How do you find the right school for you? I have several friends who are applying or considering applying, and here are questions I recommend pondering as you considering going to school.
- What is important to me about the school and location?
- How do I fit in with the culture?
- Is this what I want to do, and what do I want to do afterward?
- Are there other programs outside of a general MBA, like LGO or other dual degree program, or an optional track focused program or the Chemical Engineering Department’s Practice School, that better meet my interests? (I’ve met people in ChemE and Sloan that would have been a good fit for LGO)
- What kind of people are attracted to this program, and do I want to go to school with them? Are they like me? How are they different?
- What type of companies, industries, and locations of companies recruit at this school?
My biggest piece of advice to answer some of these questions is to visit schools. Unfortunately, visiting schools is often expensive and takes a lot of time, and possibly vacation from work.
I highly recommend visiting your top potential few schools. But, since it is expensive and time consuming to visit many schools, I also recommend visiting schools nearby your current location, even if you might not be interested in them. This helps you learn more about what you want and may reinforce or shift your thoughts. I didn’t take advantage of this enough - there were two good schools nearby and two others within a short drive that I should have visited.
Visiting a class or spending a day with a student is a great way to learn about the culture and student life. During a class visit at a school-which-shall-remain-unnamed, my host student spent her time in class with her laptop up, working on something for the next class and proceeded to tell me that this professor wasn’t very good, to justify why no one was paying attention! In this experience, I learned that this school was not worth me leaving my job, and it reinforced how important it is for me to be respectful during my classes (paying attention, not entering/exiting the room, not using cell phone/texting, not having my laptop up). It is disruptive for other students, hurts the brand image of the school for current and prospective students, and disrespectful to professors, lecturers, and guest speakers.
Outside of visiting schools, I relied heavily on stories from alumni friends and the internet because I couldn’t easily travel much with a small baby. This is one of the reasons I am blogging. Good websites and blogs are very important to creating a good image for a program. Bad websites turn students off and disorganization or poor communication translates to the image of a poor experience as a student. I also found it frustrating when schools advertised blogs that hadn’t been updated in months or years! I particularly like the feeds set up for Sloan and LGO, where you can readily read the latest student blogs, without clicking through a dozen blogs that aren’t used. If a school can’t do a good job of communicating when they are trying to sell the product, how will they do after I’m already a student!
In conclusion, listen to your own thoughts and find the school that is right for you. All the schools with top rankings will attract great students with more diversity in experiences than practically any other environment, and have an outstanding program and faculty to teach you. If you’re a prospective student, I do hope you look at LGO, MIT, and Sloan, and if it is a good fit for you like it is for me, I hope to see you here. If it isn’t, I hope you find what you’re looking for.
Search inside yourself and decide what is right for you.
