MBA Quant Experience

I'll be teaching a morning quantitative skills workshop at the Forté Foundation MBA Women's Conference in New York on June 27.  Students admitted to Forté Sponsor schools are welcome to attend.  As of yesterday, approximately 140 women are pre-registered for the workshop.

Here's a workshop description:

This two-hour workshop will build on the pre-work coverage of finance and accounting basics to develop insight into the ongoing credit market crisis. Rather than do a broad but shallow survey of quant skills needed in the MBA first year, I've picked a few tools and a relevant topic from the current business press. We'll dig into the basics of bond valuation and balance sheet leverage with two goals in mind:

1. Whet your appetite for your upcoming MBA coursework
2. Provide a status check on your quantitative proficiency.

To learn more about the broader conference and to register, visit the Forté conference site.

To learn more about the workshop or to take a look at the pre-work material on finance and accounting as an example of the MBA Math lecture material, visit the MBA Math workshop site.

Adapting material first posted here over a year ago, I've written a fairly light piece intended to help prospective MBAs decide how much quantitative preparation they need given their background and temperament.  The substance is adapted from the 8 MBA Quant Themes posts I wrote when I started this blog.  The opening is adapted from an impromptu dramatic performance one morning at Tuck's math camp in August (you had to be there!).

“To prepare or not to prepare, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous quant courses or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by preparing surmount them.”

Thus I (tongue in cheek) imagine a pacing Hamlet, top MBA acceptance letter in hand. Despite their various unique brand positions and program structures, top MBA programs all must teach the quantitative basics of finance, accounting, economics, and statistics.

Drawn from years of MBA quantitative skills teaching, the following themes will help incoming MBA students determine their preparation needs...

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I recently finished teaching my second-year decision consulting practice course Professional Decision Modeling to 46 Fuqua second-year students.  They were fantastic--smart, hard working, diverse, likeable, motivated.  I'll add brave because they took an unknown course taught by an unknown visiting professor.  Commuting to campus each week (just like consulting), I stayed at the Thomas Center, which is next to the main Fuqua buildings and has accomodations and classrooms for executive education courses and the Durham residential component of the various executive MBA programs.

I stretched and reformatted the course from the version I teach at Tuck to fit Fuqua's term structure.  The experience was energizing, forcing me to rethink priorities and try new things.  Interacting with a large group of decision science faculty colleagues was also very stimulating although limited time on campus and the demands of teaching constrained my ability to make the most of the opportunity.

A course like this is far from the present concerns of prospective MBAs considering the MBA Math quant skills course in preparation for the first year core curriculum.  Yet the experience of seeing these talented second-year students integrate the technical work (there was plenty of it) with the qualitative and interpersonal aspects of a real consulting case is what motivates my work with students on the more basic quant skills foundation covered by the MBA Math course.

I hadn't been on Duke's campus for about 12 years since I was a guest speaker in a decision science course.  The Fox Student Center is a great addition to the day-to-day experience.  Building projects abound on campus, including a major project to add Fuqua classroom space.  The central campus quad is absolutely beautiful; it's hard to imagine it's only 80 or so years old.  I enjoyed exploring Durham and Chapel Hill, with highlights including some bbq of course, open mic night at the James Joyce pub, dinner at Pop's, two trips to Tyler's Taproom, and a nighttime stroll through UNC's campus.

MBA programs differ in the Excel skills that students need and what mix of pre-enrollment, classroom, and student-to-student learning develops the required skills.  I will post responses from current students about their programs.

The MBA Math course provides an introductory Excel lesson coupled with coverage of Excel spreadsheet design and major functions (general purpose arithmetic implementation of formulas and also equivalent built-in functions) integrated into the finance, statistics, and economics lessons.

I went to New York on Friday after finishing the first week of my Tuck second-year decision consulting course to participate in an event hosted by The MBA Tour for prospective MBAs.  I spoke with school representatives with whom I have previously only communicated electronically or on the phone, and with others in the MBA support community, such as Janet Nakano of MBAPodcaster and Andrew Yang of Manhattan GMAT.

