MBA Quant Experience

Linda Craib writes in her BusinessWeek MBA Journal  about her plans to boost her quantitative skills before entering Yale's executive MBA program:

Because I'm a woman who has had an nontraditional path to business school, I am spending the next year of my life strengthening the quantitative skills I need to become a business leader. With degrees in nursing and art history, this time leading up to Yale provides me with a wonderful opportunity to further prepare academically. My goal for the coming year is to see the beauty of mathematics beyond simple calculation.

Sarah Baranowsky writes in her BusinessWeek MBA Journal  about the inevitable challenges of the MBA first term at Wisconsin Madison:

But before the halfway point, when exams are piling up and every waking minute is devoted to the program, the doubts creep in. You think, why am I punishing myself this way? You think, how did I end up here? You think, being a student is a crazy way to live. You think, I might not make it.

If you are heading to business school in the fall, you should expect to hit a low point sometime in November. Plan for it, because it will happen no matter what you do ahead of time. For my part, I started to see combinations of panic and fatigue on the faces in my cohorts first. I felt like I was doing reasonably well. Then midterms hit, and I fell apart. I realized that I don't know how to take tests anymore, especially tests that have anything to do with math (my last math class was more than 15 years ago). The stress plays out in everyone differently, but everyone learns one common lesson: the value of grace under pressure.

The upcoming holiday break is the light at the end of the first-term tunnel.

Comments from a second-year at MIT Sloan:

We use tons of Excel here at Sloan, including regressions and other statistical functions.  People who don't have the skills are at a bit of a disadvantage, though there is so much group work that they are able to get lots of help.  There are some workshops offered during the first few weeks of classes, but I did not attend.  My skills are fine but even I have experienced the late-night frustration of knowing what you want to do and not knowing how... I'd be miserable if I hadn't had a lot of experience prior to school.

Comments from a second year at Harvard:

At HBS, we use Excel heavily in the first year – daily for a few hours per day. We use Excel heavily every day for our Finance courses (both 1^st and 2^nd semester), and moderately in the 2^nd semester for the Strategy, Macroecon, and Negotiations courses as well. First year did not include any use of regressions or stats programs, however.

Getting up to speed on Excel was the single biggest challenge I had at HBS. Formal excel prep through HBS for new students comes in three forms:

1) Analytics , which is a pre-MBA 2 week boot camp for select students (about 250/900 students enroll). Analytics provides some excel help through tutors, but not in a formal class, and as a result, I found that I knew a bit more about Excel after Analytics, but not nearly enough in terms of shortcuts, quickly thinking through how to best configure/set up spreadsheets. The time factor for Excel newbies like me killed me during the first year when there’s so little time to do all your cases, etc.

2) For all students: Finance, Accounting, and Quantitative Methods (QM) pre-Matriculation online modules : These were required for all students to complete after acceptance but before formal matriculation – failure to complete these modules would result in HBS retracting their offer letter. We had to use Excel on all these, but again, it didn’t show us how to use Excel, or use it effectively and efficiently. QM shows us how to use statistics, run regressions, and interpret the data, Finance, Accting self-explanatory.

3) For all students: Excel CD-ROM and workbook. The companion book with the online modules specific for Excel use. Somewhat helpful, but very basic, and not nearly enough, esp again in terms of setting up spreadsheets efficiently and knowing how to do the shortcuts in formatting, etc.

During HBS, students (usu PE or I-Bankers) would sometimes hold informal Excel tutorial sessions for their respective sections. We had a great, and very helpful section relative to others, so we had 2 shortcut help sessions and several sessions going through each case led by students. The 2 shortcut sessions were literally my lifesavers – it so dramatically helped my learning curve on how to use Excel that none of the other formal programs compared, and it was the first time I felt Excel was no longer a barrier to begin doing some “real learning”. We covered the following at these sessions:

1) General rules on formatting and setting up a spreadsheet:

a. Setting up hard coded inputs vs. formula dependent numbers with a color coding system (highlighted cells, blue/red text)

b. Setting up an assumptions box, etc.

2) How to create “if” statements, and then how to create switches (“yes”, “no” cell) to change scenarios

3) How to use goalseek

4) How to use the paint function to help format spreadsheets

5) Keyboard shortcuts to insert and delete rows, columns

6) Using F2, F4

7) Using ALT, T, U, A to check dependents

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.