The month of May is, for the average French person, one of beautiful days, where you “do what you please,” and of presidential elections. However, a curious community stands out with different concerns: students preparing for business school entrance exams. For them, the period of preparing for the daunting oral examinations has begun.
Prépa Grand Oral, since 2005 in Nice, has been offering these students invaluable assistance. In the framework of intensive seminars, they alternate between teachings and simulations at a particularly sustained pace. Add a touch of “tutoring” inspired by academic support and you have a formula that has already proven itself.
Launched by two students from Edhec
Created by Mustapha Benkalfate and Sylvain Vuillen, then students at Edhec, the company is the only known one in France to offer such a service. “When I was preparing for the oral exams, I had a lot of trouble finding a structure that offered realistic training,” says Mustapha Benkalfate. “In business school orals, the juries are most often made up of two executives and a research professor. So, when I learned that this or that training offered interview simulations with a French teacher as a jury member, I remained skeptical.” Having finally succeeded brilliantly in these oral examinations, Mr. Benkalfate set out to fill this gap. This was followed by a study of several months during which, with Sylvain Vuillen, all aspects of business school oral examinations were scrutinized.
90% Success Rate
This phase resulted in defining an atypical and effective training; Prépa Grand Oral shows a 90% success rate among the students who have trusted it. Just typing the company’s name into an internet search engine will convince you. On discussion forums among youth, alumni of Prépa Grand Oral praise the merits of the seminars.
The merits sometimes exceed the ambitions of its leaders. For instance, Florence, now a student at Ceram Sophia Antipolis, shares that the Prépa Grand Oral course allowed her to “ask the right questions and reflect on her real motivation for joining a business school.”
Given such success, the founders of Prépa Grand Oral have great ambitions for the development of their enterprise. They already offer courses in Paris and plan to extend their concept to the six largest cities in France within the next five years. “We get contacts from Bordeaux, Lille, Toulouse, and even from Rabat or Tunis wanting to participate in our seminars,” reports Sylvain Vuillen. “Since we can’t accommodate everyone in Nice or Paris, it seems important to us to expand our network to more cities to meet the demand.”
Quite a program…
