As promised, today I will deliver why I chose to attend the University of Arkansas and get a Walton MBA. But first, a little divergence to post an interesting thing I read over the weekend. If you know me, you know I love NPR, and they have a section called Planet Money every once in a while that attempts to make sense of the massive amount of economic and financial news out there, but sometimes it's a little whimsical. They also run a blog and podcast and if you click on the following quote you'll be directed to a recent post about economic bubbles. A teaser from said post:

"If I were playing the dessert market, I'd have shorted cupcakes and gone long brownies the minute "Sex and the City" went off the air." (Planet Money blog)

And now to the main event, the reasons, both multitudinous and compelling, I chose to get a Walton MBA. As I was preparing to finish up my undergrad I wasn't quite sure what was coming next. Fortunately, and unlike most in the economy of early 2009, I had options in staying with Smucker's (with whom I was interning) or attending graduate school.

In early April of 2009 I decided to take the GMAT and in mid-April I took it and did fairly well (as a note, the route of signing up and immediately taking the GMAT is not one I endorse). So I began my decision journey and started close to home and in my comfort zone. Initially I looked at KU, MU (Missouri), OU and OSU (Oklahoma), and TU (Tulsa). I wanted to stay in the region and I wanted to go to the best in the region, so I started with those five. Walton was literally not on my list even though it was the closest geographically to my family home in NE Oklahoma.

Initially, and like most in my generation, I turned to the internet for my first cull. I liked what I saw from OU, OSU, and TU, and I had good e-mail correspondence with all three. About the same time I was selecting which schools to visit I was participating in a business competition with a group from MSSU and with a friend of mine (Alex Kieslich) who had already decided to attend Arkansas. During a weekend when we competed in Jefferson City he told me some things about Walton and offered to mention my name and e-mail address to Rebel Smith, the admissions director for the graduate school. About a week, and a personalized e-mail from Rebel after that, and I had a visit lined up. (Also, as a note to any admissions people, the personalized e-mail is the most priceless persuasion tool)

At that point, pre-visit, I wouldn't say Arkansas was at the top of my list, but at least now it was on my radar. My visit was on a Friday and I took it off work and carpooled down to Fayetteville with Alex. I remember thinking the campus looked nice (I had never been on it despite living slightly over an hour away) and liked the parking garage right next to the graduate school. While there I had the standard talks with the program director and admissions director, spoke with career services and had lunch with a current student, all par for the course, pretty much the same thing I experienced at Tulsa which I had visited about a month earlier. None of the standard stuff held much sway with me because, the way I look at it, one afternoon visit is not enough to gain an understanding for the intracacies of the faculty, one student is not enough to decide if you'll fit in socially with a particular program, and fifteen minutes with career services is not enough to decide if they'll work with you to help you get the best job possible after graduation.

Yet at the end of the day, I walked away with Walton at the top of my list and so far out in front of the others I didn't even want to look back. For me, there ended up being three reasons for this:

1. Direction - My dad is a civil engineer and all of my family is very mechanically-minded so I have a tendency to analyze all objects with flow and direction. This leads to three possible outcomes, forward, backward, and static (going nowhere). And what I saw when I looked at other schools was not necessarily atrophy or backwards motion but apathy, they didn't talk about getting nationally ranked and they didn't talk about how competitive they were, which left me feeling apathetic about their schools. Both of these things were talked about by nearly everyone at Walton, and I could tell the staff felt they were on the cusp of something big. Essentially I had the feeling the program was in forward motion with everyone working to make the program better. As it turns out, my feelings were correct and we were just ranked the #25 full-time public MBA program this spring by US News, and now we're tasked with keeping, and building this impressive momentum.
2. Camaraderie - One thing that personally made a difference for me was the feeling of camaraderie I felt I would receive at Walton. Unlike all the schools I visited, the full-time students at Walton travel in one large pack. We started with 36 people this spring and at the change of classes we would move as a 36-person mob from one room to the next. This allows you to know everyone in the program by name, know their significant others, know their hometowns, and eventually it creates this fabric where you don't have to remember any specific due dates or meeting times because the group will. I think of this past semester like no one knew everything, but collectively, we knew it all.
3. Facilities - For me, this was the one that held the most sway. I remember Rebel taking me up to the MBA floor and we looked at the case study rooms and the classrooms and I was absolutely stunned. The facilities looked better, in person, than any pictures from any other school I had seen on the internet, even crazy aspirational programs I wouldn't consider applying to. Rebel told me some of the GSB staff went to Cambridge, Mass. to examine Harvard's facilities and the people who did their's did ours and honestly, I think we must have the best facilities in the nation.

I know I'm leaving many small reasons off this list and if I think of them I'll post them, but this is getting lengthy and I'm getting hungry so I'm out. Stay tuned because I think I'll add a poll with a predicted close for Citi stock in the next coming weeks, the Czar thinks it's going up and I think he's wrong so we'll let you decide.