12 Steps to Admissions Success

Excerpted from MBA Admissions Strategy: From Profile Building to Essay Writing by A.V. Gordon (McGraw-Hill-Open University Press)

These are the most important things to consider when applying to an MBA program. If you do nothing else, focus on these twelve things:

1. Show self-knowledge. If you know who you are, where you’re going, and why it requires an MBA, you’re more than halfway to getting in.

2. Show past success. Admissions committees have to rely on your past successes and references, as a shorthand indicator of your future success.

3. Show leadership experience and aptitude. Leadership is the ability to motivate and coordinate others to achieve a common goal. It is the key management skill and the key to management success.

4. Prove it with evidence. You think you’re great, and you surely are. But what counts is the evidence. The strongest evidence is concrete: promotions, awards etc, but stories and anecdotes will do the trick too.

5. Position yourself away from competitive categories. Look for ways to separate yourself from the herd.

6. Have clear, interesting, ambitious goals that fit with your past record and require an MBA.

7. Focus on telling your own story and don’t try to give them what you think they want to hear. If you get your profile right you can get in anywhere.

8. Don’t praise the school. They are fully aware of their value and their charms. What they want to know is why you are valuable and how you will add value to them.

9. Don’t try to be too competent. Success is good. Perfect is highly dubious. If you are too good, not only is it suspicious, but you leave them no role to add to your skills and build your profile.

10. Be personal. Give the admissions committee a real insight into your character, passion, personality and self-understanding.

11. Be unique. If what you say could be said by the next applicant or the one after that, it’s generic. If what you say could only be have been said by you, it’s unique.

12. Be likeable. People always choose people they like as colleagues and co-workers and the admissions committee is no different.

A.V. Gordon, MBA, is Director of the MBA Admissions Studio, a specialist admissions coaching and essay editing practice for MBA and executive MBA applicants. Please visit us at www.mbastudio.net for more information about the book and our admissions consulting services.

It’s no secret that the economy is tanking and that jobs are getting more scarce by the day. Naturally, the first jobs to disappear are those most coveted by MBA graduates: highly paid careers in investment banking and management consulting.

So what is a top MBA grad to do?

Improvise. That’s the beauty of the top MBA programs. They attract the best and brightest, so grads are better able to adapt to a changing economy than someone whose fear would have kept them from quitting their day job to pursue the full-time MBA in the first place.

MBAs today are becoming much more entrepreneurial and expanding their ideas of what an MBA should be doing upon graduation. Would-be i-bankers are turning into tech startup moguls. Former management consulting aspirants are now finding fulfillment (and a paycheck) in general management jobs in industry. Regardless of the MBA’s original goals, he or she, for the most part, is adapting and thriving. It just takes patience and creativity.

The point is that regardless of what others might think about your desire to get an MBA at this particularly difficult economy, rest assured that the talents that got you into your program will also carry you on to a fulfilling, happy career. Just be open-minded as to what that career will be, and patient to find the right opportunity.

Getting an MBA is a no-brainer, right? You get to party…er… study for 2 years, and end up with a drastically higher salary when you leave. Good deal, right? Well, if only it weren’t for that pesky loan that you’ll be saddled with upon graduation. Oh, and you may find that returning to living on ramen noodles and Milwaukee’s Best during your matriculation isn’t exactly living the good life. If only there were some way to make some coin while you were in school to ease those pains. Well, never fear, bschoolinsight is here to show you how you, through the power of the internet, can turn that debt to “Aunt Sallie” into a cash making machine. Here are a few ideas to get ya thinking:

Prosper.com

Prosper.com that does some wonderful things for people. It allows people who are in serious financial need and can’t get a traditional loan, to get a loan from other internet users – of course at a much higher rate. Naturally, there is some risk involved here, but I think you’ll find that by making some smart loans of your own, you can generate free money – not RISK free – but free enough to offset the evil capitalized interest that Sallie Mae is gonna pound you with each term. Let’s take a look at an example:

Bob is a new bschool student who, as almost all students do, borrows from Sallie Mae to finance his MBA. Knowing that the educational experience is more than just books and tuition, Bob intelligently adds in some cost of living expenses into his loan. This extra bit frees up the little Bob had in his savings for other things… things like making a loan on Prosper.com for a 30% risk-adjusted return. Numerically, it looks like this:

Sallie Mae loan amount: $30,000

Annual interest: $30,000 * 5% = $1,500

$30,000 Sallie Mae Loan – 25,000 Tuition, books = $5000 left over for room & board

Disclaimer: bschoolinsight DOES NOT recommend you take your Sallie Mae loan money and loan it out to others. Sallie might frown upon such a recommendation. HOWEVER, if the $5000 left over allows Bob to free up… say… $5000 of his own money to make such loans, then so be it! Whether you’re as honest as Bob is between you and Aunt Sallie.

Now, Bob takes the $5000 he was going to let sit in his bank account, and he puts it to work by loaning it out on Prosper.com. Naturally, being an MBA student, he does NOT loan all $5000 to one individual, but rather spreads the risk across multiple loans and enjoys a much higher than market return of 30% or so. Thus, at the end of the term, Bob has earned $1,500, which exactly offsets his annual interest to Aunt Sallie!  Ya gotta love free money!