So You Want to Go to School

If you want to get your MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business is the crème de la crème. The ranks of illustrious alumni go on to become billionaires, founders or heads of multinational companies of which includes Yahoo!, Time Warner, BP, Gap, Nike, and more. Lizabeth Cutler, Stanford's Assistant Director of MBA Admissions, shed some helpful insight about the famous school. Her tips can definitely apply to other business schools as well!

SavvySugar: What are some of the misconceptions people have about business school? 

Lizabeth Cutler: You tell us! Seriously, this is hard to answer without knowing what other people think. Probably the biggest misconception we run into from applicants is that they need to have a separate “business” and “personal” persona. While this may be true at some schools, Stanford asks you to bring your whole self into the classroom, your GSB experience, and the application process. Our classes deal not only with finance, IT, and operations, but also about interpersonal dynamics, giving and receiving feedback, and leadership skills. You can’t manage an organization if you can’t manage people, and our curriculum and culture help you build the self-awareness and interpersonal skills to be an effective leader of people.

To hear more about the gender gap at the school and what kind of candidates stand out, read on.

Graduate schools are a great way to switch careers or advance the one you have. I talked about the most common reasons to get a grad degree, and my new school series will give you a quick glimpse of what options are out there.

Think you have what it takes to be the next Anthony Bourdain? Well, why not start off where he did, at the Culinary Institute of America, a cooking school that's based in New York. As a graduate, you'll be part of the school's elite alumni network, which boasts of Alinea's Grant Achatz, Chipotle CEO Steven Ells, Iron Chef's Cat Cora, and the list goes on. Jennifer Purcell, one of the associate deans at the CIA, told me more about the famous culinary school.

SavvySugar: What can a typical student expect to experience at the CIA?

Jennifer Purcell: A class day may start at 7 a.m. and end around 1:30 p.m., and that’s for a kitchen course. [Expect to] stand on your feet and cook, and kitchens are warm! They can be long days, but we also have sit-down lectures, courses and classes, but the bulk of our coursework is culinary. You’re in the kitchens, and repetition is key, because it’s how you build your skills. The classes are sequential so your building blocks of starting with basics and you build on those throughout the program until you end up in the CIA's four public restaurants. The whole experience is to synthesize all of your training and put it into action in a live restaurant.

To find out about the common misconceptions people have of cooking schools, read on!

Graduate schools are a great way to jump into another career or advance the one you have. I talked about the most common reasons to get a grad degree, but I'm going to take a step further and tell you more about what options are out there in my new school series.

Do you fancy yourself an Elle Woods from Legally Blonde? If law and fashion are both your passions, Fordham's new Fashion Law Institute which is backed by Diane von Furstenberg, may be the route you want to take. I talked to Susan Scafidi, founder of the world's first fashion law center, who told me more about the field.

SavvySugar: Is there a sense of stigma with fashion law?

Susan Scafaldi: I think there has been for a long time. The first several times that I taught a fashion law course, my first venture on my first day of class was the top 10 reasons not to take this course, and one of the reasons was you’re going to have something called fashion law on your transcript, and you’re going to have to go to interviews and explain exactly what that means. There is still a little bit of skepticism about what you might really learn in the course of fashion law. But in fact, when people really look at what we teach, they realize that it is a lot of very serious technical stuff, and they also realize that there are a lot of industries which have very specialized area of law. Industries like banking and banking law or health and health law, and the fashion industry is a trillion dollar industry, and a trillion little green bags can’t be wrong.

Savvy: What makes a good fashion lawyer?

SS: The very best fashion lawyers are good lawyers first. To be a great fashion lawyer, you really have to love the law, you really have to throw yourself into all of the basics of legal studies. Then added on top of that, you have to be willing to educate yourself about the fashion industry and about the business side of fashion.

So you want to be a fashion lawyer? Then, read on!