Stanford GSB grads discuss MBA admissions, entrepreneurship and affordable car loans [Show summary]

Nicholas Hinrichsen and Chris Coleman, startup co-founders who earned their MBAs at Stanford GSB, return to Admissions Straight Talk to share what they’ve accomplished as entrepreneurs since earning their MBAs.

Chris Coleman and Nicholas Hinrichsen share how their experiences at GSB helped them grow their startups [Show notes]

So, you want to be an entrepreneur in something using tech. Or maybe you're interested in tech product management. Should you get an MBA? Is it a waste of time and money that you could better spend learning on your own, founding your own business? Two Stanford GSB grads are here to share their perspective, reflecting seven years of successful entrepreneurial experience since earning their MBAs.

Nicholas Hinrichsen and Chris Coleman, who were previously guests on Admission Straight Talk in Episode 88, both graduated from Stanford GSB in 2013. While at GSB, they founded Carlypso, which was acquired by Carvana in 2017. Since then, they’ve founded a new venture, WithClutch.

When we last spoke, you both had recently graduated from Stanford GSB, and you were running Carlypso, which you had founded as MBA students. What's happened since then? Can you bring us up to date? [2:09]

Chris: A lot has happened since then. When we talked, I think we were going through Y Combinator. We actually ended up pivoting the business into a new model since that time. Carlypso was this sort of peer-to-peer car sales platform. We ended up pivoting to being a direct wholesale channel where we sold cars, leasing to companies that can't sell directly to the consumer but have to sell through these wholesale auctions. We became a virtual dealer of sorts. We built software that said, "Okay, what are the cars that we think are good for consumers? How do we figure out how to use performance marketing to our advantage so that we can market the right car to the right consumer?"

We had a pretty good handle on that. It was a good business. It wasn't a great business because it required very, very heavy operations, actually moving around 4,000-pound pieces of metal all the time, rather than bits and bytes. The software that we built ended up being more valuable than our end-value prop to consumers. And so we sold the software to Carvana, and ended up joining as executives there. Nick ran the sell-to-Carvana business of buying cars from consumers, and I ran product for the initial part of the consumer experience, from the homepage, search page, and product pages.

We spent three years there. It was a great three years of seeing the company go from early public company to the company everyone else is aiming to beat. That was a really fun ride, and we got to know some of the executives there very well who were super helpful and had very different skill sets than us. Now we've gone off to start a new thing again. Me and Nick have just started WithClutch, which is sort of a platform for saving consumers on their automotive expenses.

Nick: Our first employee at Carlypso ended up applying to busi...

An inside look at the impact of COVID with Darrell Nabers [Show summary]

Darrell Nabers, Assistant Dean for Admissions and Recruitment at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine, shares how the school is adapting its program and admissions policies to life in the time of COVID-19.

Changes to Loyola Stritch's program and admissions practices as a result of the COVID pandemic [Show notes]

Our guest today is Darrell Nabers, Assistant Dean for Admissions and Recruitment at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine. Darrell earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Whittier College and Golden State University, respectively. He then held various admissions positions from 2000 to 2005 before joining the University of Chicago's admissions staff where he served in different roles until 2015. He joined Loyola Chicago Stritch in 2015 as Director of Admissions and became Assistant Dean for Admissions and Recruitment in February 2019. Darrell was a guest on the podcast last year for Episode 325. Our latest interview focuses on the changes to Loyola Stritch's program, and specifically its admissions practices as a result of the COVID pandemic.

How is the Loyola Stritch medical school program different today due to COVID-19 than it was a year ago? [2:19]

It's very different. One example would be the fact that I am speaking to you from my home and not from my office. We as a staff have been working from home since March 20th. There have been discussions about when we'll return to the building. They have not yielded a decision, and because we're part of a larger institution with an undergraduate campus and the graduate campuses, that has to be a unified decision. As a health sciences division, we have been able to advocate for our third and fourth year students to get back into their courses, which has happened.

