ESADE vs. IESE vs. others – my choice

According to my blog statistics the comparison and choice between ESADE and IESE has be one of the main interests of my readers. Therefore I decided to dedicate an article to my choice of ESADE over IESE.

IESE simply was never an option to me!!! It never made it to my radar. ESADE’s reputation was being the school with great people and culture and that reputation had reached me.  Nothing alike about IESE. So i never considered IESE to be quite honest.

I met many of the schools at the MBA fair in London in 2008 and I based my choice simply on gut-feeling at the end of the day! LBS for example had some students present and the contact with them was terrible. After seeing how they were reacting to each other, talking to applicants, it was clear that I had no interest whatsoever in applying to them!

Another very important factor to me is the teamwork! I love teamwork and team focus and don’t like the cut-throat mentality of many other schools. When you have a school with a bell-curve grading system I assure you that you will feel enormous horizontal pressure. ESADE students are competitve but we are teams at the end of the day and not competitors. The feeling I got from IE, INSEAD and LBS namely showed me the exact opposite.

But at the end of the day you have to make the choice that feels right. you should definitely look beyond rankings though and consider the soft factors as well. I example only applied to HKUST, RSM and ESADE because these are the ones I had the best feeling about!! it is not only about ranks for me but about whether it feels right…

One last thing that I can recommend is that you ask to attend some of the classes when you visit the schools. And speak as intensively with students while on campus as possible!!! Keep asking and asking and asking!!! The responses and the way people respond will tell you a lot!

Overall i can say that I am very happy, I amazed with the selection of colleagues and definitely enjoy the experience!

I hope that helped you a little with your choice and let’s stay in touch!! Good luck with your applications!

ESADE’s IT Improvement Projects

With the ever-growing needs for a better IT infrastructure, ESADE figured it is time to use the Christmas holidays to work on the IT. This is great news as it seems that our IT improvement roundtable in November is bearing fruits.

In the month of November the  staff members who are related to the IT as well as 8 students (4 with IT background and 4 without) sat together and held an IT improvement workshop. We raised all the pressing issues, prioritised them and started working on them.

Throughout the month of December on of the most pressing issues of wifi signal strength have already been attacked and new, stronger wifi routers have been set-up all over the campus. Hopefully this will have effect as of next January, as there was no noticeable improvement as of December 16th, the last time I was on campus.

In addition the printing services have been upgraded. Now the student ID, which can be topped-up with money, replaces the printing cards and simultaneously makes the log-in process to the print jobs more efficient. (Insider information: soon there will be a major push for using the student ID for paying in the canteens instead of using cash. That makes the serving a lot faster and therefore everbody should have the caffein level boosted much faster in the morning. There will also be top-up facilities outside the canteens, as I have heard from reliable sources ;)

The internal social network NEXUS has been launched in the recent days, which also indicates new ways of communication and networking among the students, professors and alumni. This is a great move and hopefully the communication becomes easier and does not need to be hosted on external networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Tip: Nexus could also become a better meeting place for ESADE candidates, newly-recruits and applicants with current students.

Apparently there is major work being undertaken on the Intranet, as the new Intranet “Moodle” is undergoing maintenance as I write. Hopefully the ergonomy of the Intranet improves and the Moodle replaces the old Intranet in total.

As I am part of the think-tank I can assure you that there are many more issues being improved on and that ESADE is working hard on making student life easier from an IT point.

Insider information: there is a good chance that the ESADE application process will improve and that soon there will be an online submission facility of the recommendation letters. This would make the applications a lot easier. It seems that the ESADE is one of the last MBA schools that still has the paper-based only system but that hopefully should change in the coming months.

ESADE MBA Class of 2010 graduating 2012

It seems that the first students have been admitted for the ESADE MBA intake in 2010 graduating in 2012. The Facebook group “The ESADE MBA class 2012″ (join here) has already been launched so feel free to join and start exchanging tips, networking and  getting to know each other. It is early however the MBA is a large investment and therefore there cannot be enough preparation. Check out my page “Pre-MBA Readings” as a first start.

Happy networking and congratulations to those that have been admitted!!!