We are proud to welcome back, by popular demand, Jeremy Shinewald, founder of MBA Mission! MBA Mission is one of the leading admissions consulting firms in the industry, and we’re very fortunate to have Jeremy in to speak with our students in Chicago and New York.

Jeremy has agreed to conduct one-on-one FREE consultations with up to 20 of our students in Chicago on Monday, September 8th and Tuesday, September 9th between 4:30 and 9:30 p.m. Sign-ups are on a first-come-first-serve basis, and we expect that slots will quickly fill up. If you’re in Chicago, contact Dan McElroy (operations@manhattanprep.com/gmat/) to get your name on the list. If you make the list, you’ll then submit your resume and other info so that Jeremy can review them ahead of time before meeting with you.

Jeremy, being a man on a mission (pun intended) will then head to MGMAT HQ here in New York for an Essay Workshop Thursday night, September 11th from 6:30 – 8 p.m. The question Jeremy will address is “How do you write essays that will grab the attention of Admissions committees?” Wouldn’t we all like to know! Click here to sign up for this event.

Last, Jeremy will be conducting more FREE one-on-one consultations in New York on Saturday, September 13th and Sunday, September 14th from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. each day. Here again, you should e-mail Dan McElroy (operations@manhattanprep.com/gmat/) to register for a time slot.

We’ll post an update here when the slots fill up. So if you’re reading this and you’re a student in Chicago or New York, act fast!

Occasionally, we speak to someone who is confused between us and Manhattan Review. The confusion generally lifts very quickly, when they realize that we are the ‘Manhattan GMAT’ that their friend(s) mentioned to them (“the one that serves Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, etc.”).

It’s actually a surprise that it doesn’t happen more often, as Manhattan Review’s primary marketing strategy seems to be confusing students who are looking for Manhattan GMAT. They regularly pretend to be us and try to muddy the waters, particularly online.

Thankfully, we talk to hundreds of students and dozens of Instructor candidates, and no one has ever mentioned using Manhattan Review, considered teaching for them, etc. So the confusion can’t be too bad. 🙂

A recent article in the New York Post references Manhattan GMAT, and provides a useful summary of Scoretop for mainstream readers. We’ll take ‘legitimate’ any day! 🙂

ManhattanGMAT’s prep courses are ordinarily priced around the industry standard (despite the fact that we pay our Instructors $100/hr. + bonuses, about 4 times the prevailing rate). The conspicuous exception is in the Los Angeles area, where MGMAT courses are only $1,090, about 25% cheaper than normal.

Why the discrepancy? Do we like Los Angelenos better than others? Are our pricetags made of ice, such that they melt in the sun?

The actual reason is that several years ago, we accepted an invitation from our friends at Pepperdine University to host our GMAT courses in their very nice campuses throughout the Los Angeles area. In return, we agreed that we would offer discounted pricing.

So if you live in Los Angeles, you can add discounted ManhattanGMAT courses to the long list of great things about living in L.A., along with the sunshine, palm trees, beaches, etc. 🙂

Businessweek is following up on the recent enforcement action by GMAC against a website, Scoretop, that illicitly gave students access to ‘real’ GMAT questions. It’s very interesting reading.

Perhaps the most fascinating effect is that students who used the now-defunct site may be barred from applying to Business School, or even expelled if they’re already in a program! GMAC is now reportedly going through Scoretop’s hard drives to find the identities of past users of the site, with serious repercussions for confirmed users.

The lesson is that you may want to be careful what resources you use to prepare for the GMAT, as the consequences could be FAR worse than a subpar score. Certainly run the other way if anyone purports to have ‘real’ questions, as the only publicly available questions are available from GMAC itself (the Official Guides, GMAT Prep, GMAT Focus, old paper tests). Note that ManhattanGMAT recommends all of GMAC’s resources as the best and only way to get access to GMAT questions straight from the source. As we’re fond of saying around here at MGMAT, there really are no shortcuts to getting a high score!

We get frequent questions about ManhattanGMAT offering classes in areas where we’re not currently available. Questions vary from various major metropolitan areas here in the U.S. all the way to India. This is even taking into account our online course offerings, as some people (understandably) are eager for an in-person class in the vicinity

There is some good news – we’ve been fortunate enough to find some truly remarkable teachers in some areas where we haven’t been available before. Keep an eye out in Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston, for starters. Plus, one of our top Instructors is moving to Charlotte this summer. Another is moving to Montreal in the Fall. So we’re getting there.