So we have third years who are doing mostly didactic-structured content for the first couple of months before they begin their rotations. The fourth years had to take a pause on their clerkship training when the COVID crisis hit, and this allowed them to make up the clerkships before we had third years overlapping with them. That's a difficult thing to do, to have two classifications overlap and then the third shift. Once the fourth years make up the clerkship rotations in the next few weeks, then the third years will move into theirs, but they're currently participating in clinical simulations and exercises and mostly virtual content, but we'll be back in the clerkships soon. And then of course, the fourth years move into their sub-I’s and electives.

For the first and second years, we are virtual. So there's an asynchronous curriculum which allows students to log in and conduct their coursework. There are also live lectures that are provided through a virtual platform. The goal is to bring both groups back at some point this year. We have preliminarily determined the early part of October for the first years to be back on, to actually be on campus for the first time. It's just going to require attention to the different health mandates by the state. Our main campus made a plan early to bring undergraduates back to campus,

Chen shares his journey from military intelligence service-member to international MBA student to Accepted admissions consultant [Show summary]

Chen Chadash, Accepted consultant and UCLA Anderson MBA grad, had a unique path to business school as an international student with a background in military service. He shares his insights on life at UCLA Anderson, working as an admissions ambassador, and navigating the MBA application process.

How can an admissions consultant help international applicants understand the MBA application process and submit essays and supporting materials that highlight what adcoms value the most? [Show notes]

Chen Chadash has a fascinating background: He earned his bachelor's in physics and electrical engineering from the Technion in Israel and served in an elite unit in the Israeli military for seven years in intelligence and cybersecurity. He then joined UCLA Anderson in 2016. After interning at Ernst and Young for the summer, he joined full-time in July of 2018. While at UCLA, he was a student admissions ambassador and has leveraged that experience to guide applicants to top MBA programs, including MIT Sloan, Kellogg, Booth, Columbia, INSEAD, London Business School, and UCLA Anderson.

Can you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what you like to do for fun? [1:51]

I grew up in Israel, far from here, in Tel Aviv. I recommend everyone who hasn't been there to visit. Obviously, during the COVID pandemic, it's a bit difficult, but once that's over, I highly recommend it. I really like cooking a lot. Even more, eating what I cook. I really enjoy sports. I used to play basketball for many years in high school. And then other than that, I really like extreme sports. I like to try new things here and there like kite surfing, like climbing Mount Everest, scuba diving, stuff like that. I stick with some of them. Some I don't really enjoy, but I do enjoy trying them.

Did you get to the top of Everest? [2:50]

I got to the base camp. It's about 18,000 feet high. Base camp is what basically everyone can do without any special equipment. Beyond that point, it really gets dangerous. You have to get training, oxygen, etc. But base camp is what everyone can do if you don't mind the two weeks of hiking in very difficult conditions.

And then just a couple months ago, I had my first baby. I would call that another extreme experience! But this one caused me to stop everything else that I was doing and focus on that.

Why did you decide to earn an MBA? [3:37]

I was in the military for a long time. After a long military service, which was great and a very fulfilling experience that I wouldn't trade for the world, I felt I had a huge gap in understanding business and how the "real world" works. It was a very different environment. I was looking for a way to bridge that gap as fast as possible and in a way that would be both beneficial career-wise and in a way that I would enjoy. Then living and studying abroad was something that was a dream for me for a long time. Both those things came together.

Zack Timmons integrated business and medicine to take on a social problem facing his community. [Show summary]

Zack Timmons, a fourth-year medical student at Dell Medical School at UT Austin, combined his passion for medicine with his background in business to create Good Apple, an Austin-based produce delivery company on a mission to end food insecurity. Listen to the conversation >>

A med student and social entrepreneur on a mission to alleviate food insecurity in his area [Show notes]

Zack Timmons is a fourth-year medical student at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin and co-founder and CEO at Good Apple, an Austin-based produce delivery company on a mission to end food insecurity. Since launching Good Apple in November 2019 as a third-year medical student, Zack and his team have delivered over 540,000 pounds of healthy food directly to the doors of over 17,000 people facing food insecurity.

