Choosing the right business school
It’s that time of year when all you would-be MBAs receive your admissions decisions. Many of you have gotten in to multiple schools and have tough decisions to make. You’re about to invest two years of your life and a large chunk of cash in an MBA program and you want to make the most of it. So how do you begin to sort through the staggering volume of information and statistics to make the right decision?
Go visit. Making a decision without visiting the school is like agreeing to marry someone based on their Match.com profile. You need to know what you’re getting in to! Visiting the school will help you get a sense of the social atmosphere. But to do this, you have to make sure to step off the beaten path. Duck out of the standard admissions tour and strike up a conversation with real students. See if you can get invited to happy hour with them. Get them drunk and ask them what they really think about the school, what they don’t like, where they hang out, how they made friends, etc. Is the atmosphere collaborative or hyper-competitive? Is it a commuter school or do people go out together on the weekends? Your happiness for two years will depend a lot on the people you spend your time with and the environment you’re in.
Don’t depend on rankings alone. I don’t deny that they are important—my life would be a lot different if I’d gone to my hometown university instead of striking out to a top-ranked east coast school. But once you get inside the top 20 schools, stop and pay no more attention to rankings. Statistics rarely show the whole picture, and b-schools are often ranked on narrow criteria that don’t capture the true pros and cons of each school. The only “best” you should be concerned about is what is best for you.
Diversity is important. It’s important if you are a minority, because seeing successful people that look like you encourages your success. If you’re not a minority it’s still important, because diversity contributes to the business goals of an organization: being responsive to an increasingly diverse world of customers, improving relations with the surrounding community, increasing the organization's ability to cope with change, and expanding the creativity of the organization. In short, diversity makes organizations more successful because people learn new things from one another. This is especially important in business school because the most important learning doesn’t always come from your professors. It comes from your classmates who bring with them a wide range of experience and knowledge.
Reputation is important. Not just overall reputation, but how a school is viewed by specific industries. For example, Chicago is known for consulting and NYU is known for banking. Companies recruit accordingly, so if there is an industry you want to focus on then you should go to a school that’s strong in that area. Talk to students at the schools you’re considering to get an idea of what industries the school is known for.
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a business school, and I’ve listed the ones I think are most important. But there is one last factor to consider above all else: the gut factor. If you visit a school and your gut tells you it’s the right place for you, it probably is. And if it tells you to run screaming in the opposite direction, then that’s what you should do. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what the research, the rankings or the admissions websites say. Only you can know what’s best for you.
