Graduate Blog / Graduate Life

US News ranks Babson #1 for Entrepreneurship

Eighteen years in a row! Proud of this. Link to US News Ranking.

A tram trip in San Francisco

I was in San Francisco on a personal visit for spring break last week. I met Eric Bahn, the founder of Beat the GMAT and we had a blast hanging out! I also attended the Cleantech Forum where I met Babson Provost Shahid Ansari at the venue of the event. We (Prof. Ansari and I) started talking about entrepreneurship and the announcement of Babson’s #1 ranking in the latest US News publication. I asked Prof. Ansari what Babson’s consistent #1 rankings for entrepreneurship meant (coincidentally on the same day that I put up this post) and his take on the Babson philosophy that resonates in the academics and experiential learning here.

The hour that I spent with Prof. Ansari and his wife (Prof. Jan Bell, also a Professor at Babson) was time spent very well.

Through our discussion, I realized that Babson is not just “for entrepreneurs”. We spoke about the fact that Babson is a school that aims to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset amongst students and professionals and it is this mindset that Babson students carry into their later lives and careers. This mindset is applicable, whether you go to work for a startup, a family business or in corporate life. The combination of the hard technical skills, an entrepreneurial attitude, opportunity seeking and validation and willingness to DO is the cornerstone of Babson’s excellence in training future business leaders.

I buy into this philosophy. The Babson Way.

Sure, some may say I have drunk the Babson Kool-Aid, but what Prof. Ansari said to me resonated a lot with what my thought process had been what I wrote Pt. 1 in this post last year (on my personal blog).

There are two significant people who contributed in shaping my decision to come to Babson and whom I thought about when writing that post.

I interviewed with Jay Govindarajan (M ’10) in Bangalore in December 2009. Jay is part of the team at the Women’s Center in Coimbatore, India (the town where I was born.) Jay’s parents are doctors and Jay’s mom actually treated my mother during her pregnancy with my sister due to my mother’s diabetes complications. Jay’s mother has also treated other ladies in my family with gynecological health requirements. I was touched by the work that Jay and his team are doing with delivering affordable healthcare solutions for women in India (where healthcare delivery is unaffordable for many women who also face many complications during child birth) and the fact that he chose to come to Babson to study over other schools resonated with me as a mark of true quality beyond the veneer of branding and the shallow “prestige” of an MBA degree. It told me that Babson people do great things.

This thought was reinforced when I read the Businessweek articles (especially, this one) of Vivek Bhatnagar (M ’08), a former Commanding Officer in the Indian Army. Vivek came to Babson and had transitioned into a career in the Polymer and Plastics industry with a family business based out of Houston by the time I interviewed and was accepted to Babson. I read all articles by Vivek and browsed through his takeaways from the Babson program and I found that my dreams and hopes resonated in the journey of a military officer who had found his right fit at Babson. I told myself that this might not be such a bad place to be in after all.

I realize this post has been very personal and probably longer than people may like to read. But in that hour that I spent speaking with Prof. Ansari, I revisited my application journey all over again. Not just the Babson admit, but going back and starting with my own hopes and dreams, the GMAT exams, the countless essays, the recommendation requests, the interviews, the rejection mails, the job transitions, the visa process and finally the tough Mods at Babson.

I realized that it wasn’t Babson’s #1 entrepreneurship ranking that really brought me here, it was the quality of the people. It wasn’t the placement statistics that turned my head or influenced me, it was the people.

It was the Babson people and what they did with their education here that brought me here.

And I am here with the promise and determination that I will leave my own mark in this world of ours. In the Babson Way.

This post is cross posted at Rocky’s Journey to a Babson MBA.
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