Prior to medical school, Zack attended Rice University where he studied the cognitive sciences and was premed. He later worked for two years as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting. He plans to pursue an emergency medicine residency, where he hopes to leverage his patient stories in the emergency room to continue building programs and organizations to meet the health needs of our community's most vulnerable residents. 

Can you tell us a bit about your background outside of medicine? [2:14]

I grew up near Waco, Texas in a small town just outside of Waco called Robinson, Texas, and lived there with my younger sister and my two parents who are a huge influence on my life. My dad is a commercial tire salesman and my mom's a social worker. I think they've really instilled the importance of getting to know people and service in the community. They're a huge influence on me. 

I always really enjoyed the outdoors. I think that's something I still enjoy today, from downhill skiing to long-distance backpacking. Most recently, my partner and I completed about 300 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail in California. Cooking is also a huge hobby. I spent a little bit of time in the Northeast prior to medical school and got to know Marc Vetri, who is an incredible pasta chef in Philadelphia. So have recently been making a lot of homemade pasta, which is great.

When did you decide to become a doctor? [3:38]

Probably when I was a senior in high school, I made the decision that I was at least interested in medicine. I will say one thing is that my passions for medicine have definitely changed and matured the more I get into the field. I think there are so many reasons to be excited about healthcare today. But I think initially, the way I started off was maybe a pretty simple story. I was really interested in the sciences and loved the application in helping people. That was kind of the initial impetus to my path. When I got to Rice University where I went to undergrad, as you mentioned, I had this incredible opportunity to work as an emergency medicine technician, and I actually gained my advanced certification through a course at Rice, which is really cool. So I did that for three years during undergrad.

Why Georgetown's new MSBA program may be just what you're looking for! [Show Summary]

Dr. Sudipta Dasmohapatra, Academic Director of Georgetown’s MSBA program, goes in-depth on who the new online master’s program is for and how will prepare students for careers in data science leadership.

Earn your Master's of Science in business analytics online in just 16 months, while continuing to work. [Show Notes]

Are you attracted to business analytics but don't want to take the time off work to enter a full-time program to master the topic? Georgetown's McDonough School of Business has just what you're looking for: an online master's designed for working professionals. Today's guest is the director of that program, and we're going to learn all about it.

Dr. Sudipta Dasmohapatra earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in India and her PhD from Penn State, and she's always been a numbers geek. She started her career as a data scientist in 2004 and her teaching career at North Carolina State, where she was Associate Professor of Marketing and Customer Analytics until 2017. In 2017, she became, among other duties, the Director of the Master's in Statistical Science at Duke University, and in 2020 she joined Georgetown as Academic Director of its brand new online MS in Business Analytics (MSBA) program for working professionals.

Can you provide an overview of Georgetown's MSBA program? [2:06]

The Georgetown Master’s in Business Analytics offered by the McDonough School of Business is coming online in January 2021. It is an online, 16-month, comprehensive analytics program. We have designed it with the goal of preparing future business leaders and managers that are interested in learning how to understand data and how to use data to create, share, and sustain value.

The graduates of this program will be prepared to lead in key growth sectors where graduates that have deep business analytic skills are highly sought. This particular program has been rigorously curated to meet the needs of the current marketplace. We have integrated the technical aspects of data analytics with the managerial business functions so that the students can learn to speak and communicate the language of data.

Within this particular program, we have both asynchronous classes, as well as synchronous sessions in which the students can join their cohort, as well as a prominent faculty, in a virtual classroom. Students also have the opportunity to come to campus. We have two week-long campus-based residencies that provide integrated hands-on activities to the students through a very intensive, week-long curriculum.

One of the cornerstones of this particular program that I want to talk about is the capstone project. The capstone project, over six months, applies the program's concepts and methods and tools that the students learn in a challenging business data analytics assignment with a project sponsor. Students that come into this program can not only leverage the core McDonough and Georgetown community network, but being in the global capital city of Washington DC, we are going to connect the students to a network of people, programs, and complex data that have real-world consequen...

