George Bradt has an article in the Forbes.  He claims that recruiters agree that the only three things you need to know for an interview are:

1. Can you do the job?

2. Will you love the job?

3. Can we tolerate working with you?

It seems simplistic! Overly so. But we as MBA tutors kind of agree with George. We help students prepare for case interviews and provide case interview tips and we see students do crazy things to prepare for interviews but miss the basics. These three questions do cover the basics.

You have got to show that you can do the job, you love it and that the interviewer will regret not hiring you. Its not just the qualifications. Its about giving evidence in multiple ways including prior activity, interest, reliability, etc. Interviewer watch for this in all questions, responses and actions an interviewee provides. Read the full article here.

Mint.com has an excellent article on student loans. It highlights a few WSJ articles on this subject too.

The key take away is that student loans have now surpassed credit card loans. So please manage them just like you would any other debt. Mint.com has a few suggestions. Go to a college you can afford! Take the core classes from a community college and transfer credits go to a brand name college for the later part. What was shocking (and I too did not know this) was that these loans have some ugly fine print. Heavy fine print for missing payments, nuisance calls from debt collectors, etc. What is appalling is that these student loans live on even after a student dies. The co-signers need to pay the loan off! You cant even get this debt off in bankruptcy!!

Read this article. Its worth it. Take the news out and tell your friends about it.

Here is an additional tip from us as MBA tutors who can assist you with business plans. Just like you would write a business plan when you think about starting a new business, write up a plan for your MBA idea. Consider the total cost of getting an MBA at the schools of your choice. Make sure you try the full time ones, part time, distance eduction, local colleges, top tier, etc. Compare the cost and the payoffs, expected salaries, how you will finance them, etc. Treat it like a business decision not an emotional one.

MBA tutoring is our primary focus.  We however provide our MBA students a variety of other services in addition to MBA tutoring including interview preparation assistance and specialized niches such as case interview practice sessions with industry professionals.

Yesterday’s NYT has an interesting article on alumni turning back to their college career centers for help on a variety of services from counseling, resume editing, job search assistance, etc. You can read more about the story here.

The article mentions that some of these colleges provide this service free of cost while some charge for this service. I want to reiterate that we do provide similar services such as interview practice to our MBA students. Practicing for interviews is critical especially if you are interviewing for niche careers such as consulting or investment banking where they use specialized interview techniques. Case interviews are a good example. (Read what is a consulting case interview here) Practicing for case interviews and preparing for case interviews significantly increases your odds for success.

We however charge for this service as we are not subsidized by any organization or government and hence have bills to pay. Our career services are quite pricy we admit…But we do get you assistance from industry insiders (usually from your industry of interest) and not from career officers who have been career officers their entire careers!  We believe getting someone from your industry is worth the price difference.

Do let us know if we can get you some professional help.

Interesting article in today’s NYT.

Zeke M. Vanderhoek, the founder of the Equity Project, believes that top quality teachers are the key to high performing schools.  His assumption  is that more than curriculum, labs, technology, etc, it is the quality of teachers that make for quality learning.

We agree!   High quality tutors = High quality learning.

And that is why we staff our ranks with high quality tutors and focus on students and professionals who really value learning.  Maintaining quality is not a ‘low cost’ play and that is why Mr. Vanderhoek pays $125k per annum salaries.  So if you wonder why our rates are not cheaper, it does cost money to attract the quality tutors we provide.

Thanks for learning with us!

What do entrepreneurs need to understand about finance!?  Why do they need finance tutoring!?

Often people think starting a business is simple.  It is simple in many ways but as you get further into the business, there are important decisions to be made that will impact the long term sustainability, profitability and returns of the business / owners / investors.  Here is a sample of terms you need to know when structuring investments:

• Pay to Play
• Anti-Dilution
• Liquidation Preference
• Protective Provisions
• Information Rights
• Registration Rights
• Redemption Right
• Conversion
• Right of First Refusal
• Restriction on Sales
• Voting Rights
• Vesting
• Employee Pool
• Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement
• Indemnification
• Initial Public Offering Shares Purchase
• Precedent Conditions to Financing
• Drag

Be smart.  Work with our finance tutor or our accounting tutor to get the basics right.  Small decisions could make a large impact!

We have always been a supporter of open education and open courseware.  GraduateTutor is glad to now announce that we will formally begin offering tutoring services to MBA/business open courseware programs as well.  Students learning on their own might find that they are stuck on a specific point or need help with a specific topic.  Since open courseware students often do not have access to the faculty of these universities and associate resources, they can access GraduateTutor’s expert faculty for assistance. 

