QS World MBA Tour

I decided to go to this event and check out the schools that I was considering.

The Toronto stop was held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I arrived just before 3pm, and there was a huge line up at the registration desk. If you had registered before the event, you would only need to pay $5, otherwise it would cost you $10. There were people in suits and ties and other people in jeans and T-shirts. Suit and tie was totally unnecessary, in my opinion - I think that as long as you're not in ripped baggy jeans and T-shirt with weird logos, you'll do fine.

Once I got in, my first stop was Queen's. This was also one main reason why I came to the event at all: since I was going to visit them the week after, I figured it'd be nice to say hi and get a brochure. I waited for my turn to talk to the lady I'd been corresponding with (they all wore nametags), and introduced myself. She was happy that I dropped by and said that she actually thought of emailing me to let me know that they'd be in town, but didn't get around to it. Since there were many people waiting at the table, I said that I'd chat more when I visit. Grabbed a brochure and left.

Other tables that I visited:

Ivey must've brought in a team of over two dozen people, of admissions staff, professors, and students. All of whom were busy talking to interested prospective students. It was quite the scene. I managed to say hi to the director of admissions, who remembered me from the visit a month back.

Cornell answered the questions I had about sending transcripts/proof of degree. Since I was "foreign", they had some special requests that I wanted to clarify. It turned out that because the system in Canada is fairly similar to that in the States, I could also just send a copy of my transcripts and not worry. They were friendly.

I found out that the "HEC" in HEC Montreal stood for "good school of business", or something like that. It also has nothing to do with HEC Paris. They assured me that one doesn't need to know French in order to live in Montreal. I liked the nice ladies at the table, and I also liked their program. If I didn't get into any of my top 3 choices, they would be the next down the list.

DeGroote wasn't so impressive, somehow. They were very adamant about not considering starting a 1-year program, and they say that their strength is in the co-op, which doesn't mean much to me. The admissions lady I talked to also didn't strike me as very enthusiastic.

Rotman's admissions ladies seemed like they weren't interested at all in anything people might possibly ask them. They chatted amongst themselves, I waited for about 15 seconds for them to notice me, to no avail. Since I wasn't very interested in them to begin with, I just left. Having said that, I did attend an MBA lecture given by one of Rotman's professors, and it was quite interesting. Although, I'm sure that almost any properly recognized school can put forward a good lecture, let alone Rotman. I just wasn't interested in their program as a whole.

Telfer didn't even participate in this thing. I hoped I wouldn't need to one day seriously consider the school, who either isn't in the the same or similar "league" as the other schools, or just didn't bother with these types of events.

I should mention that once you register with your email address, be prepared to be forever electronically bombarded by a hundred MBA schools around the world.

Ivey Class Visit

It was actually the first time I'd been on a first class train, which impressed me to no end. For starters, I didn't know that they would provide a meal. After a big breakfast at home, I had to say pass to the delicious-looking breakfast that everyone else was having. The attendants walked by every 10 or 15 minutes and kept offering stuff: drinks, pastries, more drinks, more stuff to eat... no wonder the tickets cost so much.

I arrived at the train station in London shortly before 10am, and got on a limo arranged by Ivey. There were 7 of us from this train that were getting picked up. Ten minutes later, we were at the Spencer Leadership Centre. The admissions director was there to greet each one of us, we had coffee and fruit, and joined the rest of the visitors in one of the classrooms.

There were about two dozens of people that came out for this visit. We first sat through an admissions presentation of mostly things I already knew - that is, easily found on their website. One thing that they really stress is that they were the oldest MBA school in Canada, and had a huge alumni network of 40 thousand people I believe. The alumni network kinda came with being an old school, and also, their alumni included both MBA and HBA graduates. The HBA is their undergraduate counterpart of the MBA, where students do work that's very similar to the MBA during the final two years of their studies, after which you can apply to do an accelerated MBA for 8 months at Ivey.

I noticed that when asked about why Ivey was not ranked as THE top school, one of the staff completely dissed the rankings, saying that there are many factors that influence the rankings, and that he didn't know at all how the rankings people came up with their rankings. I understand, but that's not really an answer. There was just a hint of arrogance, for lack of a better word, that I didn't like.