What's it like being a student at Stanford GSB? [Show summary]

Ilana Walder-Biesanz’s eclectic background includes engineering, opera, product management, ballroom dance, data analytics, and theatre. In this episode, she shares why she also pursued an MBA from Stanford GSB.

Should you include interests and experiences that are not directly business-related in your MBA application? Absolutely! [Show notes]

This show's guest is a true Renaissance woman, currently interning for a company in Nigeria, after earning her MBA from Stanford GSB as a member of the Class of 2020. She also has a fascinating series of experiences before arriving at Stanford.

Ilana Walder-Biesanz earned her bachelor's in engineering from the Olin College of Engineering in 2013. As a student at Olin, she also had an arts and humanities concentration in theater and founded the Olin Opera Organization. After graduating, she pursued her masters at the University of Cambridge in European Literature and Culture and was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She then studied for a year at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as a Fulbright Scholar. Returning to the U.S., she worked for three years for Yahoo as a Product Manager and joined Stanford's GSB class of 2020, where she was a Siebel Scholar and an RJ Miller Scholar. She just became a data analyst marketing intern, working remotely for a Nigerian-based company on behalf of Stanford Seed, the Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies. And what I've told you is just the tip of the iceberg. Ilana has traveled extensively. Per her LinkedIn profile, she speaks English, Spanish, German, and Italian reasonably well, and some Japanese, French, and Hebrew. I'm not exaggerating when I say she is a true Renaissance woman.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background? [2:26]

I grew up in Portland, Oregon to two parents who had both studied theater in college and had started their careers as actors. So they pretty much pushed me onto the stage as soon as I could walk and talk. I think that's been a through-line of things I'm interested in throughout my life in engineering and business: I've been an avid actress and theater-goer. Dance came a little bit later. I was horribly graceless as a child, and my mother (who was actually also a dance teacher on the side) despaired of me and pulled me out of dance classes because I was so bad at it. But at some point later in life, I found my feet and really developed a passion for ballroom dancing.

Can you go into a little more depth on how you developed your interest in engineering and analytics, along with your interest in opera, dance, and the humanities? [3:27]

The humanities and opera and dance definitely came first. I actually discovered engineering through Girl Scouts probably when I was eight or nine. My Girl Scout troop went to a Lego Robotics sampler. Just a day where we all built robots out of Legos together. I thought it was the coolest thing. I signed up for Lego Robotics after school and eventually graduated to building robots out of metal instead of Legos. I did that throughout middle school and high school and that was what sparked the interest in engineering and in building robots,

Could a postbac program boost your chances of acceptance to medical school?[Show summary]

Dr. Barry Rothman, an Accepted consultant with 19 years of experience in health professions advising, shares his expert guidance for applicants considering postbac programs and medical school.

Learn how this admissions cycle will differ from other cycles, and how you can best position yourself for success. [Show notes]

Dr. Barry Rothman is a former health professions advisor and Director of San Francisco State University's pre-health professions certificate program, which served pre-med, pre-dental, pre-nursing, and other pre-healthcare students who were preparing themselves to apply to their graduate professional schools. Today, he helps Accepted's clients in all aspects of the application process to graduate healthcare programs and graduate schools in the life sciences. 

How did you get involved in pre-health advising at San Francisco State University? [2:22]

I was being a good tenure-track faculty member, and I was given the opportunity to be the health professions advisor because the previous one had retired. I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought, "Oh sure, it'll be an interesting sideline." Little did I know that I would fall in love with it. Within a few years, I would be working with many health profession students and pre-health profession students, and that they would want more service than our school was offering, especially the ones that were postbac. With their support and help and with the support and help of my dean, we created, from nothing, a postbac program that's been highly successful the last 14 years. 

