Heller Admissions Blog Articles in November, 2022

Month: November 2022

Calah’s Experience Shipping Off to Boston

Calah McQuarters, MBA’23

At the time I was accepted to Heller, I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was born and raised in Tulsa but moved in 2017 to attend my undergraduate university in Washington DC. In March 2020, like many people around the world, the coronavirus pandemic brought me back home from college to finish my junior and senior year on zoom. While I enjoyed living with my parents again and taking advantage of free groceries, post-graduation I was eager to figure out what the next season of life looked like away from home. First, I made a plan: work for one year, then start grad school. The end. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, where I wanted to live, or how I was going to get there, but I knew my plan and I was determined to see it through. So, when I received my acceptance letter from Heller on April 1st, two questions were answered. I knew I would be studying for a Social Impact MBA, and I knew I would be moving my life to Boston, Massachusetts. However, those two answered questions raised so many more. Where was I going to live? How do I even find an apartment? What do I need? Why are utilities not included and so expensive?!

And thus began the tumultuous, emotional, exciting, and draining journey towards August 12th, the day I arrived in Massachusetts to sign my first ever lease on an apartment. I will sprinkle words of advice as I detail this journey, but please remember this experience is different for everyone. I have heard the transition for some was seamless, while for others it was less than pleasant to say the least.

I began looking for an apartment in the greater Boston area in February. Now, if you’re following along, you will remember I didn’t get accepted to Heller until April 1st, but I knew if I was to be accepted, I would need to be ahead of the curve. Having said that, I was definitely a little too far ahead. Any place I called, emailed, or messaged on Apartments.com said the same thing: “We’re looking for tenants to move in around June 1.” I wasn’t planning on moving until late July at the earliest, so this quickly dashed my dreams of finding an apartment fast and checking that off my to do list. (1) Start looking for an apartment a couple months in advance, but don’t be discouraged if you don’t find something immediately. Good things come in time!

As I said before, I was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a nice 2 bed 1 bath apartment (my exact criteria) cost no more than $1100 max (utilities included!). Armed with this knowledge, I began my search for an apartment with the same general expectations. My bubble was quickly busted. Not only did I need to adjust expectations for rent and utilities, but also for other necessities I had been taking for granted in the warmth of my parents’ home, such as groceries, gas, or fun activities (those are important!). (2) When looking into a graduate program, also look at expenses related to living in surrounding areas and take note of what adjustments you need to plan for in advance (eg. will you need to travel by car or is public transportation available).

Fortunately for me, I convinced my sister to come along for the ride of graduate school with me, so I had already found my roommate. Check! However, in our excitement, dreaming of our new life together not far off in the distance, we may have dreamed a little too big and not quite practically enough. We spent entirely too much time at Target, Walmart, Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Ross, and Burlington in the month before moving to Massachusetts. Our list of “needs” very clearly and quickly expanded to a list of wants and that is how we ended up with a key bowl that now holds potatoes. (3) When thinking about what you will need after moving, stick to your needs! There are lots of opportunities to purchase your wants when you get to where you’re going. Targets are everywhere. This will also make the process of packing and unpacking so much less stressful. Also, take advantage of second hand if that’s your thing. I can definitely thank Facebook Marketplace for my couch and coffee table.

August 10th, my sister and I began our three-day journey across 1,500 miles in a 10-foot U-Haul towing a car headed towards a new experience. This journey, much like our overall journey, was full of fun memories, hangry moments, exhaustion, and lots of coffee. And it was worth every second. Living, working, and studying in the Boston area has been a dream come true. The people are nice (mostly). The food is good (mostly). There is always something to explore (after getting through traffic). And life overall is good (and sometimes stressful). (4) Whatever your experience, make sure you take moments to pause and reflect on all that you have learned to make it to now. Don’t be discouraged. The moment is coming when life overall will be good (and still probably a little stressful).

Career Center Resources

November 15, 2022 / amendez / 0 Comments

Andy Mendez, MBA/SID’23

On the first floor of the Heller School building, you’ll find a couple of things. This includes the Heller Admissions Office, the Dean’s Office, and the Career Development Center. The Career Center can be an excellent resource in your graduate journey – if you know what resources exist and how to use them. Here is my advice for how to make the most of resources at the Career Center.

