When I started my MBA elective of Behavioural Finance recently, my husband told me to mentally prepare to let go the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). I scoffed at this. I love EMH, and it was taught to me by my favourite professor who knows everything. Back off. But as the course progressed, I could feel certain foundational beliefs start crumbling… by the end I was beaten. Long live behavioural finance.
It has been six months and a bit, and I’m halfway through my MBA. What have I learned?
Someone in my MBA class told me that I ask good questions at lectures. Emboldened by this lovely compliment I started thinking about what makes a good question, and how to ask better ones. (This is meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek and I’m not at all implying that I avoid all the pitfalls all of the time.)
It’s the end of my third week at Imperial College Business School, where I’m doing an MBA. I can tell it’s going to be a lot of work – in some ways more work than my job at Little, Brown was, because the student timetable eats into my Me-Time quite a lot. So it’s important to know why I’m doing it. I’ve already self-diagnosed as a Questioner (see this post about Gretchen Rubin’s expectations framework), which means that when it comes to expectations I set for myself or others set for me, I can do it all as long as it’s clear to me why I should. Let this post be a reminder to myself…
I’m a brand-new MBA student at Imperial College Business School. To get in, most MBA schools require a good score in a gruelling test called the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test). I too had to take this test, which measures all kinds of critical reasoning as well as verbal and quantitative information processing skills.
My problem was that I was a late applicant in an admissions process which normally takes a year. I had only ten days in which to prepare for the GMAT, and I managed a score of 620. The difference between my first practice test and the final test was pretty stark:
| Total score | Quant score | Verbal score | Quant % | Verbal % | |
| Practice test (estimated ranges) | 370–470 | 6–18 | 37–39 | 0–6 | 83–89 |
| Final test | 620 | 32 | 44 | 24 | 98 |
Contrary to most of the advice I read online, it turns out you don’t need a minimum of three months, a private tutor or to be a maths savant. Here’s what I would say about preparing for the GMAT at short notice.
I’ve signed up to do a No-Pay MBA in the next couple of years – a self-taught equivalent of a traditional business degree using massive open online courses (MOOCs). I was inspired by the founder of the No-Pay MBA network, Laurie Pickard, who has actually done it – here’s an article about her in the FT.
I’ve just started my first course, which is Introduction to Marketing from the Wharton business school of the University of Pennsylvania, and wanted to share something interesting.
