Category Archives: GMAC

GMATCH Virtual MBA Admissions Fair Coming in November

Posted on October 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has announced that it will host an online admissions fair featuring admissions representatives from dozens of top MBA programs next month, on November 22 and 23. The GMATCH Virtual Fair, which will take place entirely online, is being billed as the “the first truly global virtual fair” for business school applicants and admissions officers.

GMAC has lined up a rather extensive list of MBA programs around the world for the event, including London Business School, INSEAD, UVA (Darden), Georgetown (McDonough), UCLA (Anderson), the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Nanyang Business School.

From an announcement on GMAC’s web site announcing the event:

The innovative GMATCH concept employs a rich graphical interface featuring virtual booths and a multimedia auditorium stocked with material about each participating school’s programs as well as management education in general. Participants will be able to use webcams to enable face-to-face interaction.

While we wonder how well the “virtual” concept will do, this event does provide a great way for you to interact with admissions officers from programs that you might never have considered, simply because they’re on the other side of the globe and your chances of being able to visit the school are remote. We recommend using the GMATCH Virtual Fair as a chance to go outside your comfort zone (after all, you’re in the comfort of your own home!) and explore some programs that you might not have otherwise considered.

You can register for the event here.

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Posted in GMAC, MBA Fairs

Win $50,000 by Telling GMAC How You Would Change Management Education!

Posted on July 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

What could your idea be worth? How about $50,000? The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has invited anyone to answer this question: What one idea would improve graduate management education? GMAC’s Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund will award a total of $250,000 in prizes to 15 people whose ideas rise to the top, with the most promising proposal taking home $50,000. All you have to do is submit three paragraphs making the case for your idea is the one that can best revolutionize management education.

GMAC will accept entries to the MET Fund’s Ideas to Innovation (I2I) Challenge at www.gmacmetfund.org from now until Friday, October 8. After rounds of review and voting by a panel of educators and business leaders from around the world, the prize winners will be announced in mid-December., in what is considered Phase 1 of the process.

During Phase 2, to begin in 2011, GMAC will post the winning ideas online and ask schools and other nonprofit organizations to develop ways to implement them. GMAC will underwrite one or more of the best proposals using funds dedicated to the MET Fund, a $10 million initiative to invest in the development of management education worldwide.

What is “innovation,” for the purposes of the contest? GMAC defines innovation as the implementation of an idea that improves management education in a meaningful way—for students, for schools, for societies. GMAC seeks ideas that are achievable, easily understood and able to demonstrate measurable results within one to three years. GMAC is particularly interested in proposals that show potential to broadly impact management education in either a specific part of the world or globally.

If you’ve got an idea that will get GMAC’s attention, visit www.gmacmetfund.org and get started. May the best idea win!

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Posted in GMAC

MBA Grads Grow More Confident About the Job Market

Posted on June 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

A new survey released by GMAC earlier this month reports that new MBA grads are growing more confident about the economy, despite a drop in the percentage of grads who have jobs compared to last year.

According to the latest GMAC Graduate Management Education Graduate Survey, the percentage of full-time two-year MBA program grads who had an offer of employment prior to finishing school dropped to 40% this year, down from 50% in 2009. The numbers are even worse for part-time MBAs: 22% of part-time grads had a job offer before graduation, down from 38% in 2009.

Although these numbers look pretty grim, about one-third of grads who said they felt the global economy is stable or strong, up from just 9% a year ago. So, what gives? How could optimism bounce back while the job picture actually gets worse by some measures?

GMAC’s news release doesn’t go so far as to answer this question, although it may simply be a matter of “bad news fatigue,” and our tendency to doubt that things can stay this bad for that long. Not many MBA grads (other than perhaps a handful of older part-time MBAs) are old enough to remember the last time the U.S. or global economy last went through an extended rough patch, in the late 1970s. So, for most of these grads, two years into a recession, one can’t help but ask, “This thing has to be over soon, doesn’t it?”

Or, do these grads know something we don’t? Maybe they’ve noticed that more companies are returning to campuses to interact with students, even if the job offers aren’t yet flowing more yet. GMAC echoed this idea in its announcement, mentioning that the increased optimism among graduates mirrors the trend highlighted in the GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey, which found that employers are finally shifting their attention back to expanding their businesses. If that’s the case, then maybe this really is the first sign of a light at the end of the long, dark jobs tunnel.

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Posted in GMAC, MBA Jobs