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When candidates who have already taken the GMAT once ask us whether they should take the test again, we always reply with this key question: “Do you think you can do better?” If the individual does indeed believe that they can improve, the next question we inevitably get is “What do business schools think of multiple scores?”

Fortunately, most MBA admissions committees do not frown on candidates taking the GMAT more than once. Many applicants feel that they must be “perfect” the first time and that any subsequent test they take—particularly if they receive a lower score on it—might be damaging to their candidacy. This is not the case.

Accepting a candidate’s highest GMAT scores is actually in an MBA program’s best interest, because doing so can help raise the school’s GMAT average, which is then reported to rankings bodies such as Bloomberg Businessweek and U.S. News & World Report and could positively affect the school’s position in these surveys. So, do not be afraid to take the test two or even three times. It can only help.

Now, if you took the GMAT and feel like you finally “nailed” the exam but later learn that your score on the Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA), the essay portion, is low, should you panic?

In short, the answer is no. Although we have always encouraged business school candidates to do the best they can on the AWA, the truth is that we have never been told by an admissions officer—nor, as far as we know, has a candidate ever been told in a feedback session—that the AWA score is a factor in a school’s decisions. Generally, the AWA is not used to evaluate candidates but to detect fraud.

If, hypothetically, you had tremendous difficulty expressing yourself via the AWA essays but wrote like a Pulitzer Prize winner in your application essays, the school would get suspicious and begin to compare the two. Not to worry—the schools are not punitive and are not acting as fraud squads. Your AWA essays are expected to be unpolished, so no one will seek out your file if you did your best in both areas. However, if an enormous discrepancy arises between the two, the AWA serves a purpose.

So, if you did well on the GMAT and have a low AWA score, that is unfortunate, but it will not be the difference in a school’s decision about your candidacy. Rest easy—as long as you truly did write both!

During the COVID-19 quarantine days, career professionals wrote a lot of articles about using one’s available time to build up and learn new business skills, and many people did just that. But this is a valuable activity to consider anytime, not just during a global pandemic. 

So, where should you start? Although completing an internship is a great way to develop skills and gain exposure to new ideas, you can also expand your knowledge through online courses. 

Check out the low-cost—or in some cases, free—opportunities available through the following online learning platforms: 

• Coursera
• Class Central
• LinkedIn Learning
• Udemy
• General Assembly 
• Google Analytics Academy 
• AWS Training and Certification

Other platforms offer certifications that might be even more relevant for your industry or function but might require more of a commitment of time and money. Additionally, many universities offer access to their online courses, such as UCLA Extension.

To find the right course or program for you, reflect on your goals and do your research, then consider these criteria: 

Your objective

Why are you interested in enrolling? What do you want to learn? What skills do your target companies seek? Do you need a certificate of completion? Do you want to take one course or multiple courses? 

Industry or functional standards

Ask current and former colleagues, friends, mentors, and others for recommendations. Look at the LinkedIn profile of people in your target role to see what types of certificates and/or coursework they completed. 

Quality of content

What do the course reviews and ratings say? Who is the instructor, and what is their level of expertise? What are the learning outcomes? 

Logistics

Will you need to purchase any materials? What is the price of the course? What is the class size? What is the format of the course: asynchronistic or synchronistic? What is the duration of the class/required commitment (i.e., number of hours)? 

Finally, once you select and enroll in an online course, maximize your learning opportunity by approaching it in the following way:

• Treat it like a “real” course. Show up! Have the discipline and dedication to listen to classes and complete your homework. 
• Hold yourself accountable. Set goals at the beginning of the semester, and check in with yourself weekly. Allot sufficient time to complete the required work. 
• Create a regular study space, stay organized, and avoid distractions. 
• Figure out how you learn best, and actively participate. 
• When completed, add the course/certification to your resume and LinkedIn profile. 

What is the best way to showcase your accomplishments or mitigate your weaknesses? Start getting answers to all your questions by taking advantage of a free 30-minute consultation with an expert from mbaMission’s team of consultants.

