The Early Bird’s Guide to Applying to MBA Programs

Optimize Your Work-Study Situation

If you have any say about the type of job you have, I suggest taking one that eventually affords you managerial responsibilities. While I griped about being placed in Food Services my freshman year, it ended up being an unbelievable boon. By age 18, I was training and managing five- to ten-person teams, and throughout college alone I racked up more managerial experience than many of my classmates had by the time we all arrived at business school. Alternatively, you might build up your intellectual and recommender cred by landing an analytically oriented research position.

Land a Summer Internship

Try to get at least one career-related summer internship. This will not only help you determine if you actually want to go into that particular line of work, but it will also demonstrate your interest in the field to admissions committees and future employers, and help you begin to develop valuable skills.

Go Abroad

International experience has almost become a must-have, so if you can arrange to study, work, or travel abroad, do it! Thanks to a program at my university, I got a job in Paris the summer before my senior year. This was a fantastic way to immerse myself in the language and culture, obtain work experience, and get paid for it. If you are unable to go abroad, I recommend studying and building proficiency in a foreign language. There will always be use for the staples such as French, Spanish, and German, but you may make yourself more marketable by studying Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, etc.

Become a Great Writer

Business schools will ask you to write several essays, often totaling 1,500 to 2,000 words. While it used to be enough to write a very straightforward answer (My goal is x . . .), you now have to pen major opuses. You’ll need to have a creative angle; a good thesis/argument; and engaging, concrete anecdotes. This is an area in which my clients tend to need a lot of help.

Take every opportunity you have to become as strong a writer as possible. Many colleges provide writing coaching. If you feel you are a bit weak in this department, don’t pass this up. This will be to your advantage when crafting your admissions essays and long term (you have no idea how many terrible writers there are out there!). I also recommend learning more about the art of storytelling. In addition to helping you write lively, compelling application essays, it’s also an increasingly useful skill, especially if you end up in a marketing, fundraising, political, entrepreneurial, or CEO role some day. Getstoried.com a great resource in this regard.

Take the GMAT/GRE—Soon

Take one or both of these tests (all business schools accept the GMAT and a good number of them are starting to accept the GRE) while you are still in school or shortly thereafter. Many of my clients end up taking the GMAT three or four years after they’ve graduated, and they find they’re quite rusty at doing that sort of math or taking tests in the first place. It’s definitely worth taking a test-prep course, so see if your school offers one for free or at a discounted rate. These courses are much more expensive to take if you sign up as an individual later on.

Know Thyself

Business schools ask applicants to respond to a number of thought-provoking prompts such as, What matters the most to you and why? Describe a failure. What are your three most significant accomplishments? If you had to assess your own candidacy as an outsider, what would you say?

Tell us about what you will uniquely contribute to the class. Many MBA candidates get so caught up in work and life that they’ve had no time to reflect on what they’ve been doing or why they’ve been doing it. Give yourself an edge in the application process by keeping a journal, and by this, I don’t mean simply reporting what you did today. (Save Facebook and Twitter for that!) Use the journal for internal exploration. Keep track of pivotal moments, find out what has meaning to you, and reflect on how you’ve grown or how you’d like to grow. There are many books and websites regarding the journaling process, so find one that resonates with you.