10 Strategies To Make The Most Of Your MBA Or Masters

Over the past few weeks, tens of thousands of young professionals have walked into a business school carrying a laptop, a reading list, and a set of expectations. Some gave up a promotion to be there. Most gave up an income. All of them wanted change.

So what kind of change have they come for? GMAC’s 2026 Prospective Students Survey found that only 42% of candidates are pursuing a degree in order to change careers, down from 58% in 2022, while 77% now cite enriching their lives and developing their potential. If the MBA is more than a mechanism for moving from banking to tech, how you spend your one or two years matters more than what you convert it into.

At the CentreCourt MBA Festival, which I co-host with Poets&Quants, the word that overwhelmingly comes up most when alumni and admissions directors are asked for advice is prioritization. So many exciting possibilities, but only so much time in a day.

Caroline Diarte Edwards, former MBA Admissions Director at INSEAD and my fellow co-founder of Fortuna Admissions, describes the business school experience like drinking from a fire hydrant. It’s an incredibly intense experience, and before you know it, you are stepping up on stage at the graduation ceremony.

Rather than stop at the advice to prioritize, which everyone hears and few people act on, I wanted to suggest 10 specific strategies with the actual research behind them. If you are still weighing your own MBA or Master’s decision, or want a second opinion on how to make the most of the one ahead of you, you can schedule a free consultation with a Fortuna coach.

1. DECIDE NOW WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO BE BAD AT

Morten Hansen, then at the University of California, Berkeley, spent five years studying around 5,000 managers and employees. His conclusion, published in Great at Work rather than a peer-reviewed journal, was that high performers don’t simply prioritize. They select a very small number of things and apply disproportionate effort to them.

Performance plateaus and then declines beyond roughly 50 hours a week. You cannot do the case competition, the trek, the club presidency, the exchange program and the venture fund. Choosing three means failing at the others on purpose, in front of people whose good opinion you want. Decide in week one, before the calendar decides for you.

2. TAKE THE CLASS YOU MIGHT NOT ACE

Wharton and Columbia are among the schools operating grade non-disclosure, and Cornell Johnson students voted in their own version by referendum in 2018. The policy is defended as a license to take academic risks, and the evidence suggests students do use it.

Eric Floyd at UC San Diego’s Rady School, Daniel Lee at Delaware’s Lerner College and Sorabh Tomar at SMU Cox found in Management Science that students under non-disclosure spend around five per cent less time on any given course. Yet, their total academic hours barely move, because they enroll in harder ones. The benefit is yours, and only if you spend it.

Robert Bjork at UCLA has spent a career showing that current performance is not a true sign of learning. Fluency while you study creates an illusion of mastery, and the course that feels easy is usually the one teaching you least. Take the elective that might be a real struggle, with a grade nobody will learn about.

3. STUDY IN THE WAY THAT WORKS, NOT THE WAY THAT FEELS GOOD

Jeffrey Karpicke and Janell Blunt at Purdue University, writing in Science, compared students who practiced retrieving material against students who built elaborate concept maps. Retrieval, meaning they closed the book and tried to reconstruct it from memory, rather than reading it through again, won decisively, and 101 of 120 students did better under it. Three quarters had predicted the opposite.

John Dunlosky at Kent State and colleagues reviewed ten popular study techniques and rated only two as high utility: practice testing and spaced practice. Rereading and highlighting, the two things every MBA student does at midnight before a finance exam, were rated low. Close the case and explain it to your study group from memory. It will feel worse and work better.

4. DON’T ARRIVE AT THE PARTY WITH YOUR STUDY GROUP

Paul Ingram and Michael Morris of Columbia Business School wired 97 people, mostly executive MBA students, with electronic badges at an evening mixer and recorded every encounter. Ninety-five per cent had said beforehand that their goal was to meet new people. Guests who were already friends turned out to be around 223% more likely to encounter each other than strangers were.

There was no demographic clustering in the average encounter. The obstacle was not prejudice; it was familiarity. You will not fail to meet the person who changes your career because you were closed-minded, but because you walked in with four people you already knew.

5. AIM FOR THE MIDDLING TIE

Everyone at orientation will tell you about the strength of weak ties, and almost everyone gets it wrong. In his follow-up paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Stanford’s Mark Granovetter’s own restatement of his data clarifies that among professionals who found work through a personal contact, 28% heard about it from someone they saw rarely, 17% from someone they saw often, and 56% from someone in between.

Half a century later, a team including Iavor Bojinov at Harvard Business School, Erik Brynjolfsson at Stanford, and Sinan Aral at MIT Sloan tested the theory across 20 million LinkedIn users in Science, and found an inverted U. Moderately weak ties, not the weakest, did the most for job mobility. The person worth cultivating is the classmate two sections over whose name you know.

