An important thing to ask yourself when applying to Business School

“Will I be able to get into this school?” This is a common question that most candidates ask themselves, their friends, their admission counselors, when they’re applying for their MBA. For the most part, they’re mainly trying to maximize their chances of getting in.

This is definitely an important question to ask. After all, if you’re sure you want to do an MBA and are spending so much time making your applications perfect, you may as well ensure that you’ll see the light of success.

However, just as you ask yourself “Will I get into this school?”, have you ever asked yourself, “Does this school deserve me?”

Think about this for a moment. You are going to be spending 2 years of your life at this school. This time is going to come from the prime years of your life. You’ll be spending a great deal of money in getting this education. You’ll be living far far away from your loved ones. You could be doing other things with this time – a great job, starting a company, getting married, traveling, anything. Instead, you’ll be giving 2 years of your time to this school. That’s a lot of stuff.

It only makes sense then that as much as the schools are selective about which students get in, you should be selective about which schools deserve you. Does the school have the right resources? Does it attract the kind of students you’d like to hang out with? What professors does the school have and what research have they done? What teaching model does the school follow? What values does the school and its student body espouse? What’s the culture at the school like?

These are hard questions to answer and it is easy to ignore them. Yet, the answers to these questions can make all the difference between a good and a life transforming experience in these 2 years at Business School. As Indians, it is easy to get sucked in the mentality of “I need to get XYZ education”. You are now old enough. You are making a conscious choice. Make sure it’s a choice you will be proud of for the rest of your life.

A typical day in the life of a business school student

As you all take the GMAT and work on your Round 1 apps, we thought it might be a good idea to give you a glimpse into what a typical day in the life of a typical business school student is like J Team getyourMBA asks a current student at Wharton.

7:00am – Wake up

7:15am – 8:00am – Work out at the gym

8:00am – 8:35 am – Get ready

8:40am – Catch the bus to campus. Get into a cab in case you’re late which is often! J

8:55am – Grab coffee (large atleast!) from the café. You NEED it if you hope to stay alert in class.

9:00am – 10:15am – Global Supply Chain Management. We discuss a case on Mattel, Inc. and how they were forced to recall a big lot of toys due to lead traces that could be poisonous to children. Great discussion in class on how best to control quality in your supply chain, especially when each player is not directly a part of Mattel.  Should you punish wrong behavior or incentivize good behavior?

10:15am – 10:30am – Check your mail folder - An offer from a tailor to get your business suit made at a discount for the upcoming interviews, Pricing Policy assignment graded and returned, an invitation with some goodies to the Winter Ball. Walk over to another building for next class

10:30am – 11:45 pm – Venture Capital and Finance of Innovation. Great class discussion on top 5 things investors should look at when deciding whether to invest in a company or not and why – Team? Market Size? Product? Target customer?

11:50am – 1:30 pm – Lunch meeting with Learning Team to finalize marketing case report. Team has 2 Americans, an Indonesian, a German, a Brazilian and an Indian. We are pretending to be Gillette and we have to figure out how we can increase the sales of our razors in Indonesia. How can we do that when many of the men there use scissors to cut their beard?

1:30 – 3:00pm – Mergers and Acquisitions. Great discussion on when to acquire, when to form an Alliance, when to form a Joint Venture.  We discuss Morgan Stanley – Dean Witter merger. Power politics at play!

3:00pm – 4:00pm – Meeting with photography club leadership team to finalize upcoming events and schedule.

4:00pm – 6:00 pm – Grab something to eat and get some work done in the student lounge.

6:00 pm – 8:00pm – Attend a talk on Leadership by a Mountain Guide who has led many expeditions – when do you lead from the front? When do you lead from the back? And when do you lead from the middle? Brilliant talk.

8:00pm – 8:20pm – Walk back home

8:30pm – 10:00pm – Dinner with the ladies of Women in Business Club. A junior wants to recruit for consulting and gets tips from second years.

10:00 pm – 11:00 pm – Celebrate student’s birthday at local pub.