Your MBA application essays give you the chance to distinguish yourself from the multitude of other business school applicants who also want a spot in your target program’s next incoming class. The essays allow you to show the admissions committee who you are. So, drawing on our experience of having read tens of thousands of MBA application essays, we want to help you avoid making any of these five common MBA essay mistakes.

1. Writing about Someone Else

Sometimes, applicants have difficulty knowing how to start their essays—particularly the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s “What matters most to you, and why?” and Harvard Business School’s “What more would you like us to know?” essays. Generally, we want to give our reader context for our stories, so candidates often begin by discussing their family history. Although that strategy can sometimes be effective, the key is to avoid having too much of your essay focused on someone else. If you want to give the admissions committee some background as to where your values come from, make sure that you keep the discussion of other people to a minimum and that you transition quickly back to yourself. You should always play the lead role in your application essays.

2. Starting with the Conclusion

At the beginning of your essay, always ensure that you truly start there—at the beginning—without rushing ahead to reveal the end of your story. So, when the Yale School of Management (SOM), for example, asks about the biggest commitment you have made in your life, you should not write something like “My biggest commitment was to my brother, whom I encouraged to return to college and helped get his first job, where he was just promoted.” You would give away the whole story, including the outcome, in your very first sentence! Nothing would be left to hold the reader’s attention for the rest of the essay. Instead, make sure that the opener for your essay simply opens. Consider this much more effective alternative: “When my brother dropped out of college, I knew we had only a short window of time in which to get him back on track.” This kind of opener makes the reader want to find out what happened next; they will feel compelled to continue reading.

3. Telling Rather than Showing

In the first sample opening sentence we offered in the previous tip, not only does the writer immediately reveal the outcome of their story but they are also “telling” what they did, rather than “showing” their actions in the form of a narrative. If you provide the admissions reader with the details of your story in such a way that you lead them to reach the conclusion themselves, you do something much more important—you reveal your actions, your decision-making capability, and your authenticity! By directly telling the reader the conclusion and discussing it at length without context, you risk sounding arrogant, but showing the reader creates an engaging and effective essay. For more examples of how to do this, read this helpful blog post.

4. Pandering to the Admissions Committee

After providing what a school has asked for in its essay prompt, applicants often feel the urge to add some measure of flattery to their essay or to tie their answer directly to the school in some way. For example, in the aforementioned Yale SOM essay prompt, the school asks applicants to discuss their biggest commitment, but it does not ask them to explain how that commitment relates to Yale. Yet a candidate might feel compelled to end their essay by writing, “Like I committed to my brother, I will commit to my brilliant and talented classmates at Yale, where together, we will benefit from the school’s unparalleled curriculum.” The admissions officers do not need to be convinced of the caliber of their MBA program, and you certainly do not want them to feel you are fawning or just plain overdoing it. Trust in the strength of your candidacy, rather than pleading or relying on compliments. Of course, if an MBA program does ask some version of “Why our school?,” you will need to do your research and provide that information, but refrain from addressing the topic otherwise. For more on this topic, check out this blog post.

5. Not Answering the Question

This tip might sound obvious, but experience has shown us that it needs to be said: always answer the question the school is asking. Many applicants start out by doing so but then keep tweaking their essay and getting input from others until they end up somewhere completely different. Some candidates will even cut and paste an essay from another school, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole to save themselves the time and effort necessary to create a whole new essay—but this strategy does not work. When you believe you are truly done writing your essay, step back and read the school’s question again and take a moment to reflect. Did you tell the admissions committee what you wanted to say, or did you give them the information they asked for in the essay prompt? Make sure you have done the latter.

If you would like to discuss your application essays and school selection in more detail with an expert MBA admissions consultant, sign up today for a free 30-minute consultation!

