“All the serious money is indexed,” Burton G. Malkiel, Princeton economics professor and former dean of Yale SOM, is quoted to have said in Paul Sullivan’s February 6, 2010, article in the New York Times. Malkiel’s new book, The Elements of Investing, authored with Charles D. Ellis (an active member of the Yale SOM Board of Advisors, as well as a former member of the SOM faculty and the Yale Corporation), suggests that all investors, wealthy included, could do better by investing in index funds. Most people pay dearly for investment advice which is not worth the cost; they are right, of course.

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Last week SOM alumni received an email from Dean Oster giving a characteristic kick in the pants. The email basically reminded all of those alums that students are on the job market and that we all have a responsibility to help each other as members of this community, especially in this dreary economic climate. Read the rest of this entry »

When we arrived at SOM, we were assigned groups of 4 with whom we would complete many of our core assignments.  I think it’s telling that we call those groups of 4 “small groups” rather than “study groups,” as they do at many other business schools.  At SOM, they become much more like family than a reading group. Read the rest of this entry »

Given the recent change in policy in Washington with the so called “Volcker Rule,” and the renewed attention to the problems caused by financial firms that are “too big to fail,” I thought it might be appropriate to present some of my own suggestions here on the Yale SOM Community Blog. The following essay was originally written in September 2008.

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This past weekend, 130 SOM students traveled to Warren, VT to enjoy the beauty and splendor of Sugarbush Resort.  Not only did we have two fabulous days of skiing, but had the opportunity to spend an hour speaking with Win Smith, the president and owner of Sugarbush.

SOM Students at Sugarbush (photo by Hilary Boller)

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I will start this story where it ends rather than begins and let the proverbial cat out of the bag. As my SOM colleagues and I were filing out of the conference room at the venture capital firm General Catalyst last Friday, we bumped into former GM CEO Rick Wagoner. The Managing Director present graciously asked Rick if he’d like to chat with the MBAs from Yale, and to our surprise and delight, we were treated to five minutes with a man who had presided over one of America’s most iconic companies.

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So us first years are now more than a quarter of the way through the MBA programme already and the second years have less than a quarter left. It’s no less true for being a cliché – time flies.

The first semester was nothing if not a little on the busy side* – a flurry of cases, problem sets and, for many of us, a great deal of new material. Early on, Dean Oster – while teaching a portion of our introductory microeconomics class – mentioned that one of the faculty’s main goals in both the design and delivery of the integrated curriculum was to arm us with an internalised library of ‘hooks’ on which we can draw when we return to the working world to put our education into practice. Now that I’m a fair way through the course, I’ve really begun to understand exactly what this means.
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Just shy of two months ago, I sat cross-legged on the floor of A-74 (the largest lecture hall at SOM) and watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time in more than a decade. Finals had ended, three weeks of precious vacation unfolded before me like a sunlit valley; my classmates had taken off–either to toast the end of the semester at New Haven’s finest pubs or to board planes, trains, and buses bound for all parts of the world; and I was watching Dorothy incredulously inform Toto that they were “not in Kansas anymore”. Read the rest of this entry »

Ahh…the New Year–a new beginning positively brimming with promise and possibility.  Always a sucker for tradition–but even more so during this season, I’ve given into the ritual as timeless as the ball-drop or a  champagne-soaked rendition of Auld Lang Syne. I’ve made a few resolutions to keep and track over the next few months:

Resolution #1: After a lengthy hiatus when Fall 2 got the better of me, resume a more regular blogging routine (and a more regular diet routine, while I’m at it).

Resolution #2: As we greet a new frenzy of classes, problem sets (amazing how quickly you forget those babies with 21 days of Lost re-runs and leftovers) and (yikes!) interviews, SMILE more. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent article, the New York Times expounds on the virtues of a recent trend in business school curricula towards more integrated, critical thinking. Although not specifically about SOM, the article vindicates the vision of our academic leadership – in my opinion one of the most underrated virtues of our program.

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