11:00 pm – 2:00am – Prepare case for next day’s Entrepreneurship class on how Red Bull managed to make a dent in the beverages market despite goliaths like Coke and Pepsi in the market. Finish Corporate Valuation assignment of selecting which firms would form good comparables for a given company and why.

2:00am – Sh*#@* forgot to call home again, 3rd day in a row! Mom will kill me. What time is it in India anyway?  Man, I just don't care. Maybe tomorrow, I'm just too damn sleepy right nowwww...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Am I a Leader?

An applicant recently, was worried that his profile does not show any leadership experiences so would that affect his chances of MBA admission. And surely he is not the only one with such doubts. Perhaps many of you may have the same fears – ‘I am just a team member at work. I might get to lead a team only after another year or more’. So should you all wait till you become team leaders in your careers before thinking of applying for MBA?

Well look at it this way – most MBA aspirants are in the first few years of their working careers so very few might have had the opportunity of formally leading their teams. Some others might have been Captains of their college football or some other teams. But the large majority would be neither team leaders at work or past captains of sports teams. So where does that leave us? Are all Business Schools filled only with those who were team leaders at work or past sports captains?  NO? Then, if it is true that all Business Schools want students with leadership qualities, where do all these leaders who fill their classrooms each year, come from?

To find the answer, take a look in the mirror my friends. Do you recognize the leader you see there? Because they all come from amongst you. They are just like you for the most part. And leadership? Well, leadership qualities assume many different forms in different people. Leaders are not only those who actually lead teams – whether at work or on the sports field or elsewhere. Leaders are people who take initiative. Leaders motivate others. Leaders are passionate about what they do. Leaders are prepared to take risks. Leaders work hard. Leaders persevere when others have lost hope. Leaders do ordinary things – extraordinarily. Leaders step up to take charge in a crisis. Leaders are persuasive. Leaders also make mistakes but they learn from them, move on and improve. Leaders think out of the box for innovative solutions. Leaders have self-belief. Leaders are not afraid to admit their mistakes. Leaders have the courage of conviction to defend their beliefs and opinions. Leaders are not scared to take sides rather than just sitting on the fence. Leaders see opportunities where others might see only an obstacle. Leaders also fall down but they just get up and start all over again.

One candidate narrated this story. At a cousin’s wedding the previous year, a typical north Indian wedding where the Baraat (bridegroom’s party) dances its way to the marriage venue, just as the Baraat was about to reach the entrance to the venue, it was discovered the bride was not yet back from the makeup parlor and, there being just the one entrance to the venue, it would be rather awkward for her to walk in after all the guests had arrived. Amidst frantic phone calls and counting of minutes to reach, this guy stepped out to where the Baraat had reached – about 200 mtrs from the entrance, and challenged those dancing to dance against him, knowing full well that he was a lousy dancer. A few minutes were spent in confusion as the dancers sized him up to decide whether they could accept his challenge and a few more while it was debated who would dance first. Well, he lost the bet within three minutes flat thereafter but had already bought the critical few minutes to allow the bride to walk in unseen and save major embarrassment. Surely this was smart out of the box thinking and he took the initiative to carry it out. That too is leadership!

Most of us have experienced some events when we did something different and many of these instances might illustrate some leadership trait. So these are the events to dig out from your memory in order to show you have what it takes to be a leader. Did you ever motivate a friend not to be depressed over some failure but to take heart and move on? That was the leader in you showing through. Did you step out of your car at a jammed intersection to direct traffic for a few minutes to clear up the jam? That too is leadership.

So, rather than losing sleep over the fact that you were never the real leader of a group of people at any time, use your energies to think of various events and instances where you demonstrated traits of leadership. Make a list of all these. Take your time over making this list because many such instances might be lost in the mists of memory. And once your list is made, you might find that some of these instances were really too small or too ordinary to really add value to your profile. So you need to sift through your list to pick up those events where your actions had some impact on those around you. And then use these events in your application to illustrate to the Ad Comm that you too have leadership qualities so that they will recognize you as the candidate they are looking for, among all those who have applied.