Congratulations! You have been selected for an MBA program! Now what’s next?

Many candidates who secure admission in a B-School spend a lot of time in preparation for their MBA journeys. One may take a pre-MBA course or study on their own. Some are correctly able to predict that their 2 years is going to be an intense period with hardly any downtime, for travel, or other ways to have a break from work. However, some are not. So, what is the right thing to do? What is the right path for you?

Bob Manfreda (2019 - Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA) and Adam Putterman (2019 - dual-degree MMM program at Northwestern University) are a pair of graduates from elite MBA programs. They are the authors of ‘MBA Coffee Chats: Thoughtful Advice On How To Get the Most Out of Your MBA’, which is a guide to everything that a business school admit needs to know, literally everything! It is a book of advice that has the answers to your many questions. Drawn from the experiences of them, both, and with the wisdom of hundreds of MBA graduates from dozens of top B-Schools, the book answers many questions such as,

What are MBA classes actually like?
What does the average week in a B-School entail?
When should you quit your pre-MBA job?
How do you find a pre-MBA internship — and should you bother?

A guide for ‘ALL’ MBA admits

Bob Manfreda being an MBA from Stanford and Adam Putterman being a Kellogg MBA, raises an important question if their book is a guide for elites only or is it useful for admits to smaller programs, classified as lower-tier, as well?

The authors answer that it is most relevant to candidates who are going in for a full-time MBA program, regardless of the tier. They have done their best to talk to a wide variety of people, and that it should be relevant regardless of the school.

However, they also say that there may be some chapters that one finds less relevant. For example, there might be a chapter talking about a factor that is much more specific to a very large school; it’s called the Atrium Effect, at Kellogg, where one has this huge atrium where all the people are talking, and if everyone’s talking about consulting, you end up applying to consulting jobs even if you don’t want to. And maybe at a smaller school, that peer pressure has less of an effect.

Nevertheless, they say that they have tried to make it pretty universally applicable.

From writing notes to publishing a book together

The authors, Manfreda and Putterman, had started a blog with the same name, MBA Coffee Chats. It contains insights of hundreds of successful MBAs who were interviewed by the authors on subjects of interest to new admits, current students, and graduates alike. The core of the 110-page book is not other people’s insights but those of the authors.

Manfreda and Putterman have been friends since they met each other in Deloitte while working there in 2013. They also kept in touch while pursuing their MBAs. From their first years themselves, they compared their notes while exchanging perspectives based on their experiences, both mutual and unique.

They both challenged each other and what they were learning. The team environment of Kellogg versus the touchy-feely of Stanford had overlaps but also had big differences. And then about a year into it, they got to the point where they were like that they would like to work together at some point.

Hence, they started writing quarterly or yearly goals. And at the end of school, when they had graduated, both of them wrote a very long document containing all the things that they had learned, and all the things that they wished to have done differently. Finally, they started looking into writing a book, and that was the beginning of it.

Upon graduation in 2019, they realized that they had the perfect beginning of a guide for the next generation of MBA students. Putterman says that it is this constant process of everyone figuring it out on their own when one gets to the school. Every student basically goes through the same things slowly over the first year, they talk to seniors and other people and learn these things all by themselves. And, thus, they feel like they had the tools and tricks, and insights that could help people skip around there a little bit.

A huge range of experts have given their inputs

Manfreda and Putterman did not originally start out by writing a book but posting on Reddit and talking to many people who reached out to them to ask regarding Stanford or Kellogg. By this, they found that everybody was asking the same questions and that everybody had the ‘coffee chats and interviews’, and that they were just giving the same answers again and again. So they started posting them, which got a lot of traction there. From there they got so many comments, feedback, ideas, from people all over.

Some of the most questions that were being asked and answered:

How can I remember everything important?
What’s the best thing you did in school?
Should I get a club leadership role?
How do I find a pre-MBA internship?
How can I figure out what job I want?
Should I start a business?

They started with a core set of particular things, and that is by far the meat of the book. For specific issues, the authors reached out to people they knew from the faculty, friends, friends of friends, others from work, and so on. They mostly asked open-ended questions, unlike ‘Fill out this survey about how you did this’.

They talked to people, who were new admits themselves, to know what questions they would have. And that was one source of talking. Then when they were really bearing down on writing, it was a lot of their network and the people they knew, friends of friends, to get broader school sets that really expanded the sphere of people they were able to get input from.

It’s all there in the tome and will be available for download from 27th July 2021.

MBA Coffee Chats is available for pre-order.

Click here to buy from Amazon.

Click here to order a PDF through Gumroad.

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