Preparing For Business School: How Preparation and Prioritization Helped Me Navigate My First-Year at NYU Stern

After working for nine years, Cortne Edmonds (NYU Stern, ‘21) came to business school with the goal of transitioning into management consulting. With the help of Consortium, the NYU Stern Career Center, and some advance planning around the transition prior to attending Stern, Edmonds was able to successfully navigate the transition to business school. In this interview, Edmonds shared how she prepared for business school, how she prioritized her time and commitments, and her advice for how MBA students can prepare for business school and successfully manage their priorities

MBASchooled: After you decided to attend business school and put down your deposit, what was your timeline like leading up to business school? What did you do and when did you arrive on campus?

I continued to work until mid-July and then had 4 weeks off before orientation began in mid-August. Continuing to work was a good distraction and I was lucky to get put on a project that had me in Tel Aviv for 6 weeks, from May to July. While it would have been nice to have an extended vacation between April and August, work kept me on a routine and made sure I had some extra money for extracurricular fun in the first year of my MBA. In the last month before I arrived at Stern, I spent time with family, organizing my apartment, hanging out with my non-business school friends in NY before I got sucked into all business school programming that would consume my time in the first semester.

MBASchooled: What was a surprise or something you had to navigate either in the transition to business school or early on?

I expected that managing the workload or tactics around time management would be a challenge, but I was surprised to find that the transition back to being a student was actually a challenge early on, especially as I had been out of school for almost 9 years. I remember thinking to myself that I’d forgotten how to take notes! I spent a weekend early on in September watching YouTube videos on good note-taking and study techniques so that I could get up-to-speed and make sure that I didn’t fall behind on my schoolwork, because that would only get more challenging once recruiting started in earnest.

MBASchooled: As you transitioned to school, what resources or programs were most helpful in getting up to speed early on?

The programming offered by Stern was very broad and well-curated throughout the semester. The programming was also timed to be sensitive to when students were making relevant decisions for that time period, for example, how to set up a time management and task management system at the beginning of the semester, how to develop a list of companies to target in recruiting right before corporate presentations started, and how to prepare for various interview formats thereafter. Beyond what Stern offered formally, I found that my community of classmates, both MBA1s and MBA2s, were extremely helpful in offering informal and unfiltered advice to get up-to-speed as quickly as possible.

MBASchooled: After being in the working and professional world, what was it like to be back in the classroom and academic setting? 

It was very exciting to be back in the classroom again, in spite of the brief lapse in memory of how to take good notes in class! What I find different about an academic setting compared to a work setting is that you have the liberty to make mistakes in a low-stakes environment whereas at work I needed to make swift and decisive decisions that, if wrong, had negative financial impacts on my department and ultimately the organization. Having this room gave a chance to be more creative in my thought process and approaches to various cases and business situations we have faced in class, case competitions, and even in casual conversation with classmates.

MBASchooled: What were some of the initial challenges you first in your first quarter/semester of business school? How did you overcome them?

I initially struggled with how to prioritize between classes, what I wanted to recruit for in addition to consulting, and the different student organizations that I was excited to be a part of. What I needed was a clearer sense of purpose and what I wanted to achieve while at business school, and I was able to find that by going back to my application essays for Stern and reflecting on what I had written. Applying for an MBA is like doing a personal branding exercise, so first you want to have a clear sense of what is your story and what is the unique value that you can offer to a school.

From there, it’s important to think critically about why an MBA, why that particular school, again considering what your value proposition is as a candidate and what that school values, and why now. If you can give an honest answer to those questions, it will help you have a framework to go back to when you get lost in the midst of lots of programming, classes, homework, and student leadership commitments all vying for your time, which is exactly how I was able to re frame my goals and get clear on what I could and should focus on.

MBASchooled: Knowing what you know now, what else would you have done prior to business school to prepare for the first semester?