6. SAY NO TO THE TWELFTH COMMITTEE

Rob Cross, now at Babson, with Reb Rebele and Adam Grant of Wharton, reported in Harvard Business Review that across more than 300 organizations, 20% to 35% of value-adding collaboration came from three to five per cent of people, and that those people burn out.

There is an optimum, and it is lower than most people assume. Marissa Sharif at Wharton, with Cassie Mogilner Holmes and Hal Hershfield at UCLA Anderson, analyzed the time diaries of more than 35,000 Americans for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Wellbeing rises with discretionary time up to about two hours a day, flattens, and then falls away beyond five. Too little produces stress. Too much produces a sense of being unproductive. Almost nobody arrives at business school in danger of the second problem.

7. TRY ON POSSIBLE IDENTITIES FOR A NEW CAREER

Herminia Ibarra of London Business School says we are much more likely to act our way into a more strategic way of thinking than to think our way into strategic action. Her work on provisional selves in Administrative Science Quarterly describes career change as trying on possible identities rather than deducing the right one.

Her three-year study of 39 professionals in transition reveals that the people who know us best are those most likely to hinder rather than help us. Your parents, your old boss, and your closest friend all hold a settled picture of who you are.

8. CHOOSE THE WORK YOU COULD ENJOY ON A RAINY TUESDAY

Sheena Iyengar at Columbia, with Rachael Wells and Barry Schwartz, tracked 548 graduating students through a job search and published their study, “Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Looking for the ‘Best’ Job Undermines Satisfaction,” in Psychological Science. Those who set out to find the best possible job accepted salaries around 20% higher than their peers, and were measurably less satisfied, more anxious, and more regretful about it.

Kaitlin Woolley at Cornell and Ayelet Fishbach at Chicago Booth found that immediate rewards, meaning whether you enjoy the daily work, predict persistence in long-term goals far better than the delayed payoff does. The industry you can stick with for a decade is better predicted by an ordinary Tuesday than by an exit opportunity.

9. TREAT SLEEP AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Christopher Barnes at the University of Washington’s Foster School had business students deliver speeches after a night without sleep. Writing in the Journal of Applied Psychology, he found sleep-deprived speakers were rated significantly less charismatic, and sleep-deprived listeners rated the same speeches lower again. His earlier work links sleep loss to unethical conduct through the erosion of self-control.

You came to business school, among other things, to become more persuasive and compelling. The all-nighter before the pitch takes away precisely the quality you are paying to acquire.

10. ALIGN AND GROW WITH THE PERSON IN YOUR LIFE

This is the one nobody puts on the orientation slide. Jennifer Petriglieri at INSEAD studied 113 couples across 32 countries for Couples That Work, and with Otilia Obodaru examined 50 dual-career couples for Administrative Science Quarterly. When the secure base runs in one direction, with one partner exploring and the other supporting, couples experience identity conflict. When it runs both ways, both partners develop.

An MBA is a textbook one-directional arrangement. One of you gets a cohort, a purpose, and a new city full of introductions. The other gets an apartment and a partner who is never in it. The research does not say this is fatal. It says the couples who thrive hold the deeper conversation about values and boundaries two or three times a year, rather than once, in a crisis, in November.

WHAT YOU ARE REALLY BUYING WITH AN MBA OR MASTERS

Gianpiero Petriglieri, also at INSEAD, argues that business schools have absorbed a function employers used to perform. Writing with Jennifer Petriglieri in the Academy of Management Learning and Education, he calls them identity workspaces, institutions that hold people steady while they work out who they are becoming. Their later study of 55 managers through a one-year MBA found that the fast track and the inner journey were the same journey.

Robert Waldinger directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, now in its ninth decade and covering more than 2,000 people across three generations. In the survey he cites at the start of his TED talk, over 80% of young adults said getting rich was a major life goal, and half said the same about becoming famous. Eighty-five years of Harvard data reveal something else entirely. Good relationships, Waldinger says, keep us happier and healthier. Period.

The salary and the title will appear in an MBA employment report next winter and will be forgotten the year after. The people sitting either side of you in the classroom are the part of this that still pays out in fifty years through lifelong friendship and support.

Prioritize building those bonds.

Matt Symonds is a co-founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions and co-host of the CentreCourt MBA Festival with Poets&Quants. A columnist for Forbes, The Economist, BusinessWeek and the BBC, he has spent nearly three decades working with business schools, deans, faculty and applicants across every continent. For more free advice from Fortuna Admissions in partnership with Poets&Quants, check out these videos and articles. For a candid assessment of your MBA profile and personalized feedback on your next steps, schedule a free consultation.

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.