Business School Essays – Not Easy

Why is it so hard to do B-School apps? I am having immense trouble doing mine – working on my Columbia essays at the moment. I think its because I am not used to writing about myself.

Any sage bits of wisdom from those who have done it before?

One more business school motivator

So I wrote earlier about why I want to go to business school here. Having a conversation with a friend over the weekend (she claims to be a reader – you know who you are), I came up with another one, which might actually be the primary motivator.

6) Time to Reflect

I figure, in about 4 years of consulting, I must have learned something. I find myself pontificating to new consultants about how to make their job easier all the time, and I started this blog in an effort to collect my thoughts. However, I think two years away, in an academic environment will allow me to synthesise my learnings, and work out how far (or not) I have come. I know some would say you only learn to BS people in the fast talking world of strategy consulting, but I am convinced there is something else there – I just haven't had the opportunity to understand it yet.

So there you go – my sixth and potentially most important reason for subjecting myself to the horrors of the B-School app process (Still “studying” for the GMAT retake, plan to start Columbia essays this weekend).

So why Business School?

I think I have boiled it down to five reasons – in no particular order.

1) A fun break. Psychologically, I am not the sort to pick up sticks for 6 months or a year and bum around the world (Damn my 1^st generation immigrant origins!). Unfortunately, I think it’s the kind of break I need after slogging away at the corporate grindstone for nearly 4 years. Business school offers the opportunity to have that time off, but spend in a way that keeps me from feeling guilty about wasting time. From all reports, it is seriously awesome fun with a little learning thrown in. Perfect.

2) Meet new and interesting people. Ever since uni finished, I have had a progressively more difficult time meeting new people. Apart from the fact that I am single (and have no desire to remain that way for ever), I genuinely enjoy meeting people of diverse backgrounds and learning about them. I don’t get to do it enough these days, and business school seems like a good opportunity to do so.

3) Career progression at current firm. In a lot of consulting firms, an MBA is seen as a quasi-mandatory rung on the ladder to promotion. Whilst I have spent much time wondering if I will stick with my current firm, lately I really felt strong ties to it. If I do decide to stay here for several years longer, an MBA will definitely prove useful.

4) Get a professional business qualification. Throughout my time consulting, whilst I have picked up things quickly, I have always felt bedeviled by a lack of a professional business qualification. I have had to work fairly hard to catch up on things that come easily to a commerce or business grad, so I figure its time to get a degree to give myself that solid bit of knowledge.

5) Open up future career opportunities. I also need to think about my long term future in business. Over the last couple of years I have come to the realization that eventually I want to end up as a CEO of a decent size corporation. Industry doesn’t matter as much – although something in biotech or consumer goods would be awesome. For that, I think an MBA will prove mighty useful, both in knowledge and network terms.

So that’s what I have so far. Individually they are not enough, but together I think provide a compelling value proposition. I may have some buried in my brain somewhere so will update then. 

Hitting the Books

As previously mentioned, I hope to get into business school for entry in 2010. This means applications for the first round end about November. Business school entry consists of three major components; the GMAT, application essays and references. I will be covering each of these components in some detail as I go through them. As always, helpful comments from veterans are useful. I hope to be an expert in these things as I go through – so if you have any questions post them as well.

The GMAT is a computer based, adaptive multiple choice exam that tests both math and English skills. I started with English on the weekend, and surprisingly found I could handle most of it. It appears years of reading too many books has paid off. The English part is in three sections; Reading Comprehension (where you have to understand the meaning of a passage), Critical Analysis (where you have to pick the sentence that most agrees with a passage), and Sentence Correction (where you have to correct a poorly written sentence). That last one is quite hard as the sentences they give you often sound pretty close to being correct. I can do them, but only if I read them out aloud as somehow I can tell when a sentence is correct by how it sounds. Ah well, I guess I will have to actually learn the rules.

Anyway, I had better stop writing now as I have a 6am (erk!) flight tomorrow for my new project – a stakeholder engagement strategy. I will post later on my GMAT progress.