Schedule Mock Interviews

At this point in the semester, my cohort members and I are fully in the job and fellowship search process. Many of my classmates are seeking consulting roles and these kinds of jobs have a very particular interview format, which usually involves completing and presenting a mock case. If you’ve never had this kind of interview before, it can be very intimidating and confusing. Scheduling a mock interview with the Career Center is a great way to practice and get comfortable with this format before you do the real thing. I’m currently in the running for the Presidential Management Fellows program and the interview for this focuses heavily on behavioral and situational interviewing. Having a mock interview with career staff helped me practice the STAR method response format. I generally struggle with deciding which experience is most compelling for which question. Career Center staff gave me solid feedback that helped me determine which of my anecdotes were best suited to answer the questions I’d likely be asked.

Attend Informational Sessions

The Career Center offers several information sessions a month, all with different focuses. The three types of sessions I’ve found most helpful are: talks with Heller alumni, overviews of fellowship programs, and webinars with employers or professionals in the sector I’m interested in. By attending sessions with Heller alumni, I’ve learned a lot about what resources exist on campus for students and how best to maximize my time as a student. Heller alumni also talk about how they positioned themselves for their next opportunity post-graduation. As a graduate student, there are a ton of fellowships that you may qualify for and that provide funding for language study, research, and professional development both in the US and abroad. Attending these situations is a great way to get a sense of which opportunities you may qualify for and to learn how to draft a competitive application. Lastly, employer sessions are a great way to network with professionals in your field of interest and learn about potential internship or full-time roles they might be recruiting for.

Read the Newsletter

The Career Development Center sends out a weekly email newsletter. This newsletter shares upcoming networking events as well as active job postings. Even if you are not actively job or internship searching, it’s a good idea to briefly glance at the opportunities listed. I like to scan the qualifications sector for postings that look relevant. This gives me a sense of what employers are looking for and has helped me tailor my jobs and extracurriculars to better develop these competencies. The newsletter includes both events happening at Heller and in Greater Boston. The Heller events are normally doing the lunch hour and over Zoom, which is very accessible. The events in Boston are usually in the evenings when most people don’t have classes. Attending these events is a great way to practice your networking skills and interact with your cohort outside of a classroom setting.

Evaluate Job Offers

Salary negotiation can feel scary even for students with a lot of full-time job experience. This can be even tougher if you are evaluating multiple job offers at once. Sitting down with a Career Advisor can help you think through the best ways to position yourself in the negotiation process and can also help you identify other types of benefits you may be able to negotiate either instead of, or in addition to, salary.

Overall, the Career Center is not a resource you want to put on the shelf until a few panicked weeks before graduation. The resources at the Career Development Center are designed to support students throughout all stages of their graduate school career.

How to Choose a PhD Program

November 10, 2022 / amandamiller / 0 Comments

With a little over a month to go before the PhD application deadline (get your apps in before December 15th, folks!), some students are still finalizing which programs they want to apply to. I know I’ve written many blog posts about how to choose a graduate program, but to be honest, applying to a PhD program is unique in some ways. With that in mind, I thought I’d focus on a few things that you should be thinking about as you select which PhD programs to apply to, and ultimately, how to choose which graduate program to ultimately attend.

1. How you align with faculty. It’s certainly not uncommon to have research interests that don’t align perfectly with the work actively being done at Heller: if everyone was looking at how the same issue affects the same population using the same methodology, we’d all be doing the same research. It’s not uncommon for our students to have interests that don’t neatly fit into one of our concentrations (for example, students interested in Education Policy bridge both Children, Youth, and Families and Economic and Racial Equity), but still find plenty of faculty members to support their research interests. As part of your research into PhD programs, I would recommend browsing faculty in your program of interest and asking yourself, “Who would I want as my advisor? Who would I want to serve on my dissertation committee?” This, by the way, can be broader than just your specific issue: faculty who have worked with the population that you’re interested, or are using similar research methods, might still be a good fit for you, even if they’re investigating how a different policy problem affects that population. You can find PhD faculty as well as their areas of interest here.
2. What network you want to build. As you move through the program, you’ll be building a professional network, not just with Heller faculty, but also with your cohort and within your concentration. This is a network that can assist you not only while you’re in the program, but after you leave the program as well. So, when trying to choose a program, I would ask yourself what kinds of people that you want to be helping you through this journey and beyond. Are students doing research in areas you’re interested? Are they working, or have they worked, at places that you’d be interested in working at after graduation? Does the community seem collaborative and supportive?
3. The funding package. Make sure you read the fine print: At Heller, All full-time PhD students receive a funding package that includes all tuition and fees, the individual health insurance premium, and an annual stipend of $21,000 for the first four years of the program. One thing I would note, however, is that unlike many PhD programs, this funding package and stipend is not dependent on working as a teaching assistant or research assistant. Many of our PhD students, however, are interested in working as a research or teaching assistant (and I would say that most PhD students do work in one of those roles at some point during their program), but in those cases, students are paid directly, just like with any other job. Many other graduate programs may either a) not cover fees, which can be in the thousands of dollars, b) require you to work for a certain number of hours, which can inhibit your ability to work on other projects or manage your schoolwork, c) aren’t renewable/only for a year/is contingent on benchmarks that are unreasonable.

