B-school is only a few weeks away after a tumultuous period that included deciding not to attend Yale and then receiving a partial scholarship

by Linda Craib

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As I conclude up my last journal entry as a prospective MBA student, I am less than two weeks away from the start of business school. Time, which, according to Einstein, not one other than exists so that everything doesn’t happen simultaneously, seems to subsist pushing both the bounds of relativity and his statement. Anticipation, that delightful, child-like passion that blends the pleasure of agitation with a twitch of worry, has suit a part of my everyday actual observation.

It has been a tumultuous six months since my last journal. In mid-March, I was invited to participate in a marketing and recruiting class for the Yale MBA for Executives (MBA-E). Amanda Skinner (Yale MBA ‘08), a former midwife and now a health-care consultant, was facilitating a focus group as part of a marketing class. Several members of the class of 2009, as properly as prospective and accepted students from the class of 2010, were besides invited.

The evening promised work and fun: focus group meeting at the Omni New Haven Hotel, dinner at the Black Bear Saloon, and warm chocolate-chip cookies and coffee (or wine) at 116 Crown, a great little tapas and wine bar. It was an enjoyable evening full of debate and an open exchange of ideas and opinions.

We discussed how the program begins for every student and were warned in all parts of the inclemency of "Camp Omni," the elementary two weeks of school, then students are in residence at the Omni Hotel for orientation and intensive classes covering monetary accounting, financial reporting, and relating to housekeeping analysis.

Descriptions of the two weeks were conveyed with a rather disconcerting mixture of a rueful smile, a shake of the self-guided, and ominous two-word phrases to describe the experience—as if using just common rather menacing word alone wouldn’t do. Still, no one seemed to view Camp Omni (at least in re-examination) in a negative illumine. They said the intensity of those primeval couple weeks served as a catalyst to forge friendships, teams, and bonds that have shaped their experience throughout the program.

The current students, all successful health-care professionals, many with advanced degrees in such fields as medicine, law, and the sciences, spoke of the transformational power of learning from a world-class faculty. They described how the program had changed them as leaders and as individuals in ways they had not anticipated. They described for what reason successful they felt to be part of a relatively small, crony program that be possible to offer individual politeness to each student.

Yale offers race counseling services to the students in its MBA-E program designed to sudden the of necessity of mid-career professionals within the health-care industry. Students have access to a counselor whose expertise is mid-career job search and placement help, career workshops, alumni health-care panels, and a health-care headhunter panel during the course of each academy year.

Postgraduation plans and opportunities of the current students included career transitions that took a greater grow dizzy (i.e. from nurse-midwife to executive health-care consultant) to those that simply trended upwards on a linear path for students staying with their current employers. I couldn’t help but listen closely to which the instant students had to say about how their investment in time and currency was playing off. For students who are older or who may not be in actual possession of the benefit of corporate sponsorship (or both), the thought of making this kind of six-figure investment in this economy was unsettling. I was pleased that none of the students openly expressed any concerns about his or her job prospects.

While the students expressed admiration and respect for the professors at Yale, the staff of the Yale EMBA program, and their classmates, more tough criticism was leveled at Yale relative to its financial aid policies regarding its professional schools. The evening’s events took place not lingering after major media coverage scrutinizing the financial aid policies at schools with soaring endowments.