Harvard says it has enrolled 937 candidates for its MBA course so far. 

The percentage admitted stands at 11% from 9683 applications received with a yield of 91%.

The class has 389 women (42%) while US ethnic minorities constituted 260 (28%). The average age of students was 27. It also has 318 international students (34%) representing 64 countries.

For the class, the GMAT middle 80% range was 700-760, median GMAT 730 and average GPA was 3.66.

As far as citizenship is concerned, North Americans numbering 665 constituted 71%, with US at 619 (66%). Asians followed with 126(14%) and Europeans at 84(9%).

The class has 389 women (42%) while US ethnic minorities constituted 260 (28%). The average age of students was 27. It also has 318 international students (34%) representing 64 countries.

Regarding educational background, 421 (45%) students were from economics/business followed by STEM 339 (36%) and humanities/social sciences 177 (19%).

As far as their pre-MBA industry experience is concerned, 164 (18%) were from venture capital/private equity followed by Consulting 146(16%) and 129 (14%).

Meanwhile, the class of 2016 has internship statistics of an offer of base salary at $2,383-12,000 and median other guaranteed compensation of $6,000.

Financial Services topped the options with 30% of students choosing it followed by Technology at 19% and Consulting 15%.

Other options were Healthcare (9%), Manufacturing (6%), Consumer Products (6%), Entertainment media (5%), Retail/Trading (4%) and Non-profit/Government (2%).

For the class of 2015, the base salary was at $90,000-161,250 with a median signing bonus of $50,000 and median other guaranteed compensation of $82,500.

Financial services attracted 31% followed by Consulting 24% with technology 20% in the third spot. These were followed by Health Care (6%), manufacturing (5%), Non-profit/government (4%), retail/trading (3%), entertainment/media (2%) and services (2%).

MBA Class of 2017

Class Composition

Citizenship

Educational Background

Pre-MBA Industry

The overall distribution of students by business sector and industry remains much the same as in the previous year. About 34%, that is more than a third (34 percent) of the 2015 graduates got into consulting roles, down just slightly from last year’s 35 %. Industry giants McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company and the Boston Consulting Group grabbed 43 students, or 18 % of the overall class.

The financial services sector attracted 24% of the class—the second-largest share. They were absorbed into investment banking, investment management, private equity and venture capital.

The Tech sector hired 18% of the graduates, with firms including Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Tech companies have been increasingly focusing on Tuck graduates as six or seven years ago, less than 10% of the job offers were from this sector.

Masland attributes the interest not only to increasing demand from the sector but also to resources and opportunities the school offers to students interested in tech careers. He cites as example, the Silicon Valley Boot Camp, an event organized by the CDO each year that lets incoming students explore tech-related career opportunities while networking with employers and alumni in the industry.

Companies in the retail and consumer package goods (CPG) sectors wooed more Tuck graduates than they have in the past, 10 % of the latest class, up from 7% in previous year. Juan Giovaneli, took a position at Colgate-Palmolive, after successfully switching from corporate communications to marketing during his graduation at Tuck. He went on to become an assistant brand manager at the CPG firm, completing a rotational program that will expose him to various different parts of the business.

The graduates are also full of praise for the Tuck alumni network for their successful career searches. Erica Johnston, chose Tuck for its strength in general management and marketing, hoping to transition from a job in manufacturing into a career in the food industry. Guided by the CDO, she connected with a Tuck alumna, Lauren Tankersley, MBA’07, who helped arrange a summer internship for her in Denver working for WhiteWave Foods, the maker of Silk soy milk, where Tankersley is a marketing director. 

Another alumna, Sue Allon (MBA ’89)—who is a member of the Tuck Board of Overseers and lives in Denver—extended an offer to Johnston to live at her house for the summer and use her extra car. “I was just blown away,” Johnston said in the article on the Tuck website. “To have a place to call home for the summer that was rent free, and a family to live with, it was just a wonderful experience.”

]]> https://www.oneyearmba.co.in/employment-stats-reveal-career-year-for-tuck-school-of-business-class-of-2015-mbas-jobs-consulting-financial-tech-recruiters-industry-financial-tech-retail-cpg-sectors-news-placement-one-year-mba/feed/ 0 https://www.oneyearmba.co.in/mba-vs-cfa-which-is-better-mba-vs-cfa-which-is-right-for-you-for-career-in-finance-mba-cfa-differences-cfa-salary-jobs-eligibility-course-cfa-difficulty-cost-comparision-india-usa-europe/ https://www.oneyearmba.co.in/mba-vs-cfa-which-is-better-mba-vs-cfa-which-is-right-for-you-for-career-in-finance-mba-cfa-differences-cfa-salary-jobs-eligibility-course-cfa-difficulty-cost-comparision-india-usa-europe/#respond Sat, 06 Feb 2016 08:52:59 +0000 http://www.oneyearmba.co.in/?p=9482 Interested in a career in finance but confused between a regular MBA course and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program? Here are some of the things you should consider before you decide on the right course for you.

