Brian, my buddy from San Francisco (although currently on a 1-year work stint in NYC), arrived in town on Thursday with plans to visit HBS and MIT Sloan as a prospective student.

Having arranged a campus tour with HBS in advance, he successfully completed the first objective of his big tour by noon on Friday. However, since he couldn't schedule an official campus visit with Sloan on time, I arranged a unofficial tour for Brian. I recruited Yoav to act as ambassador for an afternoon class that Friday with Brian and took Brian for a tour around MIT afterwards.

I think Brian's tour of HBS and Sloan was a productive one as he mentioned to me at the end of the MIT campus walk that he now felt much more motivated to continue his essays on the application forms, which he has been dragging for some time. Curiously, I asked him about the contrast between HBS and Sloan, and he said the following:

• It seems like everyone in HBS is either in consulting or banking prior to HBS. At MIT Sloan, most students seem have an engineering background or from the high-tech industry.
• HBS campus is simply gigantic and clean but exclusive. MIT Sloan is small and the overall MIT campus looks a little dull but very functional.
• When comparing between the case studies that he attended at Sloan and HBS, Brian has this to say: Sloanies tend to draw more their experience in case studies than HBS students while HBS students tend to be more touchy-feely in their discussion. But Brian did express it is really hard for him to qualify on this comment since both case studies and class compositions are very different from each other. For benefit of readers who are not entirely aware of the context. The Sloan class that Brian had attended was Software Business, which a good portion of its students are from the SDM program and the Sloan Fellows program - both programs with students with significant work experience. On the other hand, the class that Brian attend at HBS was Organization Behavior, which might explain the touchy-feely discussions.

Finally, good luck with your application to B-schools. I hope that you get accept to the school of your choice.

10/15/2005 7:18:55 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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