Amazon’s recent acquisition of ABEbooks has by extension given it a 50% stake in Library Thing which is a little awkward as Amazon was an early investor in competitor Shelfari. Perhaps we can expect both services to be integrated at some point. I use and like both. Library Thing launched first and has the bigger community but Shelfari’s user-base is coming along, no doubt helped by their early controversial spamming and astroturfing tactics (which is incidentally how I came across the site, unethical maybe, effective definitely).
Shelfari seems to be going after the less technically-minded users, focusing on ease of use and cute widgets. Library Thing offers more functionality and is generally a little geekier but deeper. The biggest difference is that Library Thing charges users to catalog more than 200 books whereas Shelfari’s business model depends on taking cuts of book purchases made via the site.
It will be interesting to see what the effect of Friend Connect and Facebook’s development and feature-creep will be on the myriad social-network sites built around different topics and interests. Friend Feed has been an excellent precursor to a web where our social networks are aggregated. Ultimately all of these various networks (flickr, delicious, shelfari etc) may be usurped by or almost totally dependent on a more openly-connected and feature-rich Facebook. FB is increasingly becoming my central non-professional communications platform. Being able to carve out different layers of sub-groups within your Facebook friends would be a useful step in that direction, so I can for instance add my ‘reading’ friends to a subgroup which is alerted everytime I buy or review a book etc. At which point, both Shelfari and LibraryThing could become superfluous.
nassim nicholas taleb, the improbable best selling author of the black swan believes that success is illusionary (at times it seems he believes everything is illusionary - it’s all random, all luck!). his main thesis is that luck is often behind what we normally perceive to be success and that humans are hard-wired to under-estimate the role that randomness plays via various biases:
sample bias. (over-generalizing or generalizing based on unsuitable data sets, winners only for instance). hindsight bias. (given an infinite set of monkeys randomly typing away at a computer, one of them will produce an exact version of homer’s iliad, but that doesn’t mean it would be wise to invest in the monkey’s next work. i.e. past performance doesn’t tell us as much as we think about future performance). confirmation bias (erroneously fitting data to preconceived theories). etc.
our brains are programmed to find patterns in the world around us which is great in that a man having seen his friend eaten by a tiger will assume a pattern and run as fast as he can at the next tiger encounter. but it also means we often see patterns where they do not exist. not only that but we also tend to get caught in the comfort of the ‘status quo bias’.
along the way, taleb debunks traditional economics on the basis that homo economicus is an idealized fiction with little relevance to the real world. in an aside (that helped me see a super-indecisive cousin in a new light), he says that the truly rational can’t make decisions. taking decisions requires the emotional non-rational part of the brain to takeover. the truly rational mind enters an infinite loop attempting to assess the myriad alternatives aiming for perfect knowledge leading in the real world to debilitating indecisiveness.
there are also some amusing stories of characters from taleb’s wall st past often showing how ‘perceived’ success leads to misplaced confidence in traders that translates into real cockiness or charisma as it is known on the street. until that is the inevitable blowup.
the book is terribly written, but the noticeably unedited style - he calls it personable writing, is endearing. it’s also ultimately humbling (putting human success in perspective) and scary - momentarily opening your mind to the usually hidden potential for catastrophe. look forward to his next book, apparently on religion.
As I first starting planning to applying to B-school back in 2005 or 2006 I ended up starting a few different GMAT prep programs without completing them. When I started studying properly I was scoring around 600 on the diagnosis tests. I ended up scoring 740 with the help of various courses / books etc:
I started with the Princeton Review classes organized by ScorePlus in Dubai. The course is solid, the value is highly-dependent on the skill of the teachers, but regardless the coursework, textbooks and question banks are solid. The online coursework and questions are good too. Princeton is especially good at getting you up to the 700 level, but it’s better to turn elsewhere to make the jump up from there.
At some point I dabbled with the Veritas books briefly but really didn’t enjoy them. They are organized into lots of mini-books which sound good in theory (allowing you to do many short study-stints), but I found them cumbersome and unclear.
I randomly came across a Kaplan 800 GMAT book while in Delhi for a friend’s wedding and this was definitely one of the best resources I came across. No theory, just loads of GMAT questions of the tougher kind.
Very late in the day a friend turned me on to the ManhattanGMAT online courses, which ended up being my primary study-guide leading up to the exam (alongside the Kaplan 800 book). Excellent online resource and lots and lots of question banks and timed exercises etc. I would just caution about Manhattan’s math questions - my experience was that the level of difficulty was markedly higher than the level of questions in the actual GMAT which translated into a lot of time wasted studying for irrelevent q’s. The english q’s on the other hand were excellent. I scored 44/97% verbal and 48/85% math (not particulalary good for an engineer!). So Manhattan was really good for verbal but probably was detrimental to my math score (I finished the GMAT math exam with about 20 mins to go because I kept rushing through the easier q’s anticipating the Manhattan type harder q’s that never appeared).
