Once you decide that getting an MBA is the right career step for you, the next step is to decide which business schools to apply to. In truth, one of the biggest challenges when it comes to applying to vocational schools is deciding where you want to go. How do you choose the right business school for your specific desires, needs and goals?
Ranking
Love them or hate them, B-school rankings are something for which you have to decide where to apply. While rankings are not paramount, they are in a way that future employers will compare your resume degree to all other applicants who attended B-school.
That being said, going to a high-ranked school means more to some people than others. If you are under three years of age, attending a prestigious B-school may be more important as you do not have a lot of work experience to keep your résumé. But if you have been in the workforce for 5–10 years, the rankings may be lower, as you have real-world experience to bulk up your portfolio and help you land that post-grade job needed.
The main rankings are US News & World Report, The Financial Times and Bloomberg Business Week. They all use a slightly different method, but clicking through them will give you an idea of where the schools stand.
Faculty
Experience and internationalism also apply to the Faculty of Business School. The best business schools boast high-caliber faculty with both academic and real-world expertise.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case in academia, where recruitment and promotion often depend on publication on practice. According to HBR, the unhappy result is that "business schools are creating faculties filled with individuals whose main professional aspiration is a career dedicated to science. Today it is possible to find ten professors of management who have never set foot inside the real business except customers. "
Prospective business school students can avoid this result - and gain a truly holistic perspective of the business world - by looking for business schools with faculty offering a mix of faculty and academic staff, such as entrepreneurs, mentors and Business leader.
Location
Deciding where you want to live for the next two years of your life is one thing, but you should also think beyond graduation when considering your B-school-to-location. Most schools' strongest networks are their local - Berkeley’s Haas, for example, occupies about two-thirds of their graduation in the Bay Area. If you really want to work in San Francisco, that's great, but if you want to settle somewhere else, things can get tricky.
Your B-school location has long-term implications for the location of your personal network — you will spend two years meeting people in that city or town, and these relationships can really help you when it comes to getting a job. Or successful in his career.
Additionally, geography can be a major consideration if you have a partner who is about to move in with you when you attend B-school. Depending on his job status, some places will be much easier to find work than others.
Deciding Your
Final Choice
We suggest that you want to cut your final short-list to about three schools. Adding to the best schools is highly competitive and therefore you need an option if you must close the school of your first choice (some schools have a rolling admissions policy and so you can apply to these schools early and then Can only apply for other) schools should be turned down on you).
Do not apply to many schools. Completing the application form and preparing for the interview can take a lot of time. It is better to prepare less for a large number of schools than preparing well for some schools.
Should you be lucky enough to have all the schools for which you have applied, how do you choose? First, try to visit each of your short-listed schools. Many schools offer preview days that give you a taste of what you want to do to attend that school. Second, talk to as many people as possible - students, alumni, recruits. These people will give you deep insight that every school is really like you, which is sometimes obtained from the admission office of the school.
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