How To Apply To Business School In Fewer Than 6 Weeks

Welcome to Round 2! If you’re applying to business school in a short time, we’re here to tell you that a.) you’re not alone and b.) you’re not crazy. If an MBA is part of your ideal career plan, if it’s part of your destiny, then you owe it to yourself to go for it. And, yes, there’s work ahead. Here’s your week-by-week guide to finishing your successful MBA applications in a time crunch. Whether you’ve got 3, 4, or 6 weeks to finalize your MBA applications, this timeline will get you across the finish line as efficiently and awesomely as possible.

Week 1

Step 1. Choose the right schools and calibrate your profile

School selection is a critical piece of your application and post-MBA success. When deciding which business schools to apply to, start by clearly defining your career and educational goals to identify programs that align with you and your goals. You’ll need to consider specializations, location, campus life and clubs, career outcomes, and the alumni network. Do not neglect culture. Utilize resources like Poets&Quants’ for student & alumni features, school profiles, and the significance of school rankings as they reflect reputation and employment prospects. Consider every school at this point and make three lists: safe schools, stretch schools, and shoot-the-moon schools.

Additionally, do some introspection and evaluate your candidacy at these schools. Understand where your strengths lie and what weaknesses you will need to proactively address in your application.

Step 2. Choose your MBA Admissions Coach

Many people apply to business school without consultants. The people who work with us at Career Protocol tend to really love their experience because our approach, our proprietary MBA Success Protocol, centers on helping you find and own your unique voice, rather than trying to fit your story into a predefined box.

Authentic character, inspiring true stories, and deep insight into your genuine values are what compel schools to grant you admission and scholarships. That’s why the MBA Success Protocol encourages you to deepen your self-awareness and enhance your self-communication skills while you build your most authentic MBA application.

That takes work and dedication to yourself. But it’s much easier and more fun with a Career Protocol coach by your side.

Whether you work with us, or a different MBA coach, or no coach at all, this is one of the very first decisions you need to make. Doing so will help smooth your journey, reduce your anxiety, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your entire process. Talk to us to learn more about what we do and how we help our clients achieve exceptional results.

Step 3. Set up your MBA application profile with the school and start your research

Business schools really need to believe that you want to be in their program if you are to have even a chance at admission. This means you need to get to know each school you apply to intimately. Intimacy takes a little time, so you need to begin your research process.

Here are your priorities in your research:

Set up your application, sign up for emails, and accept tracking cookies so the school can follow your progress as you get to know them.
Follow schools on social media and engage. Get our complete list of MBA school social accounts, and follow even more of our tips for connecting with schools online.
Register for and attend online events – at least 2 per school! And pay attention during them!
Read student blogs, club webpages, adcom updates, and curriculum pages on the schools’ websites. Read all you can, especially about offerings most relevant to your goals.
Reach out to students and alums and conduct informational interviews.

Plan to spend 2 hours per week on these tasks (3-4 hours if you are applying to more than 3 schools) and just make steady progress. Block off the time in your calendar and get to work. You won’t be able to cram with this step, so start now and make progress each week.

Step 4. Order Your Transcripts

Order any and all transcripts (from your undergrad institution, masters, and/or continuing education certificates) and test score reports you will need in order to submit your final application!

Step 5. Select your recommenders and set them up for success

Another part of the application process that doesn’t usually cram well is the recommendations. Your recommenders need time to reflect and write amazing letters on your behalf, so make sure you give them ample time to complete that task. Decide on who your recommenders should be as early as possible and get them prepped to write those letters. If you’d like to download our recommender cheat sheet, it’s a free bonus you can choose from if you join the Career Protocol community here.

Week 2

OK, if you did all of that in Week 1, you are well on your way to an amazing MBA application! Now begins the process of introspection that will inform the foundational pieces of your application: your essays, resume, short answers, and – most importantly – your interviews.

This step is so important that we really recommend you not begin the essay stage until you have completed it in isolation. The essays will need at least 2 or 3 full weeks of iteration, so if you are working against a timeline of one month or less, you may want to move the discovery process up to Week 1 to allow plenty of time to iterate on your essays in Week 2.

Step 6. Complete an in-depth self-discovery process

Please do not skip this step. It’s very easy to jump into the MBA essays and start contorting your story around what you think the school wants to hear. But as I say in almost every MBA article I write, that is the losing-est strategy you could possibly employ.

The key to making the admissions committee fall in love with you (which is your best bet to gaining admission in a competitive season and overcoming any weaknesses you might have) is showing them your authentic best self. Genuine, inspiring human beings get into business school. Panderers land in the ding pile with all the other undifferentiated, boring candidates who failed to create a distinct and lasting impression on MBA application readers.

