I was accepted to this program today. Brandeis says
and
but a quick Google search hasn’t yielded me any corroboration? Perhaps I’m not looking in the right place? Does anyone have any information about this? Thanks.
Did you join IBS? Whats you opinion? S has to decide whether to accept their offer or not
@VPDad I did not accept my spot and went to a different institution altogether. Sorry I couldn’t help!
Don’t come to this school, everything they advertise about it is a lie. Trust me, I’m a graduate student here and I regret every second of being here.
@donald54 can you give us specifics?
Sure, and by posting this I hope that those who are applying in the future are aware of their deceptive practices.
To start off with here’s the thing, they call it the “International” business school, but quite ironic to this 98% of my cohort was from china. Diversity may not be a factor in your decision (and neither was it in mine), but upon arriving I now understood why it should’ve been. In grad school you will want to network and go to school with people who discuss and participate a lot in class and out of school. The problem is that none of my peers will participate in class nor participate out of class where they have formed their own cliques (which I do not know if that has to do with the Chinese culture or not), the majority will not want to associate themselves with other but Chinese. The lack of diversity here is that bad that I only saw one american in my cohort, 3 other people from Asia (other than china) in a body of 200 students. You may not think it that bad, but trust me, when you cannot network with others and where a lot of these people can barley speak English, it’s these same people that are given the authority to become TA’s and grade your paper (let alone, only some of these people can barley type a coherent paper in English where your GPA is hostage to them). It’s that bad that undergrads across this campus go on and make fun of this school by calling it the Chinese business school or the international school of china. Many people believe that they are accepting a high number of Chinese students because the school might be in financial distress where these Chinese student foot the bill 100% (even a lot of the Chinese students here don’t like this because they were expecting diversity). So if you are coming here for the International aspect of this school like I was, you will be very disappointed by this, take my word for it.
A lot of talent has also left this school. Prior to coming here, I found out that there has been major restructuring among faculty; you will find a lot of new professors in this school who are amazing researchers, but at the same time have no clue how to teach and behave with their students. The academics here may be tough, but it is because you will have to figure out things by yourself due to the quality of lecturing you will get from these professors where they will assign you with copious amounts of work to do (a lot more than other graduate schools from my understanding) where most of your TA’s will be Chinese who can barley speak English and thereby can also barley explain anything to you. It’s so bad that even the dean of this school resigned from his position, so trust me, if you think you are going to get a quality education, think again.
You would also think that since this school is only 9 miles out of Boston that there would be a lot of opportunities, but this is far from the truth. Unless you have been to Waltham and understand by what I am trying to convey here, this school and its location is literally in its own bubble; there is barley any interaction with this school and other schools in the Boston area, and outside of the east coast no one has ever heard about this school (not to mention that unless you came from a big metropolis, Waltham is as dead of city as it can be). This should also tell you about what your job prospects will be like from graduating from this school in the future.
They supposedly have a career center, but in essence, they should be called the award winning center of good for nothings. They will host all kinds of fabulous networking events and what have you, but there’s nothing to gain, there are no employers or recruiters they can get that makes the career prospects from this school great. You try to go to these people for advice and they themselves don’t know what to do or how to help you, heck I even gave them my resume a couple of times to look at and review and they themselves could not even point out the errors and typos that I had on my resume. That just by itself goes to show you how useful and great their career services are.
They will market about how great their program is and how diverse it is, but I can assure you that these are highly deceptive practices. They will base their ranking of off a couple of sites (where maybe one is reputable and was a ranking from a long time ago) that are themselves biased by the methodology that is used to rank these schools like TFE or whatever it was. No body really knows in what kind of delusion these people are in by calling themselves such a great school with all their marketing (and most possibly by their employees on this forum trying to get people to come to this school) but in reality it is only a matter of time until the market corrects itself and a lot of people start truly finding out what the hell’s going on here. You can try to tell these people to step up their game and make corrections of what’s happening to this school albeit new professors who have no teaching skills, the student body that is nearly 100% Chinese, or the lack of career preparation out of the many, it will only fall on deaf ears because so long as they can milk you for everything you have they could care less.
If you have decided to come to this school, then good luck to you, if you’ve decided not to, then you have truly dodged a bullet. To anyone who considers coming here in the future I would say Caveat Emptor.
Thanks for spilling it all out, @Donald54. We really like Brandeis, but the financial aid was not good in comparison to what else my D got. This makes it easier to let go.
@redpoodles Totally, don’t have any regrets whatsoever. You guys made such an excellent choice by avoiding this school; you truly have no clue what kind of headache you guys saved yourself from.