Prospective MBA students often get very nervous about resumes, worrying madly if they’ve got the perfect sequence for admission to the top business schools.
Here’s the good news:
1. It’s ok if you have a gap in your resume
2. There’s no perfect work sequence
In fact, I consider the worry about a “resume gap” one of the biggest myths in business school...
So, what do you want to when you grow up? That’s the spirit behind the goals questions on business school applications.
This prompt is partly about your ability to plan logically and partly about your ability to envision a wild future. Some schools even make their desire for you to think big quite clear--Stanford GSB asks, “What do you want...
Just about everyone, that is, other than McKinsey consultants and Goldman analysts, call themselves non-traditional candidates for business school. Why? Because they think that everyone who will populate the next MBA class comes from management consulting or finance.
We all of know a few consultants, investment banking types, and more than a few engineers at business school. And indeed, if you look at the profiles of many business schools (here’s a...
Now that most top business schools have released their essay questions for the entering class of 2013, there's a lot of talk about the reduced essay word count. It started with Harvard Business School’s announcement on May 22 to reduce the essay portion of the application to two 400-word responses. Now many other schools, such as MIT Sloan, Kellogg and Chicago Booth...
There are those who revere her and those who fear her--but one thing is certain about Dee Leopold, director of Harvard Business School admissions—she tells it straight. After the May 22 announcement that HBS would modify its admissions process, Dee made herself available to answer questions. She granted an exclusive interview with Poets & Quants...
Networking, or talking to anyone and everyone about business school and the MBA admissions process, is more than just an exercise -- you can use it to test out your own ideas and then open yourself up to new ones. It has been said that the best ideas are talked about. Good ideas are inspired by, and refined with, conversation.
Right in Your Own Backyard
As you are mulling over your...
Everyone who has applied to an MBA program or applied for any job worries about their resume. How on earth do you fit your entire life story into one page? And what an insult that someone actually thinks you can?
Your resume has almost nothing to do with your real life. It’s about your professional life, and it’s about...
If you know anyone who is applying to business school for the class of 2014, you may have heard them muttering to themselves, “What does matter most to me and why?” (Stanford GSB) or “Have I ever learned anything from a setback?” (Harvard Business School). They may be victims of an energy-draining syndrome that shows itself every year about this time called MBA essay nightmare. It’s a regular sinkhole of drafting,...
It's summer in the northern hemisphere, which means time to get a little more organized about the admissions process. It's a wonderful time to learn about schools. A little counter-intuitive, when students are out of classes and campuses are an empty husk of their former fall-to-springtime selves. But guess what! Many students are taking summer jobs and may be coming to your neighborhood. You can meet...
It’s the middle of the MBA applications cycle and some of you are working on essays, while others are preparing for interviews with admissions committee members or alumni. Congratulations! But now it's time for more work.
The goal of the interviewer is to figure out what kind of a person you are in the flesh. But there’s a question behind that question too—they want to know...
