Columbia Business School has posted the essays for the 2009 Accelerated January Program, also known as J-Term, as well as the Early Decision dates for 2009 matriculation.

The September 2009 Early Decision application review period begins August 13th, 2008 with a deadline of October 8th, 2008. September 2009 Regular Decision deadlines are still pending; be sure to check back for the latest dates.

Here are the new J-Term application essay questions:

• Essay 1 (Required): What are your short-term and long-term post-MBA goals? How will Columbia Business School help you achieve these goals? (Recommended 750 word limit)
• Essay 2 (Required): Master Classes are the epitome of bridging the gap between theory and practice at Columbia Business School. (View link.) Please provide an example from your own life in which practical experience taught you more than theory alone. (Recommended 500 word limit)
• Essay 3 (Required): Please provide an example of a team failure of which you've been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently? (Recommended 500 word limit)
• Essay 4 (Required): Describe for us your greatest passion in life. (Recommended 250 word limit)
• Essay 5 (Optional): Is there any further information that you wish to provide to the Admissions Committee? (Please use this space to provide an explanation of any areas of concern in your academic record or your personal history.)

AdmissionsConsultants will be increasing prices on Monday, May 26. If you want to lock in a package or pre-pay for several hourly sessions at our current rates, we strongly encourage you to sign up soon.

One of the biggest temptations that b-school applicants face is the urge to continue fiddling with their applications, even after the final deadlines have passed. That urge to embellish is especially strong when there's a piece of good news to share, like a work promotion or a professional award. In some cases, it's appropriate to forward this type of information to the admissions office and ask that it be added to your file. In many cases, however, supplemental material does little to improve an applicant's admissions chances – and the impression a candidate makes by requesting special treatment can backfire.

A team from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School won the 2008 Financial Engineering Case Competition hosted by the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. The host team from the Tepper School and Princeton University tied for second-place at the 11th annual contest. This year's event, held April 4 at Lehman Brothers New York headquarters, was sponsored by the Tepper School, Lehman Brothers, PRIMIA Institute and Appaloosa Management Partners.

The competition requires teams to solve a complex financial engineering problem in just six hours. The case this year focused on the energy derivatives market. Competitors were asked to design and price exotic electricity- and natural gas-linked structured products based on underlying cash flows from an electrical power plant. Teams presented their solutions before a panel of judges made up of faculty from the competing schools and Lehman Brothers executives.

Seven teams joined this year's competition, including the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, New York University, Wharton, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon.

The Financial Engineering Case competition is the premier competition to showcase the business and analytical skills of top graduate business students in the areas of derivative security valuation and financial engineering, also known as computational finance. Carnegie Mellon offers one of the most highly regarded programs in computational finance at the bachelor's, master's and doctoral levels, as well as a joint degree with the MBA program.

In the HBS Director's recent MBA blog, he mentioned that there will be new essay questions for the 2009 application season (Class of 2011) and that they will be released six weeks early, in mid-May.

As soon as they are released, we will update you with the new question series and information!