May 2020 Update: For an Updated Version of this article, please check this out
So you’ve
- Submitted your MBA applications
- Conducted your interviews
- Gotten accepted
- Sent in your deposit
Now what?
One of the most common questions I get from future MBA students is “what can I do to prepare for my MBA program?” There’s a lot that you can do, but I’d like offer up list of things that I think can help you prepare for your MBA program.
Financial Matters
Having money to pay for business school is one of the most pressing concerns for future MBA students. Many rely on savings, loans and whatever else they can find to cover the cost of tuition for the two year MBA program. In addition to those costs, you’ll want to consider all those incidentals that don’t seem to make it into the cost of tuition calculators. Here are some common costs you’ll want to think about (these do not apply to everyone)
- Travel money (for fun)
- Social experiences
- Expenses for recruiting trips, career Treks
- Study Abroad/Global Trips (tbd on if these will happen, but still good to plan)
Potential To-Do’s
- Start saving as much money as you can
- Take out the necessary loans. Check out CommonBond or SoFi if you are looking for alternative loan options
Pre-Career Preparation
Since people go to business school to change or accelerate their career, most MBA students will spend a significant amount of time on career related activities during their business school experience. Once you start business school, you’ll be inundated with career-related activities such as resume reviews, cover letter writings, networking e-mails, mock interviews and many more fun activities. Since everyone has different cover levels with these activities, it may make sense to do a little bit of prep work. Furthermore, while there are differences in the ways that MBA programs teach certain aspects, there are many more commonalities. With that, here are some things you can do to get started:
Potential To Do’s
- Prepare Your Resume – Your school will have a template that they want to see your resume in. This will be somewhat different than the resume you submitted to business school. Reach out to your Career Center at your school to get the template and start updating it before you get to campus. You may even have the ability to work directly with a Career Director who can give you feedback and coaching.
- Read Employer Reports – Hopefully, you’ll have done this already but familiarize yourself with the Employment statistics from your school. Get a sense of where students are getting placed from a function, industry, and geographic perspective
- Create a target company list – After reading the report, start brainstorming (maybe you already know) some companies that you think you might be interested in getting to know better or applying to in the future. (Note: Entrepreneurs – I still think this is valuable for you even if you want to start your own business)
- Create a “Full-Resume Bank” – Odds are, you’ll have to change your resume when you get to business school. As such, it may help you to create a “full-resume bank,” complete of everything that you’d ever think you’d want to put on your resume. While your resume will need to be 1-page at school, it’s more than OK for this one to go past a page. The goal here is to collect as many data points from your experience as possible so when you do get to school you can figure out what to include.
- Create a “Memorable Work Moments” Document – Similar to your resume bank, you’ll at some point need to refamilarize yourself with your projects and experiences from your past jobs/roles so you can ace your interviewers’ questions in your future internship interviews. As such, you may want to create a document where you list out important work projects, initiatives or experiences and provide some details about what you did and why they were important.
- Practice Your Elevator Pitch – An elevator pitch, or a short intro about yourself which you’ll use countless times, whether it’s introducing yourself to your classmates or recruiters at company events. Spend some time refining and practicing it, so that once you’re at school you know what to say.
- Network with Current Students – If you know what fields or functions you are interested in, consider reaching out to current students or recent alum to learn more about what they are doing in that specific field. Zoom calls, hangouts or phone calls are suffice for now, and it will help you gain additional insight that will help you in your recruiting search.
Learn how to Learn
In business school, it will be hard to learn everything, so you’ll want to learn how to learn (no pun intended) quickly and efficiently on a particular topic. In my opinion, this is one of the most important and impactful things you can do to prepare for business school because it helps develop great learning habits that you can apply to the rest of your life. An important and in my opinion underrated set of skills is learning how to consume content and develop knowledge on a particular topic of interest. If you can start doing this before you get to business school, I think you will find it to be A) much more enjoyable and B) helpful to learning and consuming information. Here’s how you can start:
- Consume content regularly – Get into a habit of finding and reading content on a regular basis. (Here’s how I do it) The internet allows you to literally learn everything so if you haven’t done it already start getting into a habit of reading content every day. If you can keep this up during and after business school, I think you will find yourself to be more informed and in the loop on topics of interest
- Get Smart on your industry/function/school – Do you have a hunch of what you want to do? Start learning as much as you can about that particular industry or function. Want to work in management consulting? Check out Management Consulted. Interested in Marketing? Start reading Adage, CMO.Com, and other marketing outlets. The goal here is to get up to speed on your future career but hopefully the topic is engaging and interesting to you as it will most likely be your future profession. Lastly, you’re going to be affiliated with your school for the reminder of your life. Definitely take the time to get up to speed on what’s going on, who’s doing what, and what’s coming in the future, especially stuff that is related to the MBA program.
