2006 WSJ Ranking

Wall Street Journal released its 2006 ranking today and Kenan-Flagler moved up one notch from #9 in the country to #8. I remember I was working on my application last year when the 2005 ranking came out.

This has been a very interesting week to say the least. It’s just Wednesday and I have attended 4 company presentations. I enjoy attending these presentations because I learn something new about the Industry every time. The big guys come to town in impressive numbers and deliver with all their power and might with great pitches about all the pros of working for them. The smaller guys come too and roll out the best reasons to work for them and not the big boys. Many of them offer very educative slides that should prove very valuable when interview season rolls around. It’s been a wonderful experience because this is the stage where the recruiters are trying to win us over, so I see it as my opportunity to ask probing but tactful questions. It’ll be a different story in January when the tables turn around and they asking me all the questions.

The down side to this is that the hours I spend hitting the books was really reduced this week. This means I have a lot of work to do over the weekend to catch up. It doesn’t bother me because I’ve decided to look at the recruiting events as an extra class I have to take and get good grades in. It makes no sense to score great grades academically and fail at connecting with the real world of the recruiters. I still see some of my fellow international students trying to grapple with the idea of just walking to someone they’ve just met and start networking with them. To these students, it’s just plain weird and rude! With each passing event thought, I see more and more of them getting out of their comfort zone. You’ve gotta love Business School.

While applying to Kenan-Flagler last year, I knew the academic curriculum was integrated but now I know just how integrated it is. All the faculty members always know exactly where we are in the other classes. They even know the examples used by the other professors. For instance, we recently got an assignment in the Microeconomics class that requires the use of regression. This is a topic we just covered in the Statistics class. Any MBA applicant reading this should pay close attention to these little details about any school to which they may be applying. For me, I couldn’t have asked for a better school.