The choice between a CFA and an MBA largely depends on your aims. An MBA course covers a wide range of general management topics including finance, accounting, human resources, operations, strategy and marketing.

CFA is for those focused on a career in Finance, and helps sharpen analytical skills essential for the posts of Financial analysts, Portfolio analysts and Investment analysts.

The most traditional career paths for which the CFA charter has been most relevant are for research analysts and those who might go on to be portfolio managers. Increasingly, the appeal of the course has been expanding and it is a useful resource for a wide range of careers, such as traders, brokers, academics, risk managers, regulators and chief executives. Lets list down some of the key differences between the courses:

1. Mode of Study

Most top MBA programs are full time one-year or two-year courses. Thus, students will have to take a break from work to attend these courses.

The CFA is structured in three levels that could be completed even while employed in a regular job.

2. Eligibility 

Most good MBA programs require students to have at least 2-3 years of experience. They are also expected to showcase their skills, achievements and past experience to come up with a solid application to improve their chances of being accepted by the business school.

The CFA Level I can be attempted even while the candidates are in the final year of graduation. However, level II requires graduation degree.

3. Self-study Vs. classroom lectures

Business schools have elaborate programs that involve classroom lectures, case study method, simulations, learning through team-work, real-world business projects as well as experiential learning.

The CFA is purely self-study based. Candidates need to be focussed and have a regular study-time within the day’s work schedule.

4. Gaining admission  

Speaking about level of difficulty, Business school application could be a long drawn out and tedious process. It begins with the GMAT (or GRE) preparation; multiple attempts at GMAT if the candidate fails to obtain a decent score. Then the right business school that suits career goals has to be shortlisted. The MBA essays, which would vary for each school, would also have to be worked on.

If finance is the focus, a CFA would be able to offer candidates better opportunities in finance related areas like corporate finance, investment banking, portfolio management, hedge funds or equity research.

The work does not get over even at this point. There are the recommendations to complete and the interviews that follow. Each of this stage needs a lot of time and energy.

The CFA program does not require enrollment in any institute. Candidates could appear for it once the preparation is over . Level I is held twice a year – in June and December.

However, level II and level III are held only once – in June. On an average, the preparation time for each of these levels is around 300 hours, so a lot of dedication and disciplined self- study is needed, especially for those who balance a regular job as well as study.

The exam success rates are quite low – for the June 2015 exam, it was 42% for level I, 46% for level II and 53% for level III. So candidates need to be prepared to repeat it in case of a failed attempt.

On an average, it may take upto four years to complete all the three levels. Even after clearing the three levels, four years of qualified work experience is needed to earn the CFA certification.

5. Tuition Costs

The cost of tuition for a two year program from a good business school would be in the range of $100,000 – $120,000. To this is to be added the cost of living (house rent, travel, food, etc.) as well as the opportunity cost, the forgone income during the two years when the student is not be working.

The CFA is more pocket-friendly. It involves a one-time enrollment fee of $450 and $860 exam registration fee for each of the levels. The exam registration fee also includes the e-book with the entire curriculum and also the mock tests for which the candidate pays an additional $150 plus shipping for the print version.

Those planning to enroll in some form of coaching for CFA preparation, will also have to consider the additional expense that would come your way.

6. Career Prospects

An MBA from an international location would give internship opportunities in and around. The student will also be able to take advantage of the location to look out for jobs in the industry of his or her choice.

After earning an MBA, they could choose to continue working in the same field as before or change careers. An MBA would greatly widen career choices as well as social network and provide a chance to interact with students or alumni coming from across the world.

If finance is the focus, a CFA would be able to offer candidates better opportunities in finance related areas like corporate finance, investment banking, portfolio management, hedge funds or equity research.

7. Salary

The CFA salary in the US for the mid-level positions like financial analyst, investment analyst, research analyst is in the range of $45,000 to $100,000 or higher depending on your academic background, designation, past experience, job location and several other factors.

For senior positions like that of a senior financial analyst or a portfolio manager, the salary would be higher in the range of $60,000 to $115,000.

The Bottom Line

In the end, both the MBA and CFA are valuable. The CFA, however, is widely coveted as the degree of choice by professional investors who work at money managers and registered investment advisors, the types of firms that many financial advisors get their first jobs and initial training and background. 

By Due Quach 

I have a complicated relationship with my alma mater. College is a time of self-discovery, but it is particularly hard to find who you are when you attend one of the most intensely competitive, hyper-critical and hypocritical universities on the planet. Finding who you are in this type of setting is a trial by fire. When a young person emerges from Harvard stronger, tougher as well as more open-minded, grounded and open-hearted — that is an extraordinary accomplishment.