- Management Consulting – Management Consulted, Consulting Magazine
- Brand Management – Adage, CMO
- Investment Banking – Wall Street Oasis
- Product Marketing – Product Marketing Alliance
- Update your Social Media to reflect your interests (and start checking it) – Now that you’ll be in business school, it’s time to start following some MBA-related topics. Start following news outlets, trade websites, content sources, authoritative figures etc on your social media channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.) Consider adding and starting to check for content regularly on any or all of the following:
- Your MBA program
- Leadership of your MBA Program
- Companies you are interested in
- Business News Outlets (WSJ, Bloomberg, etc.)
Academics
As a result of COVID-19, as of March 2020 all MBA programs have moved to a virtual learning environment. While things continue to evolve month by month and nobody knows for certain what August or September will look like, many MBA programs are operating under the assumption that some of the MBA experience will be done online, or best case, the in-person academic experience will not be the same as it once was prior to March 2020. If your school cannot meet in person, take some time to learn a bit more about what the academic experience was like virtually for the end of the spring semester. You can talk to current students about what their experience was like, what some of the things that worked well, what some of the challenges were, and some of the tactics and tools that were used to help navigate the student experience. Here are a few articles that also can get you up to speed:
- Articles
- UVA Darden Students Weigh-in on Distance Learning, Uncertain Future and a Spring Like No Other
- Strategies For Taking Online Classes
- What I wish someone taught me before taking online classes
- B-School Faculty shifted online more easily than students
- What Harvard Business School has learned from the Coronavirus Crisis
Get back into the academic mindset
For many MBA students, it’s been a few years since you were in an academic environment. This is not foreign persay, but it may take some time to get acclimated to classes, group projects, and assignments. Furthermore, one of the common challenges that many students face early on is that they are having to learn new material (ex: taking finance for the first time) in a short amount of time. And in some cases, not just one or two new kinds of classes, but a lot of new types of classes. Even for me, as someone who was an undergraduate business major, and who worked in consulting, it did take me a bit of time to adjust to the academic world. Take some time to prepare yourself for the academic rigors of an MBA program. For some, this may mean taking some pre-mba prep courses like finance or economics. For others, it might just be getting familiar with the business lingo or terminology (ex: check out Axios or WSJ each day) and for others, you may want to enroll in your schools Pre-MBA Academics course.
Productivity
Business school is very busy. Since every hour of every day is important, being efficient is critical to getting the most out of your experience. To be productive, you need to have the right tools and technologies in place to help you get your work done. Here are some tips on how to find the right technology and tools to be efficient
- Decide on your technology – Figure out your laptop/desktop/device situation. Most schools will have information for you on some basic requirements/suggestions for what you should get.
- Almost all students have a computer (laptop/desktop)
- Most have a device (iPad, tablet, etc)
- Macs can be used in business school. If you’re relying on excel a lot, Windows is probably easier, but there are workarounds for some If you want to take the guesswork out of it just get a PC.
- Some schools have policies on devices (tablets, laptops, etc) so make sure you read up your schools’ as it may determine what you bring
- Lay out your Information Consumption Strategy – Consider thinking about any downloading/purchasing apps that can help you become more productive with how you consume content and information. While I use a laptop to do most of my homework and e-mailing, the following are some apps that help me with various aspects of business school work:
- Pocket.co – Cataloging and sharing articles/content that I find
- Nuzzel – Content Aggregator that integrates with Twitter to serve you top news
- Twitter – Keeping up with all my content and news
- LinkedIn – Networking
- Facebook – Social stuff
- FlipBoard – Keeping up with content and news
- Google Drive – Storing Coursepaks, and other class-related documents
There are countless other things you can do, but as I said, do not feel obligated to do any of these things. One last thing – make sure to prepare for what business school is like by checking out MBA Insider.
I personally like to prepare and believe that had I done a few of these my transition to business school would have gone smoother than it did, but use your best judgment. For Current MBA students, I’d love to hear what you think students can do to help prepare themselves before they start their MBA Programs.