MBA Quant Experience

Here is a testimonial from Peter Park, a first-year student at Harvard Business School and member of the MBA Math Board of Advisors, about his pre-MBA use of the MBA Math online quantitative preparation course:

Prior to business school, I spent three years in Eldoret, Kenya, where I worked with Indiana and Moi Universities on the development of an HIV control system for western Kenya. I was responsible for ‘income security’ strategies for our HIV+ patient base, and linked sustainability measures with HIV care and prevention.

While my work in Eldoret certainly called for sound business intuition, I had historically been a poet of sorts with a mean non-profit bent. As an undergrad at Middlebury College, I studied religion and environmental studies, and after Midd, I spent a year on a non-profit fellowship at Indiana University called the Jane Addams - Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in Philanthropy. So by the time I had my admit letters for business school, while I understood the general feel for business, I still had hardly ever opened an Excel file, and terms such as ‘equity’ conjured up notions of poverty alleviation or social justice or something.

I am now a first-year student/RC at Harvard Business School, and through some smart pre-MBA prep, the transition into HBS life has been markedly smooth and my first semester went really well. While I used a number of resources during the summer, MBA Math was the cornerstone of my independent preparations for a number of reasons. For me, I found it to be the best way to become familiar with unfamiliar terminology early on, the best introduction to the process of solving problems in Excel, and perhaps most importantly, a painless and efficient way to learn the essentials. It was definitely a lot more effective than the books I bought over the summer but never quite got around to reading, and the reason is that MBA Math is structured in a way that makes it easy and effective to learn independently.