Welcome to another installment of Which Schools Wednesday! This week we’d like to take a closer look at one applicant’s particularly astute approach to the decision making process. Recent BoB-ranked blogger HairTwirler has done a fantastic job of chronicling her thought process over the past few months. Let’s take a look at what she’s had to say:
By way of introduction, HairTwirler presents her career goals and the schools to which she’s applied in this post. With her sights set on a career in the nonprofit sector, and a list of schools that extends all the way from Southern California to Europe, she certainly went into this process with her hands full.
She first looks to Shakespeare (the great Bard of MBA Admissions) and resolves to follow the idiom “to thine own self be true”:
Knowing what you want, and being able to identify what resources and schools fit your strategy and your style of learning is critical to developing a successful application.
From there, HairTwirler goes on to collect as much information as possible about each of her options. She thoroughly familiarizes herself with each school’s curriculum and compares them against one another:
One of the reasons I became interested in Georgetown in the first place was reading about the Global Integrative. During your second year, when you are supposed to know a bit more, you take a course focused on a country. From what I’ve read… you work on a consulting project for a company doing business in the country you are studying. You then take a one week trip to the country and the visit culminates with a presentation to the local client representatives. [Side note: Yale does a very interesting and worthwhile but field trip/classroom variety international experience.]
In another blog post, she conducts an exhaustive comparison of recruiting trends:
My main focus throughout this process has been who recruits at my chosen schools. Yale and Georgetown are tops for non-profit/ NGO/microfinance “powerhouses.”
And in yet another, directs an inquisitive eye on a logistical quirk at one program, and considers how it might affect her education there.
After paying a deposit of 2800 GBP, the Judge School then undertakes the charge of finding a place at a college for you. Many MBA students are shuffled off into the lesser colleges. As most of the important MBA resources are focused within the Judge School itself this is not really a huge concern but merely an annoyance. Oxford and Cambridge need modern makeovers so badly.
Like a true MBA student, HairTwirler also walks her readers through the process of calculating the ROI of any given program:
Simple ROI calculations take into account forgone salary, tuition costs and prospective salary post-MBA given the income statistics published by business schools. Looking up post-MBA statistics is the easy part. It becomes a bit more like multivariable calculus… if you actually try to figure out what your personal ROI is for a given program.
Lastly, in this post HairTwirler addresses the psychological requirements of the decision making process:
If you’re a type A decision maker, at a certain point you have to tell your parents, significant other, friends, colleagues and everyone else to let well enough alone, cloister yourself for a few days, and make a decision. OR, if you’re the type that actively solicits advice from every one you meet, have a close friend lock you in a room for a few days and emerge with a decision.
Deciding which offer to accept is indeed a highly personalized process and it often requires some intense inward reflection. However, HairTwirler’s thorough, independent and critical analyses provide an excellent model for anyone who is currently grappling with these kinds of questions.
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