There are tons of MBA guides floating around on the internet and in book stores that claim to explain the business school admissions process. However, only very few give you a true sense of how the admissions process works and what admissions officers are really looking for. I very much believe that to understand the process inside out, you really need to understand the mission and purpose of business schools. Most guides that you find out don’t really try and address the underlying factors that drive how admissions committees make decisions about their students.
But MBA guides that do explain and walk you through the theory as to why business schools accept students in the patterns that they do can provide you with an underlying framework and overall strategy that will be more important than any individual essay you write or any individual test score you have. If you understand the underlying pain point of business school admissions committees, then you can dramatically increase your chances of getting into a top school by actively addressing that pain point. A good MBA guide will position the adcom as a customer, and explain to you how you can market yourself so you “sell” yourself to that customer, the school.
Without a focused MBA guide that can lay out for you the business model that drives business schools, you can spend time writing good essays and getting good recommendations, but if your core message and the core positioning of your application is off, and you don’t put together a holistic self-reinforcing application that markets you as a complete package, no matter how strong your individual assets, you’ll fail to really address the “needs” of the admissions committees. For example, business schools and well, schools in general, are in the business of building a reputation. The better their reputation, the higher quality professors they can attract, the more funding they can get, the better employers they can attract for their business students, the better hospitals they can place their med students, and so on and so forth. But to build a great reputation, you need to have famous, successful alumni. For business schools, that means a lot of high profile alums in high places in business and government. And to produce alums who can hopefully become famous in the future, you need to accept students who have the chance to become famous alums. Which, brings us back to our topic. A good MBA guide basically will tell you how you can create an image of yourself, projected out 20-30 years in the future, as a successful high profile business person. These are the students that have the potential to create great brand equity for their schools. People like Meg Whitman (CEO of eBay), Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan), A. G. Lafley (former CEO of P&G) are what make HBS so famous. So, year after year, HBS likes to accept students who have a chance to become the next celebrity business person. If you don’t orient your application to achieve this goal of convincing admissions committees that you can be the next Mike Bloomberg (Founder of Bloomberg and Mayor of New York City), then why would they waste a spot in the class on you? The best MBA guide for admissions will explain exactly how to do that.