My role at the event was to provide 30-minute overviews of the quantitative demands of the first year MBA core curriculum and, in the evening, to lead a 3-hour workshop attended by 45 or so prospective MBAs that covered quantitative foundations in finance, accounting, and economics, with applications to current events in business such as the subprime mortgage lending crisis and Apple's iPhone price discounts. 

The key messages are that the basic quantitative foundations of the MBA first year core provide powerful insights into a wide variety of business issues and that, for students with quantitative gaps or weakness, coming up to speed on these foundations before starting the MBA first year can help them to make the best of their investment of time and money once they arrive on campus.

I'll be teaching my second-year decision consulting and valuation course Professional Decision Modeling at Fuqua during their Term 3 in January and February.  The fall term Professional Decision Modeling course at Tuck starts next week and I am deep in preparation. 

I look forward to working with students and faculty at Duke as well as spending some time in the Research Triangle area during college basketball season.

I returned to my MBA home base at Tuck to teach the 5-day Pre-Enrollment Program, affectionately known as math camp, to 55 incoming first years.  The coverage is similar to the online MBA Math course, with lessons in finance, accounting, economics, statistics, and spreadsheets.  In each of 4 or 5 sessions each day, I introduce some concepts and lead students through sample problems before students then work individually through similar problems.  Second year teaching assistants and I roam the room to assist with questions.  The "watch-a-few then do-a-few" approach highlights areas of confusion and boosts confidence incrementally as students eventually can generate correct answers.

The second year TAs Jason, Alasdair, and Lindsay did a fantastic job grounding the week in what first year students will really need most and also in keeping the summer in math camp with some fun had-to-be-there performances.

Away from the classroom, many students explored the campus and surrounding area, including some canoeing and kayaking on the Connecticut River just a few minutes' walk from Tuck.  International students were having an orientation course across the hall, an Outward Bound group was sailing in coastal Maine, and a Tuck Builds group was doing some construction projects in the Upper Valley area. 

They're all in the midst of Decision Science and Accounting right now with summer most definitely over.

Wharton kindly provided a classroom on August 17 to give prospective students a taste of the MBA experience to kick off the MBADiversity Symposium in Philadelphia.  I taught a 3-hour financial math module drawn from the MBA Math lessons that walked students through concepts and sample problems in time value of money, annuities, bonds, and net present value.  Just after lunch, Prof. Jeff Sandefer from the Acton MBA in Entrepreneurship led a lively case discussion for which students had prepared in advance.  Outside the Huntsman Hall classroom the MBADiversity event participants encountered Wharton first years in the midst of their pre-term experience.

Motivated by that taste of the MBA life, the MBADiversity symposium attendees then returned to the Hyatt hotel for a weekend of networking, powerful speakers, and interactions with representatives from many top MBA programs.  I enjoyed talking with the participants and providing information to help shape their path to b-school.

The experience reminded me of the tentative time when I was charting my own course to graduate school, typing out essays on a borrowed typewriter (yes, it was that long ago!).  I spend most of my time teaching admitted students and it is helpful to be reminded that students go through a very challenging admissions process.

I was also struck by the collegiality among the admissions officers from various schools.  I didn't hear a single negative word the entire time.  Instead, schools explain their programs' features, listen to prospective students' goals, and strongly suggest visiting target schools to gauge "fit".

Away from the symposium, Philadelphia was a great place to visit.  A highlight was a tour of Penn's campus and the opportunity to visit Monk's Cafe and try some Belgian beers with a pot of Ghent-style mussels.  The Rodenbach Grand Cru was my favorite.

I had a fantastic experience teaching a 3-day pre-orientation quantitative skills course for 89 incoming Johnson School first years.  Lots of getting-started energy as students returned to the classroom for the first time in years combined with some quant anxiety at the outset.  By the end of three days and 24 hours of class time, friendships were forming and rusty algebra skills were coming back.

We covered a mix of finance, accounting, marketing, economics, probability, and statistics.

