Anyone attend?  What’s their rep?

norcaljeff - 03 August 2008 11:28 PM

Anyone attend?  What’s their rep?

I haven’t attended, but I know a few people that are and they are happy with their decision to attend. I recently attended an info session at UCI, hosted by Kaplan, that included UCI, Chapman, Pepperdine, and some school I never heard of on their MBA programs. I was impressed mostly by the UCI and Chapman reps for their knowledge and candid accounts of their programs. Pepperdine sounded arrogant, and the school I never heard of sounded sketchy. The thing that impressed me about UCI was their real estate program and behavioral economics courses. The real estate program focuses on financing, like mortgage backed securities, and I almost made a crack about how it was too bad the executives of New Century, Argent/Ameriquest, Encore, and Countrywide didn’t attend, otherwise we might not be in this mess. But, I refrained because I can get that out here on IHB and not in a public format with a school I might attend at some point.

Here is the link to their highlighted rankings, and not bad for a pooblik skewl.

I believe the UCI MBA program is good for those geared towards more technology based companies…that’s their “niche”.

the real estate program is new but should improve.  they lured prof kerry vandell a few yrs ago from univ of wisconsin-madison to run the RE program.  prof vandell ran RE dept at UWM as well.  the univ might not be a big name on the coasts but check the ranking and you’ll see their real estate program was routinely amongst the top handful in the country.

I know people who have attended UCI and Pepperdine’s exec MBA programs, and all have had very good experiences.  Don’t know anyone who attended Chapman’s.

Here is a paper that prof Vandell worked on with two others; Subprime Lending and the Housing Bubble: Tail Wags Dog?

Everyone I know who went thru it were already professionals and established and used it to buff their name with some more important sounding letters, MBA.

If you are graduating college and looking to go to a program where you will get conections to industry to land a good job after you get your MBA your better off at the established programs with large networks of established grads such as USC, UCLA, Whartons, Stanford, Harvard, etc.

Graduated from UCI’s Merage School a couple of years ago.  Had a great experience.  Enjoy what I do now.
The student body is as strong as USC’s, but weaker than UCLA’s (based on experience and info collected from recruiters).
I went to Marshall (USC) for another graduate program.

Experience was with fulltime program.

What program are you interested in?  PM if you want to more details.

I did the FEMBA (Fully Employed - aka evenings and weekends) program from 2000-2003.  I really enjoyed it, learned a bunch, and had a kick-ass time in Belgium on our International Residential.  I attended for two reasons:  to learn about finance (having never taken a business class as an undergrad) for my own personal needs (I don’t entrust my savings and investments to anyone but myself), and to get a better understanding of the business end of things since my whole career has been on the scientific side.

The majority of my classmates were intelligent and motivated, although we did have one guy in the class whom I wanted to strangle with my bare hands.  A total slacker, rude, arrogant, completely unworthy of the program.  But, it is true that it is very difficult to fail out of UCI’s MBA program once you are accepted.  So he graduated with the same degree the rest of us did. 

The small groups that you work in throughout the program were a highlight.  Sadly, life takes over and I have not kept in touch with anyone at all; I was hoping to make friends for life but it just didn’t work out that way.

Frankly, I scored quite high on the GMAT (>700 for anyone out there who cares) and could have gone to a “better” program like UCLA but I chose UCI because it was close, convenient, and I was not at a place in my life where going to a supposedly “better” school really mattered.  Looking back, I believe I made the right decision for me.