In your MBA application essays, you must ensure that the tone you use allows the admissions committee to readily recognize your certainty and self-confidence. Being clear and direct about who you are and how you envision your future is vital. Consider these example statements:

Weak: “I now have adequate work experience and hope to pursue an MBA.”

Strong: “Through my work experience, I have gained both breadth and depth, providing me with a solid, practical foundation for pursuing my MBA.”

——

Weak: “I now want to pursue an MBA.”

Strong: “I am certain that now is the ideal time for me to pursue my MBA.”

——

Weak: “I have good quantitative skills and will succeed academically.”

Strong: “I have already mastered the quantitative skills necessary to thrive in my MBA studies.”

——

Weak: “With my MBA, I hope to establish myself as a leader.”

Strong: “I am certain that with my MBA, I will propel myself to the next levels of leadership.”

The key in all these examples is the use of language that clearly projects self-confidence. Instead of “hope,” use “will”; rather than saying you have “good” skills, show “mastery.” Although you should avoid sounding arrogant, of course, by being assertive and direct, you will inspire confidence in your reader and make a more positive impression.

Your target MBA programs certainly want to know that you identify with them. However, this does not need to be a running theme throughout your essays or application. Unless a business school explicitly requests this kind of information—for example, by asking what you are most passionate about and how that passion will positively affect the school—we generally recommend that candidates only discuss their connection with their target MBA program via their personal statements (“What are your short- and long-term goals, and how will [our school] allow you to achieve them?”).

For example, in response to a school’s question about leadership or putting knowledge into action, you would not need to discuss how the school will help you further develop your leadership skills or how you will continue to be an active learner when you are a member of the next incoming class, even though these topics reflect core values that each school embraces. Although we cannot assert this as an absolute, we find that in most cases, such statements come across as insincere or fawning—the very opposite of the effect you want.

Stanford, Stanford, Stanford. 

Stanford seems to be the only name on anyone’s mind when the topic turns to entrepreneurship. Sure, the school has a long-standing culture of entrepreneurship, dozens of courses on innovation, its “Startup Garage” class and Venture Studio, and a stacked roster of famed practitioners as professors! But guess what? A lot of other top MBA programs also focus on entrepreneurship and innovation, and do so with great results.

Some 85% of MBA students say they want to be entrepreneurs. Of course, entrepreneurship has many flavors, from creating that tech company of the future to founding a decidedly low-tech company, to buying an established business, but no matter which route you are considering, business schools are ready to help you get started.

The way each MBA program provides future entrepreneurs with the tools they need can be quite different, though. Entrepreneurship can be studied in a host of ways, including in the classroom, on campus, and in the broader community.

Some places start with coursework, seeing it as the “foundation” of entrepreneurship. Harvard Business School, for example, begins with the core course “The Entrepreneurial Manager” and continues with some hugely popular electives, such as “Entrepreneurial Finance.” At Harvard, the curriculum will drive a lot of your study of start-ups.

Other schools systematize this process even more by offering majors or concentrations focused specifically on building new businesses. This generally includes a series of courses, combined with an internship at a local start-up, that tightly focuses on entrepreneurship. For example, at Duke Fuqua, you can pursue an Entrepreneurship & Innovation concentration, allowing you to do a deeper dive in the classroom.

On campuses where every other person seems to be walking around with a business plan in their pocket, the MBA program works to integrate its students with the broader university community. Some schools have programs specifically designed to get math majors in the same room as engineering PhDs and business students. Stanford, for instance, offers its Lean LaunchPad program, which brings together students from every part of the university. Its results have been almost legendary, producing such well-known ventures as DoorDash and Impact Food.

Some business schools accomplish the same thing through campus-wide business plan competitions, in which student teams compete for seed funding to get their company going. One of the earliest and most well-known is the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition at MIT Sloan, which awards $100,000 to a range of start-ups. Past winners include Akamai Technologies and HubSpot.