While MIT’s Open courseware and Open Yale Courses are the most famous there are a lot of other universities that participate in the Open course ware movement.  The following is sample list of participating universities in the US.

• Arizona State University
• College of Eastern Utah
• Dixie State College of Utah
• Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Kaplan Higher Education
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Michigan State University
• Open Institute of law, Int.
• Tufts University
• UC Berkeley
• University of Alaska Fairbanks
• University of California, Irvine
• University of Massachusetts Boston
• University of Michigan
• University of Notre Dame
• University of Utah
• University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire
• Utah State University
• Utah Valley State College
• Weber State University
• Western Governors University
• Wheelock College

We congratulate the above universities for making available their valuable knowledge and resources to students worldwide.  We have also reached out to the Open Courseware Consortium to see how we can do our bit to spread open education.

PS:  Note that we do not have the resources to support the wide range of subjects the above universities offer, we will start with accounting homework and tutoring, finance homework and tutoring, economics homework and tutoring and statistics homework and tutoring before expanding onto other topics.

EMBAs (executive MBAs) and PMBAs (professional/part time MBAs) like our service.   And many EMBAs and PMBAs have written in to express their satisfaction with Graduate Tutor’s homework help and tutoring service.  We have asked ourselves, why EMBAs and PMBAs find Graduate Tutor’s homework help and tutoring service particularly valuable and have the following to offer:

Quality: High quality tutoring is guaranteed at Graduate Tutor.  Unlike many undergraduate students or full time MBAs, executive MBAs have a severe constraint on time.  They do not want to try various tutors available online or on campus before the settle in on a quality tutor.

Convenience: No travel involved! They can study from home/office/School.  They can study at anytime (almost) – late night – when they are back from work and their kids have gone to sleep or early morning – before anyone is up or work begins.

Confidentiality: No one else needs to know!

Desire to learn vs. Get through the exam: Many undergraduates and MBAs just want to get through the exam!  Unfortunately, the focus is on just getting an MBA and finding a job.  EMBAs and PMBAs know how important and applicable a subject like accounting, finance or statistics is in a senior executive’s life and want to understand the content being studied.

Personalized service: We provide a personalized permium service.  EMBAs and PMBAs appreciate the personalized service more and are willing to pay for it.

If you know any other reasons, plese do let us know.

Great news!  Graduate Tutor is hiring!  We are looking for:

• MBA/Campus representatives:  If you are a student in a campus with a Business school or an MBA program and are interested in a very flexible part time job, please do contact us.
• High quality MBA Tutors: We are always looking for top quality tutors to join us but are now actively looking for finance tutors capable of tutoring case studies taught at the MBA programs/Bschools, Statistics tutors, Operations research tutors.

More opportunities are listed here.

The WSJ reports on more colleges provideing students financial aid.  Colleges must also help weak students with tutoring support where possible.  Some of our students have had to discountinue their tutoring programs despite needing help badly due to financial hardships.  Some universities hear the pain and are sponsoring or subsidizing tutoring costs for week students. 

We would love to have universities sponsor all or some of the tutoring costs as there there is not much we can do on our end with regard to pricing.  If you have any ideas, suggestions or leads please do let us know.

The current economic situation is causing new developments.  This WSJ article talks about students & parents buying internships and raises a good question: Does this give wealthy students an unfair advantage?  Yes it does!

We extend that question and ask:  Is this fair? Who is responsible to maintain fairness here?  Clearly this is not fair to those deserving students who can’t afford to pay for an internship!

Students need all the help they can get and we at Graduatetutor.com try as hard as possible to provide help by making learning easier.  Our service is expensive because we provide high quality tutoring.  We require  qualified/experienced people to teach advanced business topics in finance, accounting and statistics and these people are expensive. Our cost does not allow everybody who could benefit from our service to access it.  Those who can afford it (the wealthy) use it and benefit immensely.   The wealthy are clearly at an advantage!

Who is responsible for maintaining fairness and equality? We try to reduce costs and make tutoring more affordable.  We stay online, buy used text books, minimize overheads and more to reduce operational costs. Our tutors however have rents/mortgages to pay, children to send to school and costs to pay!

We believe it is the universities responsibility to maintain fairness.  We belive that universities must do its best to provide its students with interships? We are working with select universities to provide tutoring support for the deserving students.  Universities identify needy students (academic & financial) to sponsor a few hours of tutoring.  This way if a student really needs the tutoring support and can’t financially afford it, he/she can avail it through the university.

College students need all the help they can get. Do let us know if you can get more universities into our program to make tutoring more affordable for more deserving students.