We bring you more news and views from the front lines this week with business school applicants and students sounding off on life in the trenches.

Pre-matriculation “To Do List” — Some good advice on five things to keep you busy before matriculation comes courtesy of Ahembeea this week. Tips include nurturing your online–and offline–networks and immersing yourself in everything related to the world of business. Oh, and make sure to develop some opinions while you’re at it.

Social pressures of B-school and beyond — Palo Alto for a While brings up a great topic this week as she reflects on the importance of maintaining good relations with people whom she may not actually care for in other contexts. Will the pressure to be friends with everyone in her class lead her to develop an even greater number of frenemies?

What’s in your tool box? — Raghunathrao has compiled a list of essential tools that will help in his MBA. Key components in this diverse group include gift of gab, dash of cynicism, FrndNet and a 1TB external hard disk. Check out the original post for a complete list.

Time to take a step back? — The “fall back and regroup” strategy is weighing heavily on Bizwiz’s mind these days. Would a better choice be to regroup, fix his personal life and return refreshed and motivated to make the best out of his MBA-plans next year instead?

Lessons learned — After discovering Stanford MBA Marquis’ blog, Helen shares some lessons learned from one of his posts in particular that have been reflected in her own professional journey to date. One such lesson: make the people below and above you look great.

Will work for food — Georgetown’s HairTwirler is knee-deep in cover letters at the moment and wonders whether it would be going to far to write: “I will work unpaid overtime, take extra projects and pretend like I’m working for an American company vacation wise if you’ll only hire me! I need a job! I love you… I mean your company.”

Bidding for courses at Haas — Over on the Berkley MBA Student Blogs, Rags bids readers farewell and offers solid advice on bidding for courses at Haas. “Do not peanut butter your points across all courses you want,” he says. “Make choices.”

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We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.

We bring you more news and views from the front lines this week with business school applicants, students and professors sounding off on life in the trenches.

Summer internship secured — Harvard Bound has just five weeks left of RC year and checks in after a month-long hiatus with the exciting news that she’s secured a summer internship at the D.C. organization, The Global Fund for Children. In other news, she’s looking at course options for her EC year and lamenting the lack of funds needed for the international trips some of her HBS classmates will embark on this summer.

Is Fuqua right for me? — Sunnyside Up! wonders whether now is the right time for business school, given the drastic changes to the economic landscape since last fall. After her experiences at Blue Devil Weekend, and weighing the timing against her growing responsibilities at work, Sunnyside has declined Duke’s offer of admission and awaits word from Haas.

Laying claim to the “thoughtlet”– The.Grey.One offers multiple thoughtlets on many topics in this post; he bids a sad farewell to fellow blogger MaybeMBA, offers some book recommendations, discusses social networking and gears up for a visit to Evanston for Kellogg’s DAK II function. He also finds it amusing that he’s the only blogger of Kellogg’s 2011 class admitted in R2!

The quarter-million gamble — “What really gets to me about funding my MBA is the thought that I could surely be doing something more worthwhile with my savings than going bankrupt and then taking on debt, ” D.G. ponders in a recent post. After envisioning ways to make that money work for him, he comes back to the non-financial opportunities b-school offers.

Red Carpet Weekend recap — Wake Forest’s admitted students weekend proved wonderful for Omne, who enjoyed team-building activities such as the human knots game, a mini bike making challenge, wine tasting and more. All in all a great weekend, he says, adding that some people paid their deposit then and there, “a testament to how much fun the weekend was!”

It’s all about the people — Mechanigal shares a great adage for business school and life in general: your network is a measure of your net worth. After a great session with second-years who gave advice on electives, she says the most useful thing she heard was to make time for recruiting because when you graduate, you’ll value having a job more than having an A in the most difficult course at Darden.

The mercilessness of 2nd quarter — Metal doesn’t understand what second years mean when they call second semester at McCombs a cake walk; he says “It has been an uphill climb with a sack of bricks to carry.” Nevertheless, he thoroughly enjoys it and has spent the past week juggling apartment hunting, class assignments, the search for summer projects, and personal issues involving his far-flung family and girlfriend.

We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.

We bring you more news and views from the front lines this week with business school applicants, students and professors sounding off on life in the trenches.