Of course, we would like to be everywhere our students want us to be. But for us the issue is, and always has been, Instructors. Can we find an Instructor that knocks students’ socks off? Of course, the candidate in question has to have scored a 99th percentile on the GMAT (currently a 760+), and have teaching experience. If her or she sounds good on the phone, we then fly him or her to New York for a multi-part teaching audition. Of candidates that are flown in, we extend an offer to 1 in 5.

You can see why expansion is painstaking and deliberate. There have been candidates that have been tougher calls than others, but if anything, we’re rougher on candidates in new markets because we know what they’re inheriting – they have to be the Instructor that people have been waiting for.

We’re so eager to find Instructors that meet our standards, and our students’ lofty expectations, that we offer a $1,000 finder’s fee for anyone that refers us to an Instructor (in addition to the $1,000 signing bonus for the Instructor him or herself). So if you’d like MGMAT to come to your area, maybe you can even help by spreading the word! People in your neighborhood will thank you, and you may wind up the richer for it (literally and figuratively).

For Instructor application info, click here.

I had a conversation today with an Instructor for another company who was interested in joining ManhattanGMAT (not uncommon). This candidate had received a 99th percentile on the GMAT in the early 90’s with a 720.

Yes, a 720 was a 99th percentile at a certain point in time. But this score was generated before the GMAT became computer-adaptive, in 1998. So the question is, is it fair to represent that this person is a 99th percentile Instructor? It’s literally true, but we don’t think that current students would appreciate the distinction. A student trying to learn how to tackle today’s computer-adaptive test would expect the Instructor to have gotten a 99th percentile on the same test, not yesteryear’s paper version.

Here at ManhattanGMAT, our standard is 99th percentile on the current computer-adaptive version of the GMAT. So this particular candidate was told to re-take the test and get the score in order to be considered.

The candidate’s current company is apparently okay with billing this individual as a 99th percentile Instructor, and perhaps it is open to interpretation. But we’d prefer to err on what we’d see as the students’ side on this one.

Note: Jeremy is now fully booked for July 12th and 13th. However, you can set up a phone consultation with him by visiting www.mbamission.com.

We are proud to welcome to New York’s ManhattanGMAT Center, for at least one weekend in July, Jeremy Shinewald, founder of MBA Mission! MBA Mission is one of the leading admissions consulting firms in the industry, and we’re very fortunate to have Jeremy in to speak with our students here in New York.

Jeremy has agreed to conduct one-on-one FREE consultations with up to 24 of our students on the weekend of July 12th – 13th, between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Sign-ups are on a first-come-first-serve basis, and we expect that slots will quickly fill up, so if you’re here in New York contact Dan McElroy (operations@manhattanprep.com/gmat/) to get your name on the list.

If you make the list, you’ll then submit your resume and other info so that Jeremy can review them ahead of time before meeting with you.

We’ll post an update here when the slots fill up. So if you’re reading this and you’re a student here in New York, you may be in luck!

As you gear up to apply for business school in the Fall, MGMAT is proud to provide you with some of the biggest experts in the field in the month of June.

First, in Chicago on Thursday, June 19th, we are very proud to host Graham Richmond, co-founder of Clear Admit. Graham is a Wharton MBA himself and worked in the Admissions Office at Wharton, so people are always excited to hear from him. Graham is going to let our students know what they need to have in mind when applying this Fall, in one of the most competitive seasons in recent history. To sign-up to meet Graham, click here.

The very next week, on Thursday June 26th, we will be hosting Linda Abraham, founder of Accepted.com in our Santa Monica center. Linda is an MBA from UCLA, and is one of the founding figures of Admissions Consulting. Attendees will have the opportunity to sit down with Linda and her staff to get personalized input concerning your individual applicant profile. To sign-up, click here.

If you live in Chicago or LA, we’ll see you soon! We’re also going to be putting together an event in New York in the coming weeks as well, come back to this space later in the summer for more info.

ManhattanGMAT is proud to be sponsoring the Beat the GMAT Scholarship!  It’s an opportunity to be awarded the best GMAT Prep AND top-notch admissions consulting, just by demonstrating your personal merit.

//www.beatthegmat.com/scholarship.html

Deadline is in 2 short days, so hurry!