It’s easy to get caught up in a school’s prestigious name, a high ranking, or a too-good-to-be-true scholarship package. But a PhD program is a big commitment: you’ll likely be spending more time in your PhD program than you did in your undergraduate degree, so you want to make sure that it’s the right fit for you. Looking at these three things is a good start when it comes time to make this decision!

Social Entrepreneurship at Heller

November 3, 2022 / amendez / 0 Comments

Andy Mendez, MBA/SID’23

Even if you are not in the Social Impact MBA program, Heller students can benefit from participation in social entrepreneurship initiatives both at the Heller School and the wider Brandeis community. Social entrepreneurship events are a great form of experiential learning. They offer the chance to network outside of your cohort and provide a real-world forum for applying course concepts. I’d like to highlight the social entrepreneurship opportunities I’ve enjoyed the most.

The Heller Social Impact Startup Challenge

This is an annual event in the fall semester planned almost entirely by current students. This three-day event brings together Heller students from all programs to form teams, develop their ideas with the help of mentors, and present their business concepts before a panel of judges – many of whom are Boston-area entrepreneurs. I joined this competition in my first semester, which allowed me to apply the concepts I was learning from Financial Accounting, as well as Leadership & Organizational Development. I was still very new to the Heller community, so this event also gave me the chance to meet new people and form connections. I originally came to Heller just for the MA in Sustainable International Development program but was encouraged by alumni to add the MBA. After completing the Startup Challenge, I knew I had made the right decision.

SPARK

The SPARK program is run by Brandeis Innovation. In the fall, SPARK accepts applications for its pitch competition, known as SPARKTank. First prize and People’s Choice Award winners in the Heller Startup Challenge receive streamlined entrance into the competition. The SPARK competition differs from the Heller Startup Challenge in that it is open to Brandeis faculty, staff, and students. Judges have innovation as a top criteria. The pitch time is much shorter than the Heller Startup Challenge, so my team really had to challenge ourselves to be focused, specific, and deliberate about how we communicated our idea. Winning teams from SPARK automatically join the SPARK startup incubator. The incubator happens over spring semester. Teams meet weekly for workshops that help them hone in on topics like competitive advantage, customer discovery, and revenue generation. My favorite thing about SPARK was the cohort aspect. Our cohort included teams from the International Business School, a professor in the Asian Studies Department, as well as first and second year Heller MBA students. I learned so much from being able to hear what other teams were working on and what challenges they were working through.

Courses in Social Entrepreneurship

In addition to events, Heller students can also engage in social entrepreneurship through coursework. Students have the option of two courses – Global Social Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation – both taught by the MBA Program Director, Carole Carlson. Professor Carlson has recently authored an entire textbook with case studies on mission-driven ventures. In the spring semester, she teaches the half-semester course on Global Social Entrepreneurship, which highlights examples of social impact businesses around the globe. I really appreciated how the class encouraged us to be skeptical and question if everything that is labeled a social venture is in fact truly mission-driven. The course also emphasizes that just because a social impact is taking place, mission-driven ventures still must have robust revenue models and solid business plans to be viable. In this class, I was introduced to essential business tools for lean startups, including the Business Model Canvas and the theory of change. In this course, students actually form teams, develop a business idea, and present on their business idea as their final project. My team presented on the idea of an eco-grocery store in Bhutan that would reduce waste and create jobs for urban youth. The fall semester course, Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation, dives even deeper into these concepts and presents students with more domestic case studies. Other topics covered include competitive advantage, scaling, and financing social ventures.

If you are even the slightest bit curious or interested in entrepreneurship, I encourage you to dip your toes in and take advantage of these opportunities!

