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In our “What I Learned at…” series, MBAs discuss the tools and skills their business schools provided as they launched their careers.

Mili Mittal is a former mbaMission consultant and now the CEO and cofounder of mor.sl, a recipe recommendations platform designed to help busy professionals cook. mor.sl was recently featured in TechCrunch. Mili received her MBA and a Certificate in Entrepreneurship from the Haas School of Business at the University of California–Berkeley (UC Berkeley Haas) in 2010. In Part 1 of this four-part series, Mili describes how her Haas classmates turned into friends who supported and guided her when she was starting her own company.

I went to UC Berkeley Haas already knowing that I wanted to start my own business after I graduated. After four years as a human resources and information technology consultant at the Corporate Executive Board Company, where I gained “intrapreneurial” experience building a new product line, and after having also cofounded and launched a dance company, I’d caught the entrepreneurial bug. I thought I was going to business school to round out my skills—to learn finance, accounting—the technical things I would need to build a business. I was wrong.

At Haas, I learned and gained so much more than just academic knowledge (not to undermine those things, however—for example, learning to build a financial model in Professor Sarah C. Tasker’s “Designing Financial Models That Work” course was invaluable). I chose Haas because of its strength in entrepreneurship and social responsibility, because it supported students with crazy “I’m gonna change the world” ideas and because students emerged from that campus and did just that. When I got there, I was energized and excited, not just by everything the school had to offer, but also by the energy and ambition of my peers. At Haas, with only 240 students in my class, these peers quickly turned into friends.

The single most beneficial resource I had on my entrepreneurial path at Haas was the support of these friends. When you’re starting a company at Haas, you don’t feel alone, even though entrepreneurship is generally a very lonely path. Instead, you have a community of professors, friends and mentors who act as your cheerleaders. They work for you from the get-go, both inside and outside the classroom. Professors like John Danner and Kellie McElhaney worked to introduce me to the likes of Whole Foods’ and Wegmans’ executives so that I could gain invaluable industry perspective on my company.  Professor Mario Rosati sent my pitch to Silicon Valley investors for their feedback. Fellow entrepreneurs in my “Entrepreneurship Workshop” class worked tirelessly to offer perspective on my business plan, pitch and product iterations.

Moreover, I found my first teammates at business school—I originally started the path to mor.sl by working on a venture called myChef, which I founded with fellow Haasies. Even our classmates who were going the more traditional route of marketing or finance offered their support—filling out SurveyMonkey questionnaires about their pantries and tastes, testing various iterations of the product and offering their own connections as resources. Based on these individuals’ input and feedback, we realized the initial concept for our venture required too much user input to stay accurate, and quickly pivoted to a new model.

What’s even more awesome? These friends continue to support me to this day, nearly two years after graduation. Those who have gone on to see entrepreneurial success of their own offer their advice and materials for me to learn from—sample term sheets, partner agreements, seed-round pitch decks that worked for them. Those who aren’t entrepreneurs offer their skills, too. For example, my friend who works at a digital marketing agency offered tips on effective Facebook marketing when I needed them. Haasies are my champions—and my company’s champions. They share our success on Facebook, pass the mor.sl URL along to their friends, introduce me to potential partners. And all of them, together, have been my rock, continually encouraging me to push forward even when I’m not optimistic, and championing my small wins. Basically, they’ve got my back.

When you are choosing a business school—whether you’re looking to start your own venture or not—take a close look at who you’ll be sitting next to in class. Make sure they can quickly go from being your peers to your friends, because it’s your friends who will support you on your journey, no matter what your path is.

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.

On our blog and in public presentations, we have tried to persuade candidates to eschew rankings, which fluctuate frequently (and sometimes wildly), and instead pay attention to fit, which is enduring. Now, as the admissions season is on the verge of beginning at top business schools, we recommend that you accelerate your evaluative process.

One way to get beyond rankings is to speak with students. Even if you don’t have direct access to students, reaching out to them in a targeted way can be quite easy, via club Web sites. You should not feel “pushy” when emailing or contacting a student this way, because most students take pride in their school and are open to speaking with candidates. They are a de facto part of the school’s marketing arm. So, if you are interested in a certain school for its marketing program, for example, you can reach out to the individual (or individuals) leading the marketing club to learn more about the program (and the club!). Of course, you should be respectful of each individual’s time and be well prepared for your conversation. If you are conscientious, you will be able to learn more about the academic environment and then have time to find out more about the atmosphere on campus. Networking now should allow you to begin narrowing your search and more effectively focus your limited “free” time over the next few months.

When it comes to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this weekly blog series, Manhattan GMAT’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.

(Part 3 in a series; read Part 1 and Part 2.)

In previous posts, we’ve talked about what Integrated Reasoning (IR) is, when the new test is going to launch and what the questions will look like. We’ve also talked briefly about the scoring and implications for b-school applications.

