OK so you accepted your partial fellowship offer and lined up your student loans. Think you’re on easy street with financing your MBA education? Make sure you’re thinking like a business professional before you dive in.
Cornell’s early admission decisions for their one-year MBA will be released in a few days, so even if you did not apply to this program, it’s essentially the starting gun for this year’s results. Since over the next several weeks and months applicants the world over will be getting good and bad news from their target schools, it’s a great time to prepare yourself to receive the responses. Will you be getting a “yes” from your top choice?
Getting graded. It’s been a necessary evil in everyone’s life since we were all old enough to hold a crayon. At every stage, we either cut the mustard or we don’t and then progress to the next level of grading. For those applying to graduate school, you may have thought those college grades were all but forgotten, but now find yourself having to face them once again. And guess what? The grading doesn’t stop with the application process, because very soon you’ll be back in the classroom. This begs the question…do grades really matter?
So many applicants these days look alike on paper in terms of experience and education, test scores and outside involvement that even highly qualified candidates get lost in the shuffle. We all think we’re pretty unique until we find out that the next guy also volunteered at a similar NGO, or was promoted to VP before his colleagues. Particularly if you come from a feeder industry such as banking, finance or technology/engineering, it gets harder every year to stand out.
If you are an international applicant, you must have more than just a good GMAT score to differentiate yourself. If you are an American applicant, you need to do whatever you can to press out a decent GMAT score in order to be competitive.