Enjoying the high that only networking can bring — Far from the fake exchanges she’d imagined, Samantha has found networking can actually lead you to meet some pretty interesting people. Check out this post for tips on the myriad ways networking can work for you.

Intel on loans for internationals is slow in coming — MissionMBA is starting to sweat, now that two months have passed and Goitzueta still hasn’t locked down a loan program for international students with no U.S. co-signer. Chicago Booth and HBS made announcements this past week, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed for some good news soon.

On meeting a fantastic mentor — Palo Alto for a While (Stanford) feels like she hit the jackpot after meeting a young, bright, HBS-educated VC.  Now, if only she can come up with some great ideas for combatting her tech/engineering deficiency.

What did I do better this time around? — As Mike prepares for a move to Evanston to start Kellogg in the fall, he took a moment to reflect on what made his applications stronger this time around. He points to three things that affected his success: choice of schools, better essays and new work and EC experience.

Signed off and sorely missed — MaybeMBA bid the blogosphere farewell last week and set the record straight on her experience at Chicago Booth. Her refreshingly candid posts, as well as her point of view as a female, and parent, attending b-school offered an eye-opening perspective we didn’t see elsewhere.

Exchange program, is it right for you? — Over on the Tuck student blog, a recent entry lays out the dilemma students face when considering whether to go on an exchange program as part of the MBA experience. This post seems to stack the deck against shipping out…

The doldrums have set in and it isn’t pretty — The Ruminator, beset with boredom and frustration in his LBS classes, is impatient to get on with his internship. His only solace: weekend outings with Mrs. R and an upcoming trip to Italy as part of an operations course.

Why working for free feels good — On Duke University professor Dan Ariely’s blog, Predictably Irrational, he explores the notion that sometimes asking someone to do something for nothing is more powerful than paying them. In fact, paying a small incremental incentive does not increase effort, but actually lowers it. Quite an interesting read.

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We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.

We bring you more news and views from the front lines this week with business school applicants, students and professors sounding off on life in the trenches.

Miscellaneous updates from HBS — Harvard Business School director of admissions and financial aid Dee Leopold had a few updates late last week that will affect Round 1 applicants this fall, current waitlisted applicants and international students trying to figure out the intricacies of financial aid. Here’s a hint: good news is coming!

Turning down McCombs — MBADreamer moved to Bangalore last week and is getting settled in at IIMB.  The offer from McCombs came the last day before leaving the U.S., but after much deliberation, he decided to deny the offer and make a go of it in India. I’ll know after a year whether I made the right decision, he says.

Decision time — Getting into Wake Forest (w/ full scholarship!) is one thing, but now Omne is in the midst of making some decisions large and small regarding career and school. When to quit working, housing options, where to travel internationally…the journey has begun.

Graduation Day and a new chapter begins — The Teacher reflected on this moment in life, in which his wife has earned an MBA and he is about to embark on that same journey. A speech by Kellogg dean Dipak Jain stole the show, and his philosophy that humans should follow the refrigerator principle in life– if things are kept cool, they stay fresh for a longer period of time–was the ultimate mood booster.

And your favorite class is… — On the Darden MBA Student Blog, Bill Gray shares what have been his favorite courses this year, and the results were surprising… even to him. Rather than the quantitative classes–an obvious choice for someone with an engineering background–Gray realized he was learning far more in the ’softer’ courses like ‘Business Ethics Through Literature.’

Waning willingness to blog — With her time at McDonough drawing to a close, MBA for HairTwirler steps back a bit from blogging as impending nuptials, job hunting and Netflix gain greater importance. “I almost killed myself in the fall by taking ridiculous classes I barely understood simultaneously,” she says, so check out the lighter course load she’s taking this module.

Some good things at HBS — In response to controversy generated by an earlier post, CS@HBS shares the serious side of her MBA experience and sets the record straight that it’s not all partying and good times in Slackerville.

$30 billion a year, thanks to Steve Jobs — Stanford professor and business guru Bob Sutton links to an article in Portfolio which estimates that Steve Jobs adds $30 billion a year to the economy. As a professed Apple lover, Sutton thinks Jobs will go down in history with the likes of Thomas Edison.

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We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.