The key to showing your authentic self in applications is increasing your self-knowledge and self-awareness through the discovery process. Our discovery process is truly in-depth. Our clients rave about it. To get your own discovery process started, google “Career Protocol Discovery Process YouTube.”

Step 7. Develop your career game plan

Two thirds of discovery is about mapping and understanding your past and how you came to be the person you are. The final third is about projecting the person you want to be into the future and describing a concrete game plan to achieve the professional growth and impact you want to have throughout your career.

It’s critical you nail your MBA goals and make them goals you genuinely care about. They also have to be goals that you can actually achieve through your MBA:

Make sure you’ve got all 4 pieces of your career game plan nailed down:

Your inspiring long-term career vision
Your medium-term post-MBA and internship goal
MBA Program Strategy: your MBA program needs to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be post-MBA
Short-term tactics: these include company research and any informational interviews you need to do before your MBA interview to show you are well on the path to your post-MBA goals

Work with your coach or check out our complete guide to MBA recruiting to help make your game plan more real and tangible.

I recommend you take a full week on discovery and resist the urge to move ahead with any other part of your application until it’s complete. If you’ve explored all your past experiences, defined your core values and ambitions, and mapped your career game plan, then you are ready to move on to the essays. I promise that taking your time on discovery will increase your efficiency in all the later steps of your MBA application process.

Week 3 and Beyond

Step 8. Craft those MBA essays

The essays are the very best part of the application, and – unlike the resume and short answers – they really can’t be crammed into a single long-weekend sprint. Like fine wine, essays need time to breathe, evolve, and mature as you work through multiple iterations.

Essays are an extension of the discovery process you completed in Week 2. You should have deepened your self-awareness and refined the way you communicate who you are so that your story touches the reader’s emotions, inspires them, and shows you in the very best light possible.

Needless to say, even working on your own, you aren’t going to achieve that in a single draft. So be sure to leave ample time for writing and rewriting. If you work steadily every day, you could complete the essays for even a handful of schools in two weeks. Most people need more time than that, though, so plan to get started on those essays as soon as you complete discovery.

Step 9. Perfect your MBA resume

Your MBA resume is INCREDIBLY important!!! Please don’t take the fact that it is low on this list as a sign of low priority. No. In fact, the resume is one of the most important parts of your application. It is where you will communicate all your personal achievements, your awesomeness, and your MBA readiness. For some schools, the content of your experience to date will drive a huge percentage of their decision on your candidacy.

It is essential that you have an amazing MBA resume that showcases your professional track record of success, your excellence, and your finest achievements. It’s so low on the timeline because it is one part of the application that crams fairly well if you’re in a pinch. Need inspo? Check out our MBA resume protocol.

The Last Week

Take as much time as you have to work on those essays. If you have 4 weeks, they should take 2-3 of those weeks. If you have 6 weeks, they should fill 4-5 weeks. Once your essays are nearing a stage of excellence, you can start tying off loose ends and getting that application ready for submission.

Step 10. Fill in the short answers in the online application

The short answers that are part of every MBA application are more tedious than they are tough. Schools ask questions about your jobs, promotions, salaries, and bonuses; your parents and alumni friends; your motivations, achievements, awards, and challenges. Every school has their own cocktail of questions.

Harvard’s HBS and Stanford’s GSB are notably the most onerous, with Stanford including up to 5 mini essays in those short answers. If you’re applying to Stanford, address these baby essays as part of your overall essay brainstorming process so as not to overlap with the content of your primary essays. For the rest of your schools, you can save this step of the process till the last week.

Be thorough, pay attention to details, write complete and thoughtful responses, and do your very best on any questions that require thought. Do not copy and paste resume bullets in here even if there seems to be overlap. Address each question directly and succinctly. Be sure to save your work as often as possible!

Step 11. Finish off the final application details and submit

Once your MBA application is locked and loaded, your resume is perfected and PDFed, your essays are proofread, formatted correctly, and PDFed (or pasted into the relevant text boxes, depending on how the school manages the essays), then it’s time to get ready to submit. Here’s your final application checklist to make sure you are ready to go:

Recommendations submitted
Short answers completed
Resume uploaded
Essays uploaded
Transcripts uploaded
Video interview prepped (if relevant)
Application fee ready to be paid

Be sure to investigate whether your target school requires additional video essays as part of the application. Kellogg, Yale, and a handful of other programs have a video essay component that requires you to immediately (or within a week of submission) respond to a couple of video essay questions.

If that’s the case, do your research and prepare for the known questions before you hit submit. You also want to be in the right mindset to improvise when the time comes to do your video essay (since you want your responses to feel natural rather than canned or memorized).

That’s it y’all!! That’s how to submit your VERY BEST MBA application in six weeks or less by your friends at Career Protocol. Don’t forget to talk to us if you want to make the whole thing more fun, less stressful, and way more awesome.