Probably the single biggest challenge we face with IR is the sheer volume of information we’re given. For some prompts, it doesn’t seem possible that we can even read through all of the information in 2.5 minutes, let alone answer the questions. One major difference between IR and the quant section is that we are given a lot of extraneous information. Part of our task is to figure out what we do need and what we can ignore.

Fully reading and analyzing every last piece of information in all of the prompts is therefore not going to be possible—in fact, we’re going to have to be even more aggressive about reading selectively than we have to be when reading Reading Comprehension (RC) passages. Multi-Source Reasoning (MSR) prompts tend to be the most text heavy; luckily, these include three separate questions, so we have a total of 7.5 minutes (on average) to read the prompt and answer all the questions. Two-Part Analysis prompts that are more like verbal questions tend to be the length of long Critical Reasoning (CR) passages; those that are more like quant questions aren’t all that different, though they do tend to be on the long-and-wordy side, like a math story problem. Both of these types benefit from a complete read through, though, as with RC, you’ll have to recognize which things are just details and skim over those more (you can come back to the details later).

Table Analysis prompts can often be the most intimidating at first glance—a table might include 15 or 20 rows of data! Read the text that describes what’s in the table, but don’t even bother looking at the data itself until after you’ve read the question and know what you need to do. On one of the Table questions, I had a chart with 17 rows of data, but I only needed four of the rows to answer the questions. I was able to literally ignore the rest.

Graphical Interpretation prompts will often include graph types with which you may not be very familiar right now.  Familiarizing yourself with the different types of graphs you might see is important; this will make the Graph questions a lot easier to answer. Again, go straight for the graph description text first. There’s a good chance you’ll need to look at the graph to help yourself understand what the description is saying. I found that I had to do this on all three of my Graph prompts on my first GMATPrep.

Want to try some out? You can download GMATPrep 2.0 at www.mba.com. There are also sample questions available on that same Web site. Have fun!

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.

We at mbaMission try to encourage candidates to get as much “noise” out of the way as possible before schools release their essay questions. We want our candidates to have the freedom to reflect on their experiences, formally and thoroughly brainstorm, choose ideas, prepare outlines and then truly focus on crafting powerful essays. Essentially, we want our candidates to be unfettered as they engage in what is, for many, one of the most significant creative challenges they will ever face.

So, a simple step such as preparing your resume now will help you remain focused in the future. By working on your resume now, a process that can require several rounds of revisions, you can dedicate the required time to do so at a more leisurely pace, before “crunch time” hits. Further, you will lay the foundation for your later brainstorming for your essays, by reminding yourself of your most significant accomplishments.

If you prepare your resume now, you won’t even feel the effects later (except in a good way), and you will definitely thank yourself for having gotten this task out of the way early on.

Note: We recognize that you may achieve additional accomplishments in the next few months. We suggest that you still update your resume now, however, and then revisit and amend your most recent entry one to two weeks before your application deadlines.

When it comes to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this weekly blog series, Manhattan GMAT’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.

(Part 2 in a series; read the Part 1 here.)

Because GMATPrep 2.0 has launched, we now know exactly what an Integrated Reasoning (IR) section is going to contain. First, some terminology: we have question prompts, which are what we have to read to answer a question, and then we have the questions themselves. Some question prompts have just one question, but some question prompts have multiple questions (like Reading Comprehension [RC]).

Overall, the section includes four different kinds of question prompts: Multi-Source Reasoning, Two-Part Analysis, Graphics Interpretation and Table Analysis.

We’ll have one Multi-Source Reasoning prompt per IR section, and three separate questions associated with this prompt. One of the three questions will be a standard, five-option multiple choice question. The other two will each contain three “Either/Or” statements (true or false, yes or no, etc.).

We’ll also have four Two-Part Analysis prompts, each with one question. For each question, we will have to make two selections, not just one, but we’ll be choosing from the same set of answers.

We’ll be given three Graphics Interpretation prompts, each with one question. For each question, we will have to make two selections from a drop-down menu; there will be a separate drop-down menu for each.

Finally, we’ll see two Table Analysis prompts, each with one question. Similar to Multi-Source Reasoning, these questions will also contain three “Either/Or” statements.

These prompts can come in any order, but all Multi-Source Reasoning questions will come in a group (like RC).

We have a total of 30 minutes for this section. I used 29 minutes on this first test; while I do expect to become a bit faster as I practice IR, I’m guessing that I’m still going to need most of the time to complete the section. I think most people will struggle with timing on this new section just as much as we already do on the quant and verbal sections.

Because we have 12 questions, we have an average of 2.5 minutes per question—including the time it takes to read the prompt. It took me anywhere from about 1 minute to a bit over 3 minutes to answer the 12 questions, with most in the 1 minute 45 seconds to 2 minutes 15 seconds range. Only a couple were close to 1 minute—these questions are pretty complex.

Next time, we’ll talk about some high-level strategies for IR, including some key adjustments we have to make compared with standard quant and verbal.