One campus is not always enough to provide the entrepreneurship curriculum that students demand. For example, in addition to Wharton’s Philadelphia campus, where its entrepreneurship mother ship Tangen Hall is located, the program has a San Francisco campus committed to producing the next Silicon Valley success. Classroom teaching is still front and center, however, and being in San Francisco gives Wharton the ability to find professors and lecturers who have their own entrepreneurial roots in the region. Students get out of the classroom by engaging with founders and participating in local events. Beyond this, approximately one-third of the program’s students do an internship at a San Francisco–based start-up or a growing company in Silicon Valley.

As for in-semester internships, the leader in this space is Columbia Business School. Columbia gives its students Fridays off to allow them to get out of the classroom and into the local economy. The companies involved frequently include start-ups, particularly those in Silicon Alley, New York’s smaller, but growing, version of Silicon Valley.

Chicago Booth achieves the same effect of students being part of a start-up but follows a different formula. Booth students can spend the summer before they begin their studies finding out what being an entrepreneur is like. The school’s Startup Summer is a seven-week program in which Booth first years can intern at a start-up in any one of ten countries or eight U.S. cities (not just Chicago). Participants even receive a stipend. And all this before classes even start!

Chicago also has some unique things happening with respect to the other flavors of entrepreneurship, such as the Booth-Kellogg Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Conference. Although many people think about entrepreneurship as some tech business being built out of someone’s garage, another way to do a start-up is by buying a venture that already exists. Following this well-trodden path, a would-be entrepreneur purchases an already established business with an eye toward making it run better, cheaper, or faster. With their unique joint conference, Booth and Kellogg bring students, entrepreneurs, funders, and others in the entrepreneurship space together to explore possible opportunities to buy a business rather than found one from scratch. As part of this process, students learn how to create their own “search fund”—a special financial vehicle used just to buy companies—and even find funders. 

For some industries, such as investment banking and consulting, attending a top-tier business school is critical to getting the job you want, but entrepreneurship is somewhat of a different animal. Great ideas have turned into big companies on practically every business school campus. With this in mind, I want to call out a couple of other schools.

For their capstone projects, second-year students at UCLA Anderson can build their own business via the Business Creation Project pathway. When most people think about entrepreneurship in California, Silicon Valley comes to mind, but if they look 400 miles south, they will realize that Los Angeles has become quite the entrepreneurial hub, as well.

Talking about entrepreneurial cities, one of the most significant that frequently flies under the radar is Pittsburgh. Meta, Amazon, Duolingo, and other tech giants have a presence in Pittsburgh, anchoring a start-up universe that includes Carnegie Mellon Tepper. Pittsburgh is a city teaming with entrepreneurial life, and Tepper helps entrepreneurs plug right into that ecosystem.

Voted number one for entrepreneurship year after year by U.S. News & World Report is the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. Though small and somewhat removed from a big city, it nevertheless has transformed into a true entrepreneurial power. It has built a comprehensive pathway for taking a business from seed to IPO. Babson lives and breathes entrepreneurship and is fully integrated into the entrepreneurial world of the Northeast.

Go across the country, and you get to Boise State University, which has very deliberately tried to instill entrepreneurship into every element of its DNA. Driving this thinking is that Boise is now the new Boulder, which was once the new Seattle, which was once the new San Francisco. As each city became too expensive, tech remained one step ahead and has now landed in Idaho—not a bad place to be if you love the outdoors, mountains, and skiing.

Business students want to learn entrepreneurship, and business schools are ready to teach it—in the classroom, on campus, and in the community, and frequently with great success. Billions of dollars of value are created each year, as ideas go from PowerPoint slides to start-ups to mature companies, catalyzed by the learnings each MBA gains. The nice thing is that you can elect to follow this pathway at any number of business schools, across the country and around the world. 

For aspiring entrepreneurs, now might be the time to start diving deeply into this topic. Become the entrepreneur you want to be at a business school that fits you best.

If you wonder which schools you would be competitive at or have questions about your application essays, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with an mbaMission consultant.