Anyone Know About the MBA Program at Brandeis Heller?

[bring_to_papa]

Can anyone share anything about this program? I have been accepted here and to several other schools but Brandeis is offering the most aid.

Non-traditional URM. Undergrad 3.85 GPA in Biology. 161V 159Q. 4.5 writing. Several years of work experience as a program manager at a nonprofit.

Wondering if this program would be a good fit for me? Looking for a school with a diverse student body and decent connections in government. I'd like to end up at an agency like the FDA or CDC.

Thanks.

[stabby]

I'm a graduate of Heller's MBA program. Very mixed feelings about it. While Brandeis University is a decent institution, the Heller School is not what it once was. If I had it to do over again, I honestly wouldn't have attended and I would have put that time to better use. The job I ended up with after graduation was one I could have gotten with a bachelors degree and coaching.

Heller's definitely not a good school for people interested in government. As someone here once said, Brandeis is in the shadows of many other elite institutions in the Boston area and while they claim to offer everything, including public management training, they excel at nothing at this point. Their last dean, David Weil, worked for government and Heller was trying to use that to market themselves to prospectives interested in government. However, Weil resigned as dean and he wasn't in the position very long. The general attitude at Heller remains that public service is something working class people do and it shouldn't be an aspiration of students with high levels of privilege who don't have to engage in service professions. Public policy professors at Heller will literally say things in class like, "Government workers are never middle class." There was a girl in that public policy class who was a government employee with an elite undergrad degree making over 100K a year being told that she wasn't middle (or upper middle) class. I guess even the GS-15s and SES officers in the federal government are considered low class people by the nobody scholars at Brandeis. In any case, not a good match at all for someone aspiring to a career in public service.

I was most annoyed about not ending up with a capstone project (i.e., team consulting project, which lasts from late spring through the entire summer) related to my concentration. Say you complete the healthcare concentration requirements. Even if there are capstone projects available related to healthcare, you could end up with a completely unrelated project, so you would not get the experience that they advertised to you. Considerations that shouldn't matter in assigning the capstones, including the optics of Heller and how the school's admin feels you will impact them with a high value client, matter. I ended up with a scam nonprofit organization that I couldn't put on my resume except maybe as a volunteer opportunity. It was a complete waste of my time.

As a qualified underrepresented minority, what may also annoy you about Heller are the racial politics of Brandeis. You can TL;DR this if you don't want to hear it but everyone at Brandeis stands for diversity and inclusion...until they are out of class. I don't know which URM group you belong to but know there are very few African American students at Heller and the ones who attend can be treated poorly at times by instructors and staff. The school is constantly hiding low African American enrollment by citing statistics regarding the percentage of students who are "people of color", which includes Asians and other foreign students in the Sustainable International Development program at Heller. The few Blacks at Heller are usually non-ADOS Africans, Islands people, or Haitians. The few African American students I met there often went to elite undergrad institutions like Spelman and were usually good students. Of the non-ADOS Black folk, look on the internet for the stories of Heller grads Johnny Charles or Jessica Sannon. Johnny's Heller graduation speech, which at least used to be available on YouTube, talks about how he failed multiple classes at Heller multiple times. Jessica has talked to the media about how she received a disadvantaged high school education (I have heard at a predominantly white Catholic school in the Boston area with good average standardized test scores). I often wonder how Jessica feels about her graduation speech in light of the recent SCOTUS rulings. It's really interesting how affirmative action is supposed to be addressing the impact of American slavery and African Americans are always made the face of it. However, non-ADOS folks borrow the Black label when they can profit from it and run otherwise and act like they are better than. IME, the white and Asian students at Heller will talk all kinds of DEI nonsense during class but call you ghetto when the instructors aren't listening. I mean, they couldn't get into anything better than Brandeis, so I guess I understand the frustration but just know all the DEI stuff all over their website is phony as hell. It can also be demoralizing when people who engaged in race-related bullying against you aren't called out for who they are and become the chosen face of the school in its advertising. Or when those who literally engaged in race-related bullying are being helped through midterm and final examinations that you had to study for and take on your own. (I kid you not. We were sitting in an accounting exam - while Brenda Anderson was on leave and not teaching it, for the record. The instructor walked up to an American-born African girl and said, "You look stuck. Can I help?" She proceeded to help the student solve problems on her final. Another slow white girl had to be taken into another room and talked through her accounting exam. Karen had the nerve to give Black girls hell who were acting as her TA in subsequent classes like she was actually a good student.) The new dean, Maria Madison, feels she's the gatekeeper of Blackness even though I think she's also non-ADOS Black. I know she likes throw Brandeis' money at organizations that support immigrant Africans and not African Americans, which is interesting.

Your stats are good. I hope you didn't waste them on this school and I hope you take them elsewhere.

[John Watson]

@stabby I'm sorry to hear about your bad experiences at Heller, especially the parts that you didn't get the concentration you wanted and that you were mishandled due to racism. I'll take your advices and reconsider my interest in the Heller School and maybe Brandeis as a whole