My advice is to focus on doing as many prep questions as you possibly can, timed where possible and to take the time to do a good number of timed prep tests too. Start with a PrincetonReview style course then move on to ManhattanGMAT for verbal and Kaplan800 for Math and Verbal.
The interviewer was a consultant at one of the big firms in Dubai (pre-MBA he was a banker). The interview took place on the weekend at his firm’s offices in a conference room (he was on an assignment out of town and so scheduling it on a weekend was the only option).
The male interviewer was probably around my age, LBS class of 2006 and so the tone of the interview was markedly different to my others where the interviewers were much more senior to me (in terms of both age and career). The tone was more that of two peers than interviewer-interviewee.
The interview also differed in that the interviewer had my full application (apart from references) and not just my resume. He had some highlighted questions on my essays and experience which were the typical MBA q’s:
Why an MBA and why now?
Leadership examples;
Why London (and in particular how did LBS fit in with the other schools I had applied to)?
Some specific questions about my business and the specific market challenges we had encountered;
Drilled down a little on my target industry and in particular on the market dynamics of that industry (media).
LBS interviews have a presentation component to them. My interviewer chose a topic from a list provided to him and gave me a few minutes to prepare for a 5 minute oral presentation. My topic was on the potential effects of digital technologies on the music industry - a topic I have a lot to say about!
Unfortunately, though, my presentation was a little all over the place. It didn’t have enough structure and I ran way over time (make sure you are wearing a watch!), but I think you are being judged more in presentation skills / demeanor etc than on content.
We had time at the end for me to ask questions about his LBS experience. We touched on whether he new he wanted to go into consulting (no - he went in thinking he would continue in banking), we delved into his shadowing experience (very interesting - sounds like a cool part of the LBS program if you find the right person to shadow), the LBS alumni network in the region (not quite as big and active as other schools). He knew a few of my LBS friends who we talked about a little as well.
All in all, the interview ran for about an hour (pretty similar to the others) and the interviewer and I had a good rapport going at the end. He’s definitely someone I would like to stay in touch with.
I was invited to interview by Haas a couple of weeks ago and was matched with an Abu Dhabi alumni with extensive consulting experience with an interesting UN digression. Again my interviewer was an engineer pre-MBA which was again useful interview fodder.
We met at his office in Abu Dhabi and after quickly walking him through my resume, we drilled down to Haas specifics: Why Haas, Why is the culture a good fit? What excites you most about the program? My answers were pretty solid (I know the Haas program well), but I still felt more was expected from me (perhaps actual courses / professors etc).
We then moved on to my long-term plans. Luckily my interviewer had recently written a high-profile report on the Middle East Media Industry and so the conversation flowed into a discussion on the state and future of the sector.
I was then asked what my most embarassing moment in my professional career had been (plenty of examples to draw on!) before we moved on to my questions about Haas.
I asked about the Haas alum community in the region and we talked about specifics of the Management of Tech program which my inteviewer had specialized in. We also talked about clubs and tactics for optimizing the B-School experience.
After the interview, he shared a few reports he had worked on for the Abu Dhabi government on the ‘Cities of the Future’ that were related to some of my experiences working with the Dubai government and on leaving he gave me a copy of the Arab Media report.
I thought we had a good rapport and connection, and I left excited about the Haas culture and the thought of moving to the Bay Area.
Three or four days later I received a call informing me I had been offered a place at Berkeley!
One of the most interesting essay questions I had to answer during MBA app season was Chicago’s essay 3:
“We have asked for a great deal of information throughout this application. In this portion of the application, we invite you tell us about yourself using a non-traditional application format–a PowerPoint presentation. In four slides or less, please provide readers with content that captures who you are.”
But seeing as I am waitlisted at Chicago, you might be better off checking b-school diva’s take on it! I also recommend checking out dan meyer’s chicago-inspired blog competition for inspiration.
I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship at the Binational Fulbright Commission in Egypt today. The application was pretty straightforward: Two essays (i. research / study objective, ii. personal statement), three letters of reference (at least one academic) and transcripts etc).
From what I have heard, the Fulbright scholarships are very competitive especially for MBAs.
Yale invited me to interview a week or so ago, unfortunately I declined as it would have invovlved traveling to New Haven which I can’t really justify.
Haas invited me to interview a few days ago and I am trying to schedule it with an alum based in Abu Dhabi. Looking forward to it as I’m keen on getting some more first hand accounts of the Berkely experience. I met Sarah Takesh at a dinner a few months ago through our mutual friend Suphala and she got me really excited about the Haas experience (even though she wasn’t completely positive about the MBA experience in general). Ideally I would look into the Columbia-Haas exchange program.
