Prep before heading to an MBA program

OK, so I lied in my earlier post. This is actually my 3rd post in a day – truly a record of sorts. A couple of people have been asking me if they need to do any work before heading to b-school and I owed one of them a response over this weekend (before he starts school this Fall), hence this post.

Now there are two schools of thought here – one says ‘chill and enjoy life before school’, and another says ’study a bit so you can keep up with the Joneses’. This post is for the latter. And since I can only talk about the subjects I’ve been exposed to in Term 1, that’s all I’m going to talk about. As for the books mentioned below, google/amazon them.

1) Accounting – I honestly did not find the need to prep for this. If you have time, I’d save it for other subjects instead. If you really have lots of time, the only way studying for accounting will help you is by letting you study more for your harder courses. I did take a pre-term (i.e. about 4 classes of basic accounting before the core terms started) and all it did was let me focus more on stats and eco. Our required text is Financial Accounting by Charles Horngren, et al (it’s a good book, IMO).

2) Statistics – I would recommend you prep on math in general and stats in particular (if you have a stats course). I don’t enjoy math. But a pre-term coupled with a pretty darned good book (Essential Mathematics for Economics and Business by Teresa Bradley and Paul Patton) got my basics back to me. This then put me on course to study stats (for which I took another pre-term) using a book (Complete Business Statistics by Aczel and Sounderpandian). Did the pre-term courses help me? I guess it was a mixed bag. But given my hatred for math, I think the stats and quant courses did more good than harm. If you have the time, you can skip any pre-terms and do self-study. During the core-term, we use a set of books that our Wharton profs have written and I wouldn’t recommend them in isolation to anybody else who isn’t learning from these guys.

3) Economics – same recommendation as Accounting. But if you have time, pick up a copy of Microeconomics by Greg Mankiw. Very good exposition of the theory behind economics. But the problems leave a little to be desired (at least for ISB’s exams). I picked up a copy of the Schaum’s series book in the hope that it’ll help me with good problems, but it was a disappointment. So the hunt is still on…

4) Marketing – Kotler is supposed to be the bible and although it has a lot of material, I found the reading tough going. In any case, I would not advise you to read much on this subject before starting school. One tip I can offer you is to think through actual cases of companies to help you through class discussions. As an example, try to think of a couple companies that manage their brand well/poorly, a couple companies that get their pricing just right, a couple companies who have segmented and targeted their market correctly, etc. It’s good timepass before getting into school anyways.

As for books, I found that the ISB bookstore offers decent discounts for students, so keep that in mind before you rush out to buy all sorts of books before the term begins.

Wikipedia has been an excellent resource, and another surprise has been the use of Youtube as a source of good educational videos (as an example, I learnt about p-values in stats through youtube).

As for me personally, I am glad I didn’t have the time to do much pre-MBA study. And I’m glad I spent about a week on the pre-terms. I think it was a good enough balance for me.