The teaching environment in Sage Hall was first class, the weather was perfect late summer warmth allowing exploratory evening strolls around campus and through the gorges.  Yes, they are gorgeous!

I closed out the experience on Friday evening with a quick Ithaca Pale Ale in the basement of Ruloffs in the company of students.

On the way out of town on Saturday morning, I picked up some great bagels at Collegetown Bagels in downtown Ithaca and a mix of bread and coffee from the nearby Ithaca Bakery before heading north to the Adirondacks for some R&R.

Next up in the classroom, a 3-hour MBA Math Finance Workshop for prospective MBAs on Friday at Wharton in Philadelphia as part of the 2-day MBADiversity Symposium followed by a 5-day "math camp" next week for incoming Tuck first years in Hanover.

The current issue of FastCompany has an article  by Chip and Dan Heath about Carol Dweck's mindset work, which I have highlighted in some posts (click Growth Mindset under Major Posts on the right).  They describe success through training about mindsets to improve math performance by junior high students:

Now the puzzle deepens: Dweck has begun to explore whether we can intervene and change people's mind-sets, and if so, will that make them more successful? Earlier this year, Dweck and two colleagues, Kali Trzesniewsi of Stanford and Lisa S. Blackwell of Columbia, ran an experiment on junior high schoolers. If they trained the students to have a growth mind-set, would the kids' math grades improve? In less than two hours over eight weeks, they taught the students concepts such as: Your brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise; just as a baby gets smarter as it learns, so can you; everything is hard before it gets easy--never give up because you don't master something immediately.

They then make the jump to bringing this training-for-mindset approach to corporate leadership.  That's got to be a double bonus for prospective MBAs.  Cultivating a growth-oriented mindset can help with your pre-MBA quant work and your post-MBA leadership skills!

Although it seems as if summer just started, the surge in student quant prep activity reminds me that MBA program kickoffs are on the horizon.

I'll be teaching a 3-day MBA Math course at Cornell's Johnson School in three weeks and a 5-day version at Dartmouth's Tuck School three weeks after that.

In between, I'll be doing a first-ever 3-hour MBA Math finance workshop on August 17 as the kickoff to MBADiversity's third annual symposium in Philadelphia.  The Wharton School has graciously provided a classroom for the workshop's expected 135 prospective MBAs.  You can learn more about the symposium at the MBADiversity site.

"Two men say they're Jesus; one of them must be wrong" is a line from a Dire Straits song that I've always liked.  Adapted to the MBA domain, not everyone can be the top student in their MBA class.  When confronted with competitive challenges in a group of top performers, Carol Dweck describes in her book Mindsets that people with the fixed mindset perversely may, consciously or unconsciously, reduce their effort to avoid a deepset fear of trying and failing.

Here's an anecdote from Dweck's book about a former violin prodigy struggling at Juilliard:

This prodigy was afraid of trying.  "Everything I was going through boiled down to fear.  Fear of trying and failing....If you go to an audition and don't really try, if you're not really prepared, if you didn't work as hard as you could have and you don't win, you have an excuse....Nothing is harder than saying, 'I gave it my all and it wasn't good enough.'"

Later in the book in the context of changing mindsets, Dweck describes a student's progression from a confident fixed mindset...

I'm naturally gifted.  I don't need to study.  I don't need to sleep.  I'm superior.

...that crumbles upon encountering resistance...

Uh-oh, I'm losing it.  I can't understand things, I can't remember things.  What am I now?

With some insight about mindsets, he was able to change his perspective...

Don't worry so much about being smart.  Don't worry so much about avoiding failures.  That becomes self-destructive.  Let's start to study and sleep and get on with life.

Carol Dweck describes her book Mindsets as being for a general audience after years of writing academic psychology research papers and books.  Following some introductory chapters, applied chapters cover issues in sports, business, and relationships.  Then Dweck addresses parents, teachers, and coaches about their impact on the mindsets of those under their care.  The book closes with a workshop-oriented chapter about changing mindsets.