Most of the applicants were premeds. Then when it was successful, I realized that it could expand into other areas. We expanded into a dental postbac program, in collaboration with UC San Francisco's School of Dentistry. We expanded into a nursing postbac program, which was also very successful and very unusual. There are very few nursing, dedicated postbac programs.

In your opinion, who should consider a postbac program? [3:52]

There are two major types of postbacs. One is called a career changer. Some people really don't figure out what they want to do, career-wise, until partway through, or maybe even all the way through undergraduate school. There's a certain kind for career changers that will take them through all the medical school prerequisites and hopefully a few upper-division electives. They basically need all the coursework, or almost all the courses, that medical schools require. There's another kind of career changer, which is somebody who actually completed their undergraduate degree, went out into the workforce, and then got the epiphany that they wanted to go into a health profession. Interestingly, many of them are children of physicians. If you're a child of a physician or a healthcare provider, you want to make sure you're making this choice on your own, not because mom or dad is in healthcare. Sometimes,

How to write an acceptance-worthy essay for HBS [Show summary]

Harsha Mulchandani, member of the Harvard Business School Class of 2021, offers her perspective on student life at HBS, as well as what her work on the Harbus Essay Guide has taught her about writing the perfect admissions essay.

How can The Harbus Essay Guide help you craft your admissions essays? [Show notes]

Is HBS on your list? Hear from this student about her experience so far at Harvard Business School (shut down and all) and about how the Harbus Essay Guide can help you get accepted.

Our guest today, Harsha Mulchandani, lived most of her life in India. She earned an integrated MS in mathematics and computer science in 2015 from IIT Kanpur. She then launched her professional career at Boston Consulting Group and left BCG to become an investment analyst in 2017. She moved to Boston to attend Harvard Business School last summer and join the class of 2021.

For her summer internship, she is an M&A and operations associate while also serving, separately, as a product manager for Harbus, HBS' student newspaper. For Harbus, she works primarily on the Harbus Essay Guide, which just came out, and its interview guide, which will come out shortly.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and what you like to do for fun? [2:05]

I grew up in India. For the largest part of my life, I was in a town in the northern part of India called Jaipur. You may have heard of it as the “Pink City” or a city famous for forts and palaces, or more recently for weddings. It's getting popular. I spent a large part of my time, until I was 18, there. And then I shifted to Kanpur to do my integrated master's in mathematics and scientific computing. I spent about five years there. After that, as you mentioned, I launched into management consulting with the Boston Consulting Group. A large part of my two and a half years there was focused on consumer goods, and I did a project with the government of Rajasthan, which is my home state as well. And then from there, I went on to a private equity fund called Westbridge Capital. I spent about a year and a half there, and I'm here now. That's what I did before joining HBS, other than of course getting married.

And for fun, I've been into dance all my life. I used to do a lot of dance growing up, in college and now in HBS. And I like to go for short runs and listen to some of my favorite podcasts.

Why did you decide to get an MBA? [3:46]

I guess this is the question that people ask any MBA graduate often, or someone who is deciding to go into an MBA. I guess the most important question to answer is, why an MBA? And I guess for me, the answer was never just about only the hard skills or only the more tangible skills. It was a mix of a hard skills agenda and a more personal development agenda. And the answer for me somehow has always been a cross cut of those two. My exposure to working styles had only been focused on my own geography, which is India,

A Columbia Med School student's incredible response to COVID-19 [Show summary]

Dr. David Edelman, a recent graduate of Columbia Medical School, shares his perspective on pursuing a career in medicine during these exceptional times, as well as what led him to co-found the COVID-19 Student Service Corps.

The journey of a Columbia MD/MPH who is already acting on his commitment to health equity [Show notes]

What's it like to attend Columbia Medical? Why did this newly minted doc also earn an MPH, and how did he co-found a student organization to help med students serve New York City during the pandemic? That's what we're going to find out.

