I watch a lot of online shows these days, much more than I watch of broadcast or cable television. (In fact, it’s probably my biggest distraction from studying for the GMAT) One of the things I really enjoy doing is browsing through Hulu and looking for interesting shows that catch my eye. Wall Street Warriors was one that I found while browsing for personal finance shows.
Now don’t get me wrong, I really don’t have much of an interest in beginning a career on Wall Street. Even though it does seem exciting and there would definitely be a lot to learn, I still find the tech industry much more interesting and a better career fit for me.
Watching the show is both extremely entertaining and somewhat depressing. While I don’t want to emulate these people, it’s still a fun experience to watch a documentary style portrayal of Wall Street. It’s rare to find shows that present what is essentially “work” in an entertaining fashion.
The depressing part comes in when you realize that you already know how the story ends (and why the show got canceled). One perfect example, among the many different people they profiled, Lance and Jim, who were two “experienced” stock brokers, basically bet their entire careers on one stock: Sandisk. Lance even called it legalized gambling. During the taping of the show in 2007, the stock was trading up to $58 a share. Now it’s three years later. The stock price of SNDK is around $34.
Now obviously, the market crash in 2008 and the Great Recession had a lot to do with this. But this doesn’t absolve the fact that they bet their whole careers on the possibility that a random tech company would perform well, something they weren’t even remotely sure about. They only made this bet because it was something they knew they could sell over the phone.
Anyway, despite my misgivings about some of the ethical undertones of the show, I’m hooked. I’ve watched about four episodes so far. I’ll probably watch the remaining 12 episodes before I”m done with the GMAT.
UPDATE: For the statistics below, the Clear Admit iPhone app only provided the figures “class size” and “admission rate” in their app. I used those two figures to back into a number for “total applications.” The total applications figure is only intended as a ballpark.
One of the most difficult data points to find is the actual admission rates for all of the top schools. Most of the school rankings have incomplete data; not all schools report their rates during the ranking process. Additionally, when you cross reference the numbers between different sources, they rarely match one another. Furthermore, the way each a school defines it’s admissions rate can be different each time. Did they include the part time and executive applicants as well? Is this for the admissions year or the calendar year? Usually these specifics are left out.
Anyway, I wanted to get a broad picture of what the admissions were, so I decided to compile a set of numbers from a single source that had stats for all the top schools. I’ll ignore the potential data integrity issues for now and just use that as my baseline.
The source I used was Clear Admit and their newly updated MBA Planner App. Here is the data for all the Top U.S. Schools, sorted by selectivity. Please note that I backed into the “applications” number by considering class size and admit rate only. Since I didn’t have the data, I did not consider an “admit and decline” rate, so these are just back of the envelope estimates. One thing I need to take note of is the fact that 4 of my 6 schools are in the top 10 of this list. (gulp)
Finally, the last view I created is a graph of sorted by overall demand. I was a little surprised to see some of the low numbers at the bottom of the graph. McDonough (Georgetown) has one of the lowest levels of demand and one of the highest admissions rates. Kenan-Flagler and Tepper are similar. I also didn’t know that Columbia had more apps than Stanford.
What are my chances? If I take the weighted average admission rates of Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Haas, UCLA, and Ross, the percentage is 13.5%.
I recently received an offer from one of my favorite GMAT websites, Beat the GMAT, to review their practice question set. BTG offers a huge set of more than 700 practice questions that you can buy access to from its website. Click on the link below for more detail.
Just for full disclosure, I received access to these questions for free and they represent a $99 value. So yes, it was a blogger freebie. I was asked by the administrators there to give an honest review and I will do so, listing out both the pros and cons of the service.
I haven’t started using the Practice Questions in depth as I’ve been busy completing my Manhattan GMAT course. However, once my course finishes in 2 weeks or so, these will definitely be a huge asset to continue my practice after I run out of MGMAT content.
My initial impressions are really positive. The questions are laid out better than I’ve seen at any other website, with indicators for timing, difficulty, and even a video explanation for each problem. But I won’t be so quick to make my final judgment. Look for a detailed review from me in a couple of weeks.
