One strange thing about this email is that the reader has detailed questions for me, but he seems to not have done a lot of the standard up-front “Why MBA?” thinking that one would have normally done by now. As a result, he’s asked me some very basic questions around selection of schools and majors that I wasn’t expecting to have posed to me. Hopefully, my answers and feedback will help him get on point for where he should be.
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MK wrote:
Hey Marquis,
I have a regular reader of your blog. Honestly each and every story is very motivating; moreover the guidance which you provided to the candidates is just WWAAAOOO!! Hats off to you man. You are doing a great job. It’s finally time for me to ask my piece of career guidance as I am completely confused right now.
My Profile
My questions:
It will be a great help from your side to help in having clear view of my career goals and b-schools.
Please guide.
Thanks and Regards,
MK
I worked as a module lead and managed a team of 5 for an American Bank. I also worked as a functional analyst for Canada based customer which is into loyalty solutions (Team size 20).
Given my career objectives which specialisation I should look for? General Management, Strategy, or Consulting? Please provide a few good names in the above recommended area of specialisation for my research on the B-School.
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My response:
MK,
Thanks for checking out my blog and coming to me with your question. It sounds like you have read through some of my past entries and have a sense for my knack for helping folks with issues like yours.
OK, let’s get to your questions:
- What you’ve provided in terms of your objective for getting the MBA doesn’t really give much to work from to determine the right concentration to pursue in your MBA program. Every MBA program’s core curriculum will provide the fundamentals that you’d need to take on challenging roles in an organization and drive a company’s strategy forward. Between now and when you actually apply, you’ll need to put a lot more thought into what you want to get out of the MBA and what you’d plan to do once you’ve got it in hand.
Absent much detail about why you want the MBA and what you plan to do career-wise, I’d guess that choosing General Management or Strategy could offer a broad enough foundation for you to apply your skills to a range of industries or functional areas later in your career. I’d recommend that you dig deep and think harder about which specific business topics would align with your true post-MBA career aspirations. Without that, it’ll be tough for you to build a strong story for use in your MBA applications.Because you’ve been pretty high-level in describing what you’re seeking academically, it isn’t easy for me to recommend the right set of schools for you to consider. If I think through this under the assumption that you’d go with a General Management or Strategy concentration, then that makes it a little easier because that’s where I was focusing when I was going through my own MBA application process. I only considered top-20 MBA programs and applied to Stanford, HBS, Kellogg, Tuck, Fuqua, and Darden because of their strengths in General Management and track record for placing people in Management Consulting gigs. Of course, there are other schools in the top-20 that were strong in my desired areas of focus, but I chose those 6 programs because they seemed to be the best fits for me.
I would recommend that you do some detailed research on each program and aim for the ones that have the best combination of fit to your personality, fit to what you’re seeking academically, and good history of career placements in your desired post-MBA industries.
- I don’t know if there’s such a thing as being “too old” to apply to an MBA program. While the average ages of the student populations in different MBA programs may be in the upper 20s, but it won’t necessarily put you out of contention for acceptance letters. In fact, one of my Stanford GSB classmates turned 40 during our first year and one of my friends was just admitted to Wharton at the age of 32. While most people don’t apply to full-time MBA programs in their early 30s for a number of reasons, you should know that being in your early 30s won’t eliminate your chances of getting in.
My recommendations for programs to focus on wouldn’t change based on your age. For the program that sees you as the right fit for its class, your age won’t be a big problem in the application process. Admissions offices will look at your application as an overall profile and age is only a single part of that. For this reason, fit is such an important part of the overall MBA admissions process and it is up to you to research the different programs to determine which ones are the best for you. No one else can do that for you. - If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t drop the idea of pursuing a full-time MBA simply because you’re more experienced than the average applicant. I think the notion of considering an Executive graduate business program is a good one though.
The GSB classmate of mine who turned 40 during our first year did just that. He applied to full-time MBA programs and executive business education programs and ended up gaining admission to both the full-time MBA program AND the Sloan program at Stanford. Then, he just chose which one was the best fit for his desired academic experience.As for which executive programs have full-time programs, you’ll have to research that yourself. I know that the Sloan program at Stanford GSB and MIT have full-time structures, but I don’t keep up with the other executive business education programs. To be blunt, this is something that you should easily be able to figure out by doing Google searches, so it isn’t the sort of question that you should be asking someone like me.
When asking for help or advice, you NEED to make sure that you’ve exhausted all of the research options available to you. Otherwise, you will leave the people that you ask for help wondering whether you are being thoughtful about their time. The last thing you want is to have someone like me (with a lot of knowledge to share) thinking that you don’t care enough about your own educational and career path to do the bare minimum level of prior research before asking for help.
- Based on what you’ve put in your email, I think the biggest areas that you can develop over the next 2-3 years until you apply to school are:
- Work experience — Push to move upward in your pre-MBA career and take on role that will expose you to leadership opportunities that you can put into your MBA essays
- Extracurricular activities — You current set of activities is decent, but not distinctive; You’re going to need some activities where you take on leadership roles and do more than simply serve as a member in order to distinguish yourself from the pack of applicants
- GMAT — A 700 GMAT is good, but you come from a demographic where a 700 isn’t truly distinctive; If you are willing to retake the GMAT, it could be a good play for you; Something in the 740-760 range would be incredibly additive to your MBA application profile
That’s about all I’ve got on your questions. I hope you’ve found my words above helpful. You’ve got a couple of years left until you apply, so I think you’ve got a good chance at putting together a good set of applications one day.
Take care and good luck with your future MBA applications.
Marquis
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