Top 10 MBA: 15 months as a MBA student at Columbia Business School

I put these together as an informal sampler of my business school education, a journey that started with an ideal conversation in March 1997 and ended on commencement day in April 2000 at Uris Hall, the Columbia Business School campus on 116th and Broadway. In March 1997 I never thought that an Ivy League MBA from a top ten business school (ranked between number 5 and number 10 based on which MBA ranking you looked at) was in my immediate future plans.

Fourteen months later, after many a sleepless nights, hundreds of words from inward looking business school application essays and a 94% percentile GMAT score, I had the MBA admissions offer letter from one of the three schools on my list. While the collection below can never do justice to the months before business school admissions, nor to the unreal 15 months we spent on campus in New York at Columbia, it should provide a flavor (perhaps a snapshot) of the MBA education that changed my life.

Starting from my original business school application essay, I jump quickly to five pieces I wrote for the business school students’ magazine, a MBA faculty interview and a list of free online finance courses showcasing the course work we took. This salad bowl of memories is followed by an overview of my graduate course work as a Finance and Entrepreneurship major and a short sampling of class projects submitted by my project groups during the MBA program at Columbia Business School.

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Business School Application: Motivation

Business School Application Essay

Business School Memories

MBA Guides: Business School first year, first term: Case Hell

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: Dear Mom and Dad or the MBA contract market

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: The fine art of case analysis

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: The mid life crisis at 28

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: Drama in Real Life

Business School Resources

Online Corporate Finance: The story behind the resource, the free finance courses and solved cases.

Business School Faculty Interview

MBA Guides: Business School first year: Professor David Biem on investment banking, business school, ethics and academia

MBA course work overview

MBA Guides: My MBA Finance course work at Columbia Business School

MBA Sample projects

Final projects submitted for Advertising Management, Turnaround Management, Tax Factors in Business, Leadership, Entrepreneurial Finance and Strategy.

MBA Guides: Corporate Finance Training – Advertising strategy for an e-education portal

Master Case: Credit Process: Baldwin Piano

Master Case: Corporate Finance: LLC or C-Corp

Online Finance – Good and Bad bosses – A review of leadership trends across the decades

Online MBA: Building a valuation model for an online education business

Online Education – The battle for online MBA – Strategy and Tactics

Frequently Asked Questions

Business School Admissions: Answers for the road to your top ten MBA application