B-Schooled: Get Your MBA Admit

B-Schooled is the podcast of Stacy Blackman Consulting, an MBA admissions consulting firm, and it carries two kinds of episode in the same feed. The first kind is advice. Erica Olson presents it, and the show introduces her as a writer, author and Harvard MBA who has worked as an admissions consultant for over a decade. Her episodes take one problem and work through it in plain, cautionary terms. Merit scholarships are one example. She argues that an admit's strongest card is proof of money from another competitive program, which can make it worth waiting until every decision is in. She also passes along the view of the firm's consultants that a live phone call is harder for a school to turn down than an email. Another episode takes on what the show calls the 'bird in hand' dilemma: holding an admit while wondering whether to walk away and try for something better. She doubts that one acceptance guarantees another. Each cycle brings a new set of candidates, and a school may see a returning applicant as someone who treated it as a safety. Her list of to-dos for new admits looks past the celebration to insurance, legal protection and leaving on good terms. It includes a family story about a healthy relative in his twenties who had no health insurance shortly before starting grad school and then received a serious cancer diagnosis. He recovered, and the lesson lands. The second kind of episode belongs to Paths Less Traveled, a series hosted by Stacy Blackman, who says she has spent more than 20 years working with people going through business school and what follows. The series starts from the idea that an MBA works better as a foundation than as a route to a first job. Paul Earle, a Kellogg MBA and GOODLES cofounder, traces a line from Kraft to co-founding a mac and cheese company years later, and he describes business school as full of sliding-door moments. In a conversation with George Lankes, Ben Collins says the idea behind Woz came from watching large language models reach an inflection point. Terry Cumes and Tristen Langley, longtime friends of Stacy Blackman, talk about their wellness work with leaders and about applicants who pay more attention to health and balance than earlier generations did. The advice episodes stay on one decision at a time, while the interviews range across whole careers. Episodes end with an email address and a pointer to the firm's newsletter and free personal branding guide, a reminder that this is a consultancy's show. That is also where its value lies: the advice draws on the firm's experience, and the interviews show what the degree looked like years later.