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.

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!

If you’re considering getting an MBA in finance, you should probably find out what you’re getting yourself into once you graduate. This list will guide you through the books and movies that you MUST check out if you’re considering going into finance. None of them are that long, and most are thoroughly enjoyable even if you don’t have an interest in finance. By each title is an indication as to what part of finance it applies, in case you have specific interests.  These are in no particular order.

11. Barbarians at the Gate – private equity

Have you ever wondered how a take-private deal happens? This movie gives you an inside look at one of the biggest buyouts of all time, the RJR deal. It does a great job of keeping the topic light-hearted and interesting, with accurately depicted colorful characters like RJR CEO, F. Ross Johnson (played by James Garner), and Henry Kravis (played by Jonathan Pryce) of the private equity firm KKR.

10. Liar’s Poker – bond trading

Wall Street insiders will take it as given that you’ve read this book. This seminal work by Michael Lewis details his journey on the bond desk in the days when Wall Street was still an untamed beast. It includes entertaining vignettes about traders throwing phones and intricate details about the painful training and hazing that went on in the wild 80s. To truly understand the guys at the top of Wall Street today, you have to know the environment in which they were brought up. This book will do that for you.

9. When Genius Failed – hedge fund

Few people in the US or around the world knew it at the time, but a firm called Long Term Capital Management nearly brought the world economy to its knees. The WORLD economy. This firm, a hedge fund back when no one had heard of such a thing, was run by the smartest guys around. They figured out how to make billions, back when “millions” was still impressive. This book details how they, through bad luck, hubris, and enormous bets, went from raking in billions, to complete collapse in just days. All the big Wall Street banks had to bail them out, thanks to some quick thinking by the Federal Reserve.

8. Monkey Business – investment banking

This is the ultimate investment banking book. If you want to be an i-banker, you have to read it. It gives an accurate description of the recruiting process and follows the protagonists from day one in business school through their career as investment bankers. It’s fun, funny, and required reading for any aspiring i-banker.

7. Boiler Room – equity sales

Boiler room will show you what it’s like to work on a sales floor. The personalities are great, and fairly accurate. Note however, that most reputable sales floors are filled with top-tier MBAs and not kids who run casinos out of their homes like the protagonist does. Be that as it may, this is an incredibly entertaining movie and worth the hour and a half. This movie is also good for people who sell things other than equities because it shows some good sales techniques that can be applied to any pitch.

6. American Psycho – investment banking

Granted, investment banking is not the main focus of this movie, and it’s not for the feint of heart, but it is a classic and some of the supporting characters are a good illustration of the types of people in i-banking. This movie is worth the watch just for the protagonists monologues on 80s music. Many people say the book is better than the movie, but the detailed narrative can be a bit dry to get through. Watch the movie first. If you like it and think you can handle the detailed descriptions in text format, give the book a try.

5. Ugly Americans – equity trading

Ben Mezrich has authored many great books about outstanding individuals but this one is his best about finance. He tells the story of a young man who stumbles into a job in Japan working for a hedge fund. There is a lot of action in this book and Mezrich does a good job of keeping up suspense with Yakuza and the equity markets. It’s based on a true story, and is inspiring for any trader-hopeful.

4. Wall Street – equity sales

“Greed is good.” This line, uttered by the now-famed Gordon Gekko character, sums up the Wall Street corporate raider mentality of the 1980. Not only is this superbly acted, but it also shows many dimensions of Wall Street. It can make you rich, powerful, and corrupt like Gekko, it can make you sell your soul like it did to the protagonist, Bud Fox, or it can give you a nice long career and dump you like you are nothing as it does one of Fox’s fellow traders.

3. Confessions of a Venture Capitalist – private equity

There aren’t that many good books on private equity, but this is one. Ruthann Quindlen gives her readers an inside look at her life as a VC at the epicenter of the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley. If you’re thinking about trying to get a job in venture capital – which is a very difficult feat – read this book to find out how you’ll be spending your days.

2. Rogue Trader – equity trading

This is the second big failure story on the list. This movie tells the story of how one trader in a remote office of the oldest, most venerable bank in England caused its bankruptcy through a series of big bets and big losses. Ewan McGregor gives a great performance as Nick Leeson (the author of the autobiographical book by the same name), the Barings Bank trader in Singapore who single handedly upends the bank.

1. Den of Thieves – bond trading

Remember the term “junk bond”? They’re now called high-yield. The term “junk bond” lost its luster mostly because of the events in this story. Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky are figures of Wall Street lore because they make a killing in the junk bond racket – without even being on Wall Street. This story gives the details of how it happened, who was involved, and what went wrong that caused many people, Milken and Boesky included, to go to jail.

Many people think they need to go to the highest ranked school they can get into. Others feel that it’s a matter of fit and career goals. Regardless of which camp you’re in, you should at least be aware of the rankings of the schools you’re considering. Below are links to the more prominent rankings.

• Business Week (2008)
  
• Wall Street Journal (pdf from 2006)
• Financial Times (2008, global)
  
• US News (2008)
• Economist (2007)
• Forbes (2007)

These are just a sampling of the myriad rankings on the web, but they’re also the most respected. Rankings are not everything, but they do matter, so you should take time to weigh them as you would any other factor in choosing a b-school.

Wonder how they might average out? We did too, so we did some quick analysis for you. We took the top 10 from BusinessWeek and checked out how they rank with some of the other lists. Yes, we know this method has huge holes, but it’s just for kicks anyway since rankings are only one factor, right? Take a look…