet among the Wharton MBAs. Dream big, aim high if you want in. 3. Fear The miniscule scale breeds a lot of fear. I must admit fear is what paralyses most applicants at some point, and I—too—fell prey to that feeling when I was an applicant myself, but I overcame that emotion because I clearly understood its crippling effects. However most applicants just do not get rid of the chills. Looking at the above paragraph, I must say that it is a chicken and egg problem as fear is probably what makes them aspire for the “realistic” and the “comfortable” in the first place. They are afraid that there is no cure for their lowish GPA in undergrad, that their community contributions were tiny (so they urgently start teaching math to unsuspecting inner-city kids or helping the equally unsuspecting homeless guys hold their bowls at the soup kitchen). They repeatedly ask themselves questions about “the true cost of MBA” and map put “opportunity costs”, i.e. they are afraid to make changes in their “comfortable” and predictable lives, take drastic and powerful turns to change themselves and the world along the way, and continue with the penny counting. These people are scared that their unpaid speeding and parking tickets from five years ago will be a major obstacle, and they also think that deviating from a one-page format of the CV will be a major roadblock on the way in. A Wharton MBA applicant just like any good businessman or a warrior has to be fearless to succeed. And by the way, one must actually truly care about community contributions, it comes naturally, and cannot be faked. 4. Lack of strategy Most applicants that I have had the pleasure of communicating with did not even bother constructing the big picture. At best they just looked at the application process as a recovering alcoholic looks at his life, i.e. “one day at a time”. In most cases, they discover what exactly the application form contains the moment they decide to populate it with information. Needless to say most of these guys and gals end up on the curb. You can spot these characters early on: they usually post questions on GMAT Club that sound similar to “Do you know what we should write in Section A?” or “My GPA was 3.456, is it OK to round it up to 3.5?” This type of comments just reveals that the candidate has not followed an organized, disciplined approach to the application. What one really needs is a very detailed strategy, an aggressive and multidimensional plan, and a clear understanding what kind of tools the school gives you to deliver the message you want the school to hear. Of course, this rides on the premise that you do not have Cluelessness (see #1 above) or Fear (see #3). The better the strategy the higher the chances at acceptance at Wharton. 5. Poor execution Most people mistakenly think that the application is limited to writing, photocopying undergrad transcripts and performing other types paper shuffling. Some go as far as writing a blog about how the stapling and the trips to the FedEx office, and some even manage to damage their submitted applications beyond repair by blogging about how the paper shuffling was done in their particular case (yeah, I am looking at you, Chris). This is just one example of poor execution. I am convinced that visiting the school has a huge impact on the quality of the application. Now, there is visiting and there’s visiting. Remember, most candidates who visit the school have no plan and are Clueless (see #4 and #1 respectively above) and so they just show up in Huntsman Hall, bounce around from wall to wall, sometimes they sit on classes and generally have the facade of what “should be done”. Of course, they take a tour of campus in a group of equally unprepared applicants, and leave thinking that the “Campus visit” check box is now filled and they have gained advantage over everyone else. Wrong. Poor execution permeates every step an unsuccessful applicant makes: from misspellings on essays (one female applicant in 2011 wrote about her experience in conSLuting” for example) to using smiley faces as punctuation These people spend hours thinking about the color and brand of the suit to wear for the interview instead of actually preparing for the high-stakes conversation itself, and so on. Good strategy has to be executed to perfection if you are seeking admissions at Wharton. The color and brand of your suit add absolutely nothing to your success. So if anything above, my dear reader, describes you in some way, your chances of getting in at Wharton are zero. No need to fret about the seeming unfairness of the admissions process if you have been denied this year. It should help if you can regroup and start from the beginning, i.e. get rid of the Cluelessness, Low Scale, Fear, Lack of Strategy and Poor Execution, and the world might smile at you with its happy Wharton MBA smile. [1481 words] Source： http://www.onefootprint.com/lauderwharton/?p=672
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发表于 2013-10-9 23:24:31
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