Our guest today is Dr. David Edelman, co-founder and past co-chair of the COVID-19 Student Service Corps. Dr. Edelman earned his bachelor's degree in biology and Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. He then began his medical school studies at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. While there, he also earned an MPH at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. He is about to start his residency at Montefiore Medical Center in its Primary Care and Social Internal Medicine program.

Can you tell us about your background outside of medicine? [2:20]

I'm originally from a small suburb outside of Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up there, played a lot of sports growing up, and then left the nest to be an undergraduate in St. Louis at Washington University. I continued on with sports for a little bit there. I played football for a year, was on the club baseball team for a while, and then really found interests in Spanish language, which I studied abroad a little bit in Spain. I just loved being in a different place and being on my own and learning about language and culture and people, as well as global health and the intersections between health and equity in the United States and abroad.

I've gotten into running over the last five years. I love hiking. I have a dog who is here with me. Since I haven't started residency, I'm able to spend a lot of time with my dog. I also host a weekly trivia question for friends and family as a way to stay in touch over the last few years, which has been really fun. Those are my little quirky things I like to do.

When did you decide to become a doctor? [3:40]

I think the first moment was in high school. I think it really speaks to how the teachers that you have really make a difference on what you do in life. I was in a biology class and the teacher I had in 10th grade, Mr. Grim, was just such a phenomenal inspiring person. It's a cliche, but he made all the science come alive. And it's not because we were dissecting animals or anything, but because he really connected everything that we were learning in such a fun, fundamental way to how we live and breathe and act as people. That got me interested in it.

The only physician in my family is my uncle. When I was telling him about how much I loved it, that class in 10th grade, he said, "Why don't you come down to my hospital one night, and you can shadow in the emergency room?" That first ever experience in medicine was on a Friday night, downtown Cleveland,

What's it like to be a student at a top business school during COVID-19? [Show summary]

Eli Engelman, member of the Columbia Business School Class of 2021, shares his experience applying to and matriculating at Columbia’s MBA program, including how his experience has been shaped by COVID-19.

A CBS student reflects on his b-school experience so far [Show notes]

Are you wondering if an MBA moved online is a valuable experience? Or are you less worried about how your education will be delivered and more worried about getting into an elite MBA program when you didn't necessarily attend a college with an Ivy League pedigree? Our guest today will address both those topics.

Eli Engelman grew up outside of New York city and decided after a stint in the Israeli army to attend the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, where he earned a BA in finance and minored in philosophy and computer applications and business. After interning at Bank Leumi, he joined the bank full time in 2016 and worked there until he joined Columbia Business School's Class of 2021.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and where you grew up? What do you like to do for fun? [1:52]

I grew up in Monsey, New York, which is about 45 minutes north of the city. I attended a local high school and upon graduating, I decided that I wanted a little bit of an interesting experience in life. And so I moved to Israel to study abroad and join the Israeli Defense Force. And after three years in Israel, I decided to return to New York, this time Manhattan. I wanted to position myself at the center of business and to pursue a degree at Baruch College. Like you said, I majored in finance and minored in computer information systems and philosophy. And I had a wonderful internship at Bank Leumi, which is Israel's largest investments bank, and I decided to join them full-time. I loved the idea of being at the intersection of business, as well as that international experience that being at an Israeli bank afforded me. And at Leumi, I was a member of both the portfolio strategy and alternative investment teams. For fun, I love to read, I love to snowboard, hike and travel, and discovering different cuisines is a favorite pastime of mine.

Your undergraduate degree is in business. You have four and a half solid years of experience at an international bank. Why did you decide you wanted or needed an MBA? [3:11]

There are three primary reasons. I think there are actually many more, but the three that spring to mind are the fact that at Leumi, I got a really broad experience and I thought it was very important that starting out, I would focus more on the breadth than the depth of my experience, just to see what I would like. And I worked on public markets and private markets, and the private markets were really interesting to me. I hoped an MBA would allow me to leverage what I learned at Leumi and provide me a platform to focus my skill on that particular discipline.

The second was that I wanted to just surround myself with ambitious, hardworking peers who I could learn so much from,