On one hand, I will always be grateful for the scholarships, grants and opportunities that Harvard gave me as a low-income, first-generation college student whose immigrant parents can barely read or speak English. I will always be grateful that going to Harvard put me on a near-equal footing with classmates whose parents are CEOs, heads of state and world-renowned thought-leaders. I will always be grateful that having the Harvard brand on my résumé has opened and will continue to open doors. Most important, I will always be grateful for the friends I met at Harvard who helped me on my journey to becoming the person I am today.

On the other hand, over the past 16 years since my graduation, the thought of going to any Harvard alumni function or attending a reunion consistently triggers in me a sense of discomfort and class anxiety. I have realized part of the reason has to do with the fact that I have not given voice to how miserable and unhappy I was during my four years at Harvard. So now, I feel it is finally time to tell my story of disillusionment.

As a refugee from Vietnam who grew up in inner-city Philadelphia and attended a public high school, I felt extremely lucky and blessed when I got my acceptance letter from Harvard. It was an unlikely dream come true. My zip code in Philadelphia had (and continues to have) one of the higher rates of crime, violence, poverty and trauma scores in the city. In my hood, nearly half the kids drop out of high school, so it is seen as a triumph for a kid to go to community college. Getting into Harvard was like boarding a rocket ship out of the ghetto. My hope was to eventually use my education to support my family and help more poor kids like me break through barriers.

Harvard was my first immersion in an elite upper-middle-class environment. It was like shell shock. Unlike scholarship kids who attended private schools, I had never spent time with people who were so wealthy before. In contrast, where I came from, violence was normal. My parents ran a take-out restaurant in an area overrun by gangs. There were regular fights and robberies in our store. One time, a customer was shot in the head going out the door. During my freshman year at Harvard, I realized that what I had gone through was really not normal at all. Most of the kids in my class had enjoyed a very sheltered life. As I listened to my classmates whine about their troubles, I wondered how could they possibly understand what I had gone through?

My freshman year, I struggled to find a community where I felt I could openly share my concerns and find friends whose values and experiences resonated with mine. During high school, I had relied heavily on support from Asian-American friends whose parents were also humble, uneducated immigrants who provided for their families by doing back-breaking menial jobs. At Harvard, I tried to connect with Asian-American student groups but soon learned that besides the color of our skin, we did not share much in common. Many of these students had parents with Ph.D.s and master’s degrees who had groomed them to play brilliantly in the orchestra and follow in their footsteps. Further, many of the Asian-American students I encountered were neurotically obsessed with their grades and led a materialistic lifestyle that was out of my reach. It felt like many of them would look down on me for being poor and having no connections.

It didn’t take long for me to feel completely alienated by the ivory tower academic culture and the self-absorbed drive of my peers and my professors. The administrators preached about lofty goals and celebrated alumni who had changed the world. Yet, I learned the hard way that America’s oldest and most prestigious university makes changes to accommodate no one. Harvard was then (and probably continues to be) a sink or swim environment. Looking back, not a single staff person from Harvard’s admission team who knew about my background and financial situation ever reached out to check on me. If there was anyone on staff who gave a damn if I did sink, I didn’t know who that person was.

To me, Harvard was a place where people put on a politically correct face. It wasn’t normal to be real or to be vulnerable. Even if you didn’t feel like an overachiever, you still had to fake it because everyone expected you to be one. I learned that if you didn’t fit in, it was up to you to change to adapt to Harvard. Otherwise, the options available to you were to take a year off to think things through, to self-medicate your way through to graduation or to have a shrink prescribe antidepressants to numb your disgruntlement. I was shocked to see just how many students there had access to drugs and how many students were taking antidepressants.

I had no idea that the combination of toxic stress and not having a social support network at Harvard was about to cause all the traumas I had experienced growing up but never fully processed to blow up into post-traumatic stress disorder. I had no idea I was about to experience symptoms that included suicidal depression, dissociation, panic attacks that kept me from sleeping and relaxing and general cognitive impairment. From freshman to sophomore year, I went from being a Harvard College scholar to not being able to focus in class, do my problem sets or write papers. By the spring of my sophomore year, as the PTSD took over my life, my goal became to simply survive Harvard with my soul intact. I withdrew even more because whenever I was in that state of mind, I didn’t want to be around people and I didn’t want anyone to know I was falling apart.

In the end, I found solace in the art department, which at Harvard, goes by the pretentious title of Visual and Environmental Studies. What I relished most was that it gave me official permission to be as weird and un-Harvard as possible. It was like having carte blanche to express being different. Like Andy Warhol, I used artsy quirkiness as an armor to protect myself and pose subversive challenges. As I continued to observe and question the social norms I saw around me, art gave me an outlet to make social commentary.