This is also a good place to mention the fact that I later noticed that Ivey was only accredited by one of the world's top three accrediting bodies. I know that this doesn't have much practical impact for an individual student, but you would expect that recognitions like this would be important for them as a school.

After the presentation, four professors took over and did a brief introduction of the academic side of things as well as a question and answer session. I already knew that they rely heavily on the case-based method. They also made sure we knew that a large percentage of the grades are based on class participation. While it was also made clear that the grading is based on the quality of your comments rather than the quantity, I don't think it would be very easy (even for a professor) to grade the quality of a comment. Also, assuming all students are of similar aptitude, the more things you say the more likely you are to hit a "good quality" comment. Overall, I think that this just puts too much emphasis on speaking up in class, and possibly pressure on the students to say things all the time.

There was a brief tour of the building after the presentation. They do have a nice-looking building, complete with places to eat, meeting rooms that you can book, and even their own gym. Lunch was then provided in a lounge, with a panel of current students who were of course very enthusiastic about the program and very willing to help and answer any questions or concerns that we had. In fact, Ivey has a "student ambassador" program just for the purpose of recruitment, where you can personally email the student ambassadors and it is their duty to attend to you.

Ivey's class schedule alternates between morning and afternoon. On any given day you would only get one 4-hour block of class, either in the morning or in the afternoon, but not both. The professors and the students think that there would surely not be enough time to do all the work, if class runs the entire day. This is interesting to note, since Queen's usually has classes both in the morning and in the afternoon, all day everyday.

After lunch, we sat in the first half of the day's class, which was accounting. We were given the case just that morning, so there hadn't been time to look through it, plus I knew nothing whatsoever about accounting, so it was a little difficult to actually understand the class. One thing that's for sure though is that the class was very dynamic, and students were VERY eager to participate. The professor acted as a facilitator to the students' discussions (this was also a point Ivey made sure that we understood).

I'd like to add that because Ivey uses only cases for the entire duration of the program, you end up with over 300 cases by the time you're done. Because cases are practical, a lot of alumni find that the higher up the ranks they are within a company, the more applicable their MBA learnings become (with regards to making executive decisions, etc.).

During the class break, we made our way to another room where a career management presentation awaited us. Of course the numbers are impressive, and I don't need to say more. As with most other MBA programs, the most popular areas of employment for grads are finance and consulting. Ivey integrates their career management course into the curriculum just like accounting or any other course, and uses cases in this career management course as well. A typical case would be like "Linda is finishing up her MBA and is torn between becoming a financial analyst and a management consultant" etc. I thought this approach was interesting enough that I should mention it.

The day ended with opportunities to ask questions to admissions and career management staff, who then arranged for those us that came by train to be picked up by a couple of limos to head back to the train station. (The first class waiting room at the London station is beautiful, by the way.)

Overall I thought it was a good experience, and good effort on Ivey's part. Apart from what I've already mentioned, here are some other things that stood out (neither positively nor negatively):

• Incredible amount of workload - students, faculty, and staff kept warning us about it
• "Transformation" - a word that's often used to describe the effect that an Ivey education has on students. I thought it was interesting.
• A lot of the staff have graduated from Ivey. The "director of admissions" is a young HBA who graduated only in 2003.

I also had the following reservations:

• For at least some of the topics, I believe that lectures (and other methods) would at least be a good supplement to the case-based method.
• They kept mentioning the HBA to an extent that gave me the impression that you'd be better off choosing the HBA as an undergrad, rather than the MBA. What's up with that?
• The issue with how important class participation is.
• Rankings and accreditation.

Overall though it is definitely a good school. The reputation and alumni network should come in very handy when it comes time to look for a job.

Appleseed documents his experience with Ivey here.

Ivey Class Visit Scheduled

When I'm not doing the mock tests, I browse the internet and find out about the schools I'm interested in. Ivey offers a class visit every month, when they welcome a bunch of prospective students to campus, sit in a class, sit through presentations, talk with profs/students/admissions people/etc. This is all expense paid if you live in southern Ontario, up to $600 reimbursement if you lived in North America (I think), and up to $1200 reimbursement if you're anywhere else in the world. If you fall under the reimbursement category, you do actually need to apply to Ivey for the next cohort, before you can get your money.

