The perfect MBA applicant does not exist. However, a perception of the perfect applicant does—an individual who is scaling greater and greater personal, community, and professional peaks unabated until he/she finally applies to business school. So, those who take time off at any point perceive themselves as disadvantaged. They worry that the admissions committees will see the gap(s) in their professional timeline and dismiss them outright. After all, they probably have numerous more determined individuals they could admit, right?
Time off can be destructive, true. If you spent a year sitting on your couch watching reality TV, you may be in trouble. If you have a strong professional history and spent one month between jobs sitting on your couch watching reality TV, your record should still speak for itself. But even if you do take (or have taken) an extended leave, as long as you are productive during that time and grow personally, you should still be just fine. In fact, an adventure may even add to your story and help you differentiate yourself.
If you spend six months or a year traveling before you start your professional career, you are certainly still eligible for a top MBA program. If you take personal leave to care for a family member, do charity work, or even pursue a personal passion—an art form, for example—as long as you can show purpose and reveal a broad record of competency, an admissions officer should still see your merits.
Admissions officers are—and this may be surprising to some—human beings. They understand that applicants are not robots and that they have interests, passions, and personal lives. If you make good use of your time, they will not condemn you. They just might envy you.
With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.
I want to share a four-step Critical Reasoning (CR) process with you, a process that can be used on any CR problem.
Here is the overall process:
Step 1: Identify the question.
Step 2: Deconstruct the argument.
Step 3: State the goal.
Step 4: Work from wrong to right.
Those steps might sound obvious to some people and very vague to others. I will explain each in more detail, but I want to say first that each step is there for a very important reason, and each step has been split off from the others for a very important reason. You can find the full article on the Manhattan Prep blog, as well as additional articles that illustrate how to use this process with each of the various CR question types. Here are a few additional details for each step:
Step 1: Identify the question. Use the question stem to identify the question. Each question type has certain characteristics; learn them.
Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.
Oh, the difference a day makes. One day, you are wondering whether you will get into any of your target business schools. The next, you get a call from the admissions committee at your first-choice MBA program, and your life changes forever. Suddenly, with an acceptance letter in hand, you become more self-assured and start to contemplate whether you might receive any scholarships. Then, your second-choice school calls and offers you $10K. You now find yourself facing a tough choice: accept the offer from the second-choice school that comes with a scholarship, or accept the offer from the first-choice program, even though it does not come with any funds.
In the short term, you do not need to make this choice. With your acceptance letters in hand, you can diplomatically leverage the financial aid offer you received from your second-choice school to influence your first-choice school’s decision to also offer you some form of funding. Once you have been accepted, your first-choice school might not be prepared to let you go and could find a way to offer you some financial assistance. Of course, diplomacy is key. If you make your request in too forceful a manner, you will only alienate the financial aid office, which may then decide to not offer additional resources to encourage you to choose the other school.
So tread carefully, but with proper tact—you will not lose anything by asking for more.
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With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.
In Part 1of this article, we talked about the five-step process to answer Sentence Correction problems, and in Part 2, we discussed some drills to build the needed skills. Make sure to read both of those before continuing with this third article in the series.
Drill Number 3: Find a Starting Point
Once again, open up your Official Guide and look at some problems you have done before. This time, do not read the original sentence. Instead, cover it up.
Compare the answers, and try to articulate all the things that the problem is testing. Note that you can tell what is being tested even if you cannot tell how to answer. For example, you might see a verb switching back and forth between singular and plural. If the subject is not underlined, then you have no idea which verb form is required, because you literally have not even seen the subject. You do, though, know that subject-verb agreement is at issue.
Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.
This week, we consider another option for MBA candidates looking to broaden their business school choices: European business schools.
Although many applicants who are competing for places at the top U.S. business schools are well aware of the strengths of the MBA programs at INSEAD and London Business School, even more options are available beyond these two, including IESE, ESADE, Oxford (Said), and Cambridge (Judge). These four schools in particular have been aggressively playing “catch-up” with their better-known brethren by raising funds and dedicating them to scholarships and to enhancing their global brands. Those who know their business schools are also aware that IMD offers a boutique MBA program with remarkable international diversity, very highly regarded academics, and a stellar reputation with international employers.
So, numerous options are available, and each can be explored on its own academic merit, but is earning your MBA in Europe, in itself, a good choice for you? For many, the key issue in determining this is where they would like to be after completing their education. If you are seeking to work in Europe, then clearly, these schools offer an advantage over all but the top five or six schools in the United States—Harvard Business School, for example, can probably open as many doors in Europe as INSEAD can. However, if you are seeking to work in the States, then the European schools will not provide the pipeline of opportunities that a top-ranked American school could provide, particularly for those who hope to work in a niche industry or with a company that is not a well-known international brand.
A first-of-its-kind, on-demand MBA application experience that delivers a personalized curriculum for you and leverages interactive tools to guide you through the entire MBA application process.
With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, 