Chicago wrote to me informing me that I have been wait-listed. I thought my Chicago interview went pretty well, but perhaps I misread it! I interviewed with an ex-consultant who is now working as an advisor to the UAE government. He had a pre-mba engineering background which gave us quite a bit of common ground to talk about. He drilled down pretty deep into my CV probing into my various job experiences as well as asking me more general questions like what I thought the internet’s impact on the Middle East had been and how I saw the future of the media industry in the region (based on my post-mba ambitions). I felt there was a slight communication gap as my interviewer was french-educated. Some other questions:
Why Chicago? He probed my answer pretty deeply here, I probably came off a little weak on this one.
Where else have you applied? He said he didn’t see how Chicago fit in with the other schools on my list.
Lots of questions about my entrepreneurial experiences, including questions about our strategy, successes and failures.
Why an MBA? How will it really help you achieve your goals?
Leadership questions
Questions about my undergrad (drawn out of our common engineering background) specializations and general questions about Imperial.
I spent about 15 minutes at the end talking about his experience at Chicago (he was very passionate about his time there), what classes / profs etc stood out, what the Middle East alum network was like and general questions about life in Chicago (I have never been).
Sana Munasifi touches on a great point in her recent review of the Fifth Annual Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Festival. She highlights the recently opened Abu Dhabi branch of the Arabian Oud House as an example of the type of grass-roots, ground-up, regionally relevant and contextual initiative (= investment) that may ultimately produce results (= returns) with more significant impact than those from grand Saadiyat like projects.
The way I see it, why not do both if you have the means to? And I imagine Abu Dhabi has the means to do almost anything it wants.
I sensed an outcry amongst the Dubai cultural movers and shakers when Saadiyat was launched which I always found astonsihing. For years the standard art-opening conversations included rants on the regional governments’ lack of investment and interest in the Arts & Culture industry. Yet when Abu Dhabi announces the biggest Arts & Culture project undertaken in modern times, there is a backlash about the way the money is being spent (trophy-museums, blatant tourism projects, unoriginal etc). As someone who has been active on a grass-roots level in the burgeoning regional culture scenes I have always believed that the most interesting movements and developments emerge through individuals and small groups and that these ground-up movements would benefit from a larger cultural eco-system which the mega projects planned in Abu Dhabi and Doha and Dubai will undoubtedly provide.
Naseer Shamma -
Back to Sana’s article, she raves about a new find for me: Iraqi Oud player Naseer Shamma:
“Mr Shamma broke with oud convention with his work “Oriental Orchestra”. This performance at the festival saw 67 international musicians playing 15 ouds, ten kanoons (similar to the harpsichord) and nine nays (a kind of flute), with drums, tambourines and other instruments. The concert included solos and call-and-response phrases between Mr Shamma and different instrumental groups, but most songs featured the full orchestra. The multitude of minor tones created a clangy, dissonant sound, which was, as Mr Shamma admitted, shocking in its unorthodoxy. But the jingle of the orchestra injected his compositions with new, lively personality. It was a welcome change from the regional classics performed throughout much of the rest of the festival.”
And she makes lots of great observations- my favorite:
“The festival, like much in the Emirates, was rife with status symbols. Seating sections included VIP, VVIP and Pearl and Diamond seating (I’m still unsure which was more elite).”
I am a real believer in Abu Dhabi, I think it (along with Doha) will be a fascinating global city in a few decades. Mohamed Bin Zayed and Hamad Bin Khalifa are currently the Middle East’s most interesting leaders.
I was accepted to the Columbia Business School today (May 7 2008) and I am thrilled.
I figured I’d kick-start this blog with the good news. The plan here is to share my MBA experience as well as random bits + pieces on the worlds of media, tech and culture.
MBA blogs have been super useful for me throughout the application process and I will hopefully be able to bring the Middle Eastern perspective to things as well (I am an Egyptian who has lived in Dubai for most of my life).
I applied to Columbia on March 3rd (4th round deadline) and was invited to interview with an alum in Dubai around mid-April. I have also applied to Haas, Stern, Chicago, LBS and Yale (all 4th round applications submitted on or near the respective deadlines). I was invited to interview with Chicago mid-April as well and did so with an alum in Dubai. I haven’t heard back from any of the other schools yet.
I’m looking to transition into the Media / New Media industry post-MBA which explains (most) of my school choices.
The alum interviews were great. Basically informal chats that both lasted around an hour and were really just genuine discussions about my candidacy and the schools and programs. I had done a ton of prep beforehand including reaching out to as many alumns in Dubai as possible and current students (particularly those involved in the various and generally super-active media associations) which was good but probably unnecessary to get through the interviews themselves.