I experimented with different personas: I shaved my head, dyed my hair many colors and dressed eccentrically. Then I got involved in theater and eventually directed productions by the Asian American Players. When we put on M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, I dressed up as a butterfly and carried a boom box blasting Puccini’s opera around Harvard to promote the show. I realized I had developed a reputation for standing out when I came to class in costume and my classmates didn’t flinch. They only asked me how they could see the show.

While at Harvard, I did seek psychiatric care to deal with the PTSD. It was life-changing when the psychiatrist explained to me that my brain development was impacted by the traumatic experiences I went through as an infant when my family escaped Vietnam by boat and spent almost two years in a refugee camp. As heartbreaking as it was to hear that my brain was malfunctioning because of events I had endured as a child which were completely outside my control, it was also empowering to finally have an explanation for what was happening to me. He then recommended I try Zoloft to see if it could rebalance my neurochemistry. He also suggested I start therapy.

The medication stabilized my brain, but left me feeling numb. The therapy made me feel more despondent and helpless. I gave it time, but in the end, I never figured out how talking with a therapist was supposed to be helpful. The most frustrating thing is that the people who treated me didn’t focus on helping me learn effective methods to handle the circumstances causing my high stress: that my family still lived with extreme financial hardship, that I didn’t want to be a burden on them, that I felt responsible for helping them and guilty for not being there to help them, and that going to Harvard did not directly translate into putting me in a better position to financially support them.

What I needed was mentorship and coaching to build the life skills I didn’t learn at home, to address my trigger-defense mechanisms that were locking me in negative spirals and to become financially secure. Since there was no way that Harvard was going to hand these things to me, I realized I needed to figure out how to do these things on my own. Plus, no one seemed to understand that I was not going to take antidepressants the rest of my life. In fact, I was going to stop as soon as my student health insurance expired when I left Harvard. It was up to me to develop a plan to get off medication without relapsing.

For the most part, I managed to heal and push myself to grow over a long journey that continued after graduation. I taught myself neuroscience and developed mind-hacking techniques to heal my brain. I combed through books on emotional intelligence, behavioral economics and positive psychology to unravel my conditioning and build a healthier relationship with myself and connect more authentically with other people. I became financially savvy and secure by working in management consulting, getting an MBA from Wharton and then managing private equity investments.

Now I am a social entrepreneur pursuing the aspiration that led me to Harvard in the first place: to pay it forward and help more people realize their potential. My solution is to create an evidence-based, trauma-informed, essential life skills training that integrates important lessons and skills I’ve learned over the course of my life with scientific findings. I have named this the Calm Clarity Program because it helps people calm their minds and think and see clearly. I am now in the process of building a social enterprise that delivers the Calm Clarity Program on both sides of the educational divide.

I have waited to engage with Harvard as an institution because I still have no idea who on staff there would actually give a damn about my story and the fact that I spent most of my four years there in pain and anguish. I wonder whether my sharing my story with decision-makers there would make any difference. These are some of the questions I have asked over the years:

• Could starting such a dialogue motivate Harvard to provide more support to students who come from low-income backgrounds?
• Is it possible to create a safe space to talk about socioeconomic class differences within the student body?
• Would the college administrators understand the importance of providing a trauma-informed life skills training?
• Would they be willing to offer such training to the student community?

I honestly don’t know the answer to any of these questions. Yet, I hope that when the time comes to engage with Harvard, I will find much more open-minded and caring people to have a dialogue with.

Addendum: My motivation for writing this essay was to finally face my own fears of being looked down at and rejected for growing up poor and traumatized. I knew it was holding me back. So I decided to share my story with my classmates so they would understand why I have been avoiding alumni functions. I’ve been amazed by the outpouring of support and sharing that followed. It’s been so uplifting to realize that no one is looking down at me — actually, it’s quite the opposite! In response to people who have reached out to ask for suggestions for books and resources, please refer to the list here: http://calmclarity.org/the-science/further-reading/

Due Quach (pronounced “Zway Kwok”) is the founder of Calm Clarity, a social enterprise that uses science to help people master their mind and be their best self. As a refugee from Vietnam raised in a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia, Due overcame poverty and post-traumatic stress disorder to graduate from Harvard College with honors and the Wharton MBA Program. The Calm Clarity Program represents a synthesis of evidence-based insights and techniques that enabled Due to conquer adversity, build a successful international business career, strive for self-actualization and to now help others do the same. To learn more about Calm Clarity, please visit their website at calmclarity.org, subscribe to the newsletter, and follow them on facebook (calmclarity) and twitter (@calmclarityorg). Please note: at this time, the Calm Clarity Program is only delivered through in-person experiential workshops and is not offered online. (Due Quach’s profile photo credit: Ben Arnon, Cover image credit: Will Hart/ Flickr)