Case Studies & Cocktails: The "Now What?" Guide to Surviving Business School

After all the hard work on your application, you’re finally in to business school. Now what? The acceptance letter is just the beginning of your MBA experience. Even before classes start, you’ll face all kinds of new challenges: Financing your degree, readjusting to homework, schmoozing recruiters. Now you can turn to this guide, produced by Manhattan GMAT—one of the leading names in GMAT preparation—to ready you for the challenges you’ll face as a newly-minted MBA candidate. Case Studies & Cocktails will be your go-to guide as you prepare to enter your MBA program and beyond, as you enter your first year. The authors—MBAs themselves—have drawn on their own experiences and interviewed current students for the inside scoop on every aspect of b-school, from telling the boss you’re going back to school to balancing wine and cheese in one hand while networking. The result is both a handbook for the social side of school and an academic primer on the material you’ll have to master. The book even includes glossary of need-to-know jargon, so you won’t feel lost when classmates start slinging around acronyms.

Carrie Shuchart holds a A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard Universityand an MBA from Columbia Business School. She has previously beenan editorial analyst at The Atlantic, a freelance television producer, andan entrepreneur. While at Columbia, she focused her efforts on Follies,the school’s semi-annual comedy show, for which she acted, directed,and made some pretty poor attempts at dancing.

She began teaching with Manhattan GMAT in 2008 as a way to fund herstart-up habit and her shoe collection. Recently, Carrie joined the LosAngeles office of McKinsey & Co. as a consultant. She still can’t explainwhat the job entails.

A native of the First State, Chris Ryan has an A.B. in Physics from HarvardUniversity. Before getting an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business(Duke), he taught high school science through Teach for Americaand later in private schools. At Fuqua, Chris was head TA of the coreStatistics and Finance courses, as well as Curriculum Representativeand FuquaVision co-president.

After b-school, he worked for McKinsey & Co. in New York, then joinedManhattan GMAT, where he now serves as the Director of Product andInstructor Development. In his spare time, Chris writes moody music,tinkers with moody screenplays, and occasionally hangs out with hiswife Kathryn at home in Brooklyn.