Real stories from MBA applicants and students…

Tinydancer posted a new book alert this week on the Best Business Schools’ Admissions Secrets, coming out July 1. Check out the sidebar on her blog for other recommended application reading.

Veni Vidi Vici struggles this week with resume fun. As someone who has never had to write one before, he’s hoping to find peers in the MBA blogosphere interested in discussing the pros and cons of various formats, the level of detail they would give and other resume-related talk. Any takers?

To avoid repeats of past episodes of awkwardness, MBA for HairTwirler has a few tips for her readers that she may soon meet in real life at McDonough.

A few weeks into his internship, Goitzueta blogger Righty shares his Monday morning woes and deja vu.

In Greetings from the Emerald City, CS@HBS settles into her sweet fully-furnished suite and gears up for a summer internship at a large Seattle technology company.

School’s out for Mike Murphy, aka Darden One Day at a Time. Now that he’s back in the working world, Murphy takes a moment to reflect on the notion that grades matter, despite a pervasive belief that business school is just a way to get a great job and build a great network.

And from Dee Leopold, Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at HBS, a lengthy post addressing one of the burning questions on applicants’ minds: Who should write my recommendations?

Stacy Blackman’s Weekly Roundup of B-School Intelligence

To equip executives with the knowledge and skills to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving world of media and entertainment, UCLA Anderson School of Management presented the second annual Entertainment and Media Executive Program June 17-20, 2008. The four-day intensive program focused on the challenges and opportunities that emerge from an ever-accelerating shift of production, distribution and consumption of media and entertainment into the digital realm.

The EMLYON Business School is offering two new scholarships to encourage the entrepreneurial leadership attitude and academic excellence required to successfully complete their International MBA program. “The 2008 Entrepreneurial Scholarship” covers 50% of tuition fees and rewards candidates with a strong entrepreneurial focus. “The 2008 Excellence Scholarship” covers 75% of tuition fees and rewards academic excellence.

From the last issue of The Harbus for the academic year: 50 Reasons Why HBS is Better than Real Life provides a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at all the things about HBS that right now look infinitely preferable to the big, cold, scary world out there.

QS Top MBA explores what top business schools can do in this interview with student Alexey Shalimov, who shares his first impressions, and first disappointments, of the Wharton full-time MBA program he began in July 2007.

Also of interest this week at QS Top MBA: Can a top business school really teach entrepreneurship? Isn’t innovation something that you either have or don’t? According to one of the world’s leading academics in the field of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (E&I) and the man who set up the E&I Center at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, there is a definite role for business school in developing the skill sets of entrepreneurs and innovators.

Business Week’s Francesca Di Meglio reports that the slowing economy is raising the stakes for MBAs hoping to turn their summer internship into a full-time job offer. Although it’s unclear whether employers will be making fewer job offers at the end of the summer, it’s likely interns will find themselves in an increasingly tight job market, especially in the ailing financial and consulting sectors.

In a slightly different reading of the fortunes to come, the Graduate Management Admission Council says new MBAs find success landing jobs before graduation. In fact, GMAC has found that the percentage of students with job offers before graduation is at its highest level since 2001.

An Inside Higher Ed editorial advances the belief that it’s time to go un-global. According to finance professor George Morgan, all around us, the free movement of goods, services, people and capital across political borders is losing political strength and popularity. Morgan asserts that it’s past time for colleges and universities to fully accept the trend before they and their graduates entering the un-global world are left behind.

In our blog, we provide news, tips and tools to help you navigate the MBA admissions process. Despite the high volume of information that gets printed every week, we do not regularly address the fact that many applicants face a set of challenges that are very different from GPA, GMAT and resume. I want to help applicants work through road blocks to success that may include self-doubt, anxiety, procrastination and generally feeling overwhelmed by this process. Hopefully with a bit of “Vitamin MBA” I can help you to overcome these challenges so that you can put our other resources to work and truly excel on your applications. I now present you with a dose of “Vitamin MBA”:

The Happiness Project blog wrote about the idea of perfect vs. good. I thought this was very relevant to the work we do with MBA applications because so many people become paralyzed by the idea of having to draft the most perfect essays. I am a big fan of taking the plunge and writing something…anything, as opposed to spiraling and agonizing over every word because every draft has to be perfect… We touch on the idea of taking the plunge in our HBS essay tips post, as well.

Read on for excerpts from her post.

Voltaire is the great thinker responsible for the observation, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

I’ve found this precept to be extremely useful with my happiness project. Instead of pushing myself to an impossible “perfect,” and therefore getting nowhere, I accept “good.”

This sounds sensible enough, you’re thinking, but how does it actually work in real life? Here are some examples:

• I floss sometimes. Not every day. Sometimes.
• I don’t push myself in exercise. I have friends who, I suspect, secretly scoff at my mild work-out routines. But because they never exercise except to push themselves to the max, they never go, and I’ve been exercising consistently since high school.
• I don’t call, I email. When I told someone about my April resolution to send my friends birthday emails, he said, “But you should call! A call is much better.” True, I admit. But I hate the phone, and I won’t call. But I will send an email.

Obviously most of the examples are not terribly relevant to your MBA applications, but I think the concept is. I have clients who spend weeks and even months gearing up with spreadsheets and checklists and outlines in order to approach this process perfectly. Others just dive in and get started. If you find yourself trapped in the pursuit of perfection, remember that this is the “enemy of GOOD”.