Event Recap: Punishment Culture and the Persistence of Mass Incarceration in Massachusetts

November 1, 2022 / rclark / 0 Comments

Ronunique Clark, MPP’23

In my concentration course this semester, our professor asked if we could attend a bonus lecture as part of our regularly scheduled class. I decided to attend the Joshua A. Guberman Lecture: Punishment, Culture, and the Persistence of Mass Incarceration in Massachusetts, presented by Elizabeth Matos. Brandeis University created the Joshua A. Guberman lecture to honor Guberman, who had passionate concern for individual well being and social justice. I chose to attend this lecture because I have had an interest all my life in criminal justice, mass incarceration, the school to prison pipeline, anything that involved the justice system in America. I felt that the lecture would be a good place for me to start getting my brain going about my presentation in my class and to learn more about what mass incarceration looks like in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Matos was a an amazing speaker and lecturer, linking her life story to her current work in a phenomenal way. She walked us through the origins of mass incarceration: what triggered this mass wave of incarceration of Black and Brown people in America and connecting the historical origins to what we are seeing in mass incarceration trends today, especially in Massachusetts. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and Black and Brown individuals are 4 times more likely to be incarcerated versus their white peers. Even though Massachusetts is on the lower end of incarceration rate, it does not mitigate the fact that they still dedicate most of the budget to spending on prisons. According to the Department of Corrections 2020 annual report, the state spends, on average, $61,241 per prisoner at its largest prison, MCI-Norfolk, and $111,674 per prisoner at its only exclusively maximum-security prison, Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley. . Now imagine if we dedicated this money to community resources and schools in low and middle income communities. What would Massachusetts look like?

I had two major takeaways from sitting in on this lecture. The first takeaway is that Massachusetts is the only state in the country that will utilize correctional centers as places to treat people who have mental health and substance abuse issues. Individuals who struggle with mental health crises or substance abuse issues are not offered residential treatment, instead, they are sent to solitary confinement. Elizabeth highlighted the story of Ayesha Johnson, a 35 year Black women who died in the custody of Boston Suffolk Prison, after only being there for a few hours. Even though the state ended the practice of incarcerating women for civil commitments in 2016, Johnson was civilly committed under ‘Section 35’ in Massachusetts, which is meant for people who need mental support. She did not need to be locked up because she did not commit a crime, she needed extensive treatment and support. But instead she ended up becoming another statistic of our harsh criminal justice system. Prisons are not places of treatment, they are a place of discipline and often torture. It made me question where did we go wrong if we deem that having a mental health issue or substance abuse problem is a crime? Individuals who struggle with these issues are often criminalized more often, especially if they are Black and Brown: just another tactic in this new system we know as the New Jim Crow.

My second takeaway from this lecture is what we dedicate to the spending budget for prisons. I mentioned that the state of Massachusetts spends $61,241 per prisoner at is largest prison. Even though efforts for rehabilitation and treatment have definitely grown over the last decade or so, we are still far removed from what biggest goal of prisons should be: rehabilitation. When an individual is incarcerated, they give up everything they have and now they no longer own a car, or have a job, they do not see their families, they are now property of the state. Yet when the state no longer has them as property, they are released from prison with nothing to fall back on at all. How is someone supposed to become a law abiding citizen when they have to start from the bottom. I wondered, ‘How could we better support the assimilation in society after an individual is released from prison? How could we prepare an individual for this while they are awaiting release? How could we make sure they are rehabilitated and they do not reoffend?’ I asked these questions to Elizabeth at the end of her lecture, and she reassured me that this element of mass incarceration has grown better over time. The re-entry space has more resources then they ever had, because what people experience in prisons affect their reentry. Now, we have peer coaches and peer actor individuals who were also formerly incarcerated, supporting the release of individuals back into society. Yet in order to keep pushing for a more effective re-entry space, we must have all hands on deck from all aspect of our government.

I am really happy that I decided to attend this lecture. I did leave the lecture with more questions and more worries, however, I did feel I learned something new about a state I have lived in for the last five years of my life. I got to understand how this state handles mass incarceration and what efforts are being pushed, discussed, and implemented in hopes of ending the spread of mass incarceration and to really encourage a more robust restorative justice practicing society. Thank you Heller for hosting this lecture, and thank you Elizabeth for providing the knowledge on this topic and helping us as students, faculty, and peers in continuing our fight for justice in the area of mass incarceration!

Heller Admissions Blog

Month: November 2022

Event Recap: Punishment Culture and the Persistence of Mass Incarceration in Massachusetts

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