I wouldn’t change what I did but rather offer a piece of advice given what I saw from where some of my classmates struggled. I was very intentional about recruiting primarily for consulting and was able to immediately start that process once I got to Stern. For people who were less clear on what industry or function they wanted to recruit for, they found that they had less time once they had a more clear focus to start building relationships with firms and then prepare for those interviews once they knew where they wanted to target.

And for those who never decided entirely on an industry, they were stretched thin such that it reduced their ability to be fully prepared across all of the different companies and interview styles they needed to prepare for. So taking the application process very seriously to be clear on what you want out of business school or otherwise using the summer to set a plan for what you want to recruit for will give back time that you can use toward all the other commitments you will be faced with once you get to school.

MBASchooled: What advice do you have for how prospective MBA students should prepare for going to business school?

As I noted before, have a clear list of priorities for what you want to get out of business school. You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want, so be focused so that you can maximize your business school experience.

MBASchooled: What was the academic experience like? What helped you manage the classroom experience?

The academic experience was intellectually stimulating and I enjoyed all my classes both for the content and in helping me to prepare more holistically for consulting recruiting. In terms of the class format, Stern has a mix of case-based, lecture-based, and experiential learning throughout the curriculum, and I think that optionality is important as certain subjects lend themselves better to particular methods. I liked how we had our blocks (also known as sections or cohorts at other schools) and we would take certain classes with those blocks and pre-assigned study groups, but we also could take other classes with students from a mix of blocks and create our own study groups for those. This allowed me to meet and learn from students beyond the core group of 60 in my block.

The two critical pieces I needed to manage the classroom  experience were:

1) a strong to-do list and calendar to be prepared for class and stay on top of managing all the deliverables across classes; and

2) study groups in all my classes, which helped with case readings, problem sets, and test prep. Even when things started to feel overwhelming, these things kept me on track and ready for each class.

MBASchooled: Even though we are still learning what the MBA Experience will be like this fall (ex: virtual, in-person, hybrid) how can incoming students prepare for first year recruiting? Is there anything different they need to be prepared for? 

Most organizations are in the process of developing their virtual recruiting process for the fall, so there are still unknowns for what that will be like in execution. That being said, there was still an element of “virtual” recruiting last fall when we recruited for consulting and so there are best practices to be shared. I think a great source of information will be students who were recruiting for offices that were not geographically close to where their school was, so I would suggest finding out who those students were and get creative ideas from them. Those students had to do even more cold-calling of people on LinkedIn, tapping recruiters more to get connected to people, and do cases over the phone or on Zoom.

In my mind, the biggest difference will be getting used to having conversations and casing on Zoom. There is such a thing as Zoom fatigue after having back-to-back hours staring into a camera on your computer. I think for now, without clear guidelines on how the process will be, focus on a few tactical things to make you feel comfortable for starting the recruiting process;

1) have a few  professional Zoom backgrounds preloaded that can block out a less-than-professional background in your home;

2) hide your personal feed on Zoom calls to avoid the tendency to look at yourself on the screen;

3) make sure to have good quality headphones so that your audio and receiver will be more clear on both sides of the conversation; and

4) check on the broadband connection for your internet so that you can avoid latency issues in the connection as much as possible so that the conversation feels like it flows more smoothly.

 

MBASchooled: What tips or best practices do you have to help incoming MBA students prepare for a virtual MBA Experience?

Most of the fundamentals of how to prepare for an MBA experience still stand, so I feel that what MBA students need to prepare for are primarily in mindset and attitude. While the virtual MBA experience is different from what one might have expected, it’s not insurmountable and it can offer lessons that will make one a more flexible leader in a more virtual work environment in the future. The biggest challenge I see is that you won’t have those organic touchpoints when you bump into people in the school building or around campus. To counteract that, you need to be more intentional about creating time and opportunities to connect with people over Zoom socially and build those connections that make the MBA such a valuable experience. Don’t be self-conscious about it. Everyone is in the same position, so you’ll find that people will be receptive to it, especially early on the semester when everyone is really excited to meet one another.