The studies Dweck performs all seem similar in that she has people answer some basic questions about their outlook and then she follows their performance in various domains.  The questions ask how much the subjects agree with statements like "you have a certain amount of intelligence, and you can't really do much to change it" (fixed mindset) and "you can always substantially change how intelligent you are" (growth mindset).  The focus is not on whether you have a lot or a little ability in a certain area but the extent to which you believe that you can change your ability level with effort.

She finds again and again that the mindset revealed by these self-perceptions lines up extremely well with peformance in challenging circumstances.  To change mindsets, she encourages us to examine our mindsets in areas of relatively low ability and realize that similar dynamics are at play in areas of relatively high performance.

What really pulled me in was the section about artistic ability.  While it seems crazy to me to believe that a person cannot substantially improve his or her quantitative ability through effort, I readily accept that I'm just not artistic.  And never will be.  My drawings on cards to family and friends still have only stick figures.  Dweck shows how people with this mindset about their artistic ability were able to do competent (not great) self-portraits by committing to take a relatively short class in drawing. 

Where the fixed mindset prevails, people shy away from challenges that will identify them as incompetent.  Shift to a growth mindset, however, and you'll be surprised what can happen.  It's not about who you ARE in some fundamental sense.  Rather, it's about getting out of your own way and allowing yourself to BECOME more capable through steady effort.

The fixed/growth mindset distinction gives me great insight into the fear that many of my pre-term math camp students have about quantitative ability.  I tell them that there's no reason to know anything about finance, accounting, economics, statistics, and spreadsheets until they've studied the subjects.  But, like I would feel walking into an art class, some of them are convinced that they just "can't do math" (at the high level their MBA courses will require, anyway) and they are about to be discovered as admissions mistakes.  Unfortunately, that mindset can be self-fulfilling.

Back in March, I posted about an article I read about mindsets written by Carol Dweck.  Since then, I've read her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.  It's a quick, engaging, and wide-ranging read.  I believe that it is extremely relevant to understanding how MBA students react to the overwhelming rigor of the MBA first year.  I'll start with a quick post containing an anecdote from the book and then I'll provide an overview of the book's structure and some definitions in a separate post.

Basking in the warm, self-affirming glow of their hard-earned acceptances to top MBA programs, admitted students will soon need to leave behind the big-picture talk about career goals and get down to the nitty gritty of a fast-paced curriculum that includes demanding quantitative courses in finance, accounting, economics, statistics, and decision science.

I'll shift references from medical school to business school in one of Dweck's anecdotes to address incoming MBAs more directly:

Most students started out pretty interested in [business].  Yet over the semester, something happened.  Students with the fixed mindset stayed interested only when they did well right away.  Those who found it difficult showed a big drop in their interest and enjoyment.  If it wasn't a testimony to their intelligence, they couldn't enjoy it.

"The harder it gets," reported one student, "the more I have to force myself to read the book and study for the tests.  I was excited about [business] before, but now every time I think about it, I get a bad feeling in my stomach."

In contrast, students with the growth mindset continued to show the same high level of interest even when they found the work very challenging.  "It's a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be, but it's what I want to do, so that only makes me more determined.  When they tell me I can't, it really gets me going."  Challenge and interest went hand in hand.

Blogging has been slow while I've been getting admitted students ready for their summer pre-MBA quantitative preparations.  Cornell (Johnson), Dartmouth (Tuck), and Washington St. Louis (Olin) have purchased MBA Math subscriptions for all incoming students.  Georgetown (McDonough) will do so in the next day or so. 

Separately, admitted students from dozens of MBA programs have found their way to MBA Math on their own in recent weeks and are working through the twenty-two lessons covering Excel spreadsheets, finance, accounting, microeconomics, and statistics.  Students subscribing in the past six weeks will be attending the following prominent MBA programs in the fall: Boston College, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Georgia Tech, Harvard, INSEAD, London Business School, MIT, Michigan, Purdue, Rice, Rochester, USC, Stanford, UT Austin, Wake Forest, William and Mary, and Yale.

Discussion boards and regular office hour online chats provide communication between students and me and among students.