This is open to pretty much everyone, as long as you're more or less eligible to apply to their program. They do require your resume before they can confirm your booking.

I registered online and someone was quick to get back to me. They needed to know how I wanted to get myself to London. From Toronto, I could either drive and receive a gas card (forgot how much), or I could opt for first class train travel. I opted for first class train travel. Its net worth was more than the gas card, and I could relax instead of concentrating on the road. I was put in touch with a VIA rail booking agent, and I was now booked to visit Ivey on August 14th.

Choosing Schools

Of course, preparing for the GMAT wasn't the only item on my agenda during this period of time. If I wanted to make it to the next class, I still needed to make some decisions about where to apply, and craft my applications. I also didn't want to be too late in the game, especially this year when many people are choosing to go back to school because of the recession looming in the background.

Believe it or not, my choices were actually very limited. As I've mentioned before, I have a weak undergraduate GPA. Specifically, most of the Canadian programs have a hard GPA requirement of 3.0, which I don't have. Now that I think about it, this was also part of the reason I put off doing the GMAT two years ago - I didn't think I had a chance of being admitted into a reasonable school.

With this in mind, the most popular schools in Toronto where I'm at - Rotman (U of Toronto) and Schulich (York U) - were out of the question. I had no doubt that they would not waive this requirement under any circumstances, partly because I've personally experienced the bureaucratic ways of U of T, and partly because there's surely no lack of good applicants that meet this requirement, so there would be no need for them to make exceptions.

On a side note, Rotman and Schulich rarely interview applicants. Rumour has it that if you had a stellar GPA/GMAT/both, you're pretty much guaranteed a spot in the program. This means that you might get a classmate who is an expert at studying (on their own) but lacks other essential skills.

I also figured that I didn't want to stay in a big city anyway, with commuter classmates. I wanted to go somewhere where the MBA class is way more than just schoolwork. I wanted an entire community, complete with networking, socializing and forming friendships. I didn't want to be in a class with people who disappear to go home after class. I also wanted to attend a small program, so that there's enough personal attention and less bureaucracy to go around.

The other thing I prefered was a one-year program, instead of two years. Basically, a one-year program does not contain much less material. First, a "two-year" program really only uses 8 months in a year, so it's only 16 months, versus the 12-months of the one-year program. Secondly, these 16-month-programs are way less intensive - specifically, many of them don't have classes on Fridays, for example.

The only real drawback is the lack of internship opportunities in a 12-month program, but considering that I want to stay in consulting, I don't think that it is necessary for me to have this internship experience. I'm not getting any younger and would rather just get it over with in less time.

Appleseed also briefly discussed the pros and cons of a 12-month-program here, as well as posted a very comprehensive list of what to consider when choosing a program here.

Eventually, without visiting or talking to any school (due to lack of time), I narrowed down my choices to three schools (links on the right):

Queen's School of Business
Richard Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario)
The Johnson School (Cornell University)

One thing that these schools have in common is that they're all relatively small programs in small cities, and most, if not all, of their students relocate for the year. I will talk about my experience with each of them individually in later posts.

I thought that my odds of getting into each of these schools are similar, and so applied to them all at around the same time.

I also picked out a few safety schools, and was going to do another round of applications in February if I didn't get into any of my top choices:

HEC Montreal
Specifically a business school with no other disciplines. Like Queen's, this place is accredited by all three of the world's leading accrediting bodies. One-year program, has a consulting focus that I'm interested in.

Telfer School of Management (University of Ottawa)
One-year program also with consulting options, accredited by 2 out of the 3 accrediting bodies.

DeGroote School of Business (McMaster University)
This made the list because it was close to home, although I was increasingly leaning towards not going there. They only have a 2-year program without a consulting focus, and an admissions lady at the MBA fair told me that their strength was in the co-op program, which is mostly for new grads without work experience.