Step 1: Plan for Your MBA Career

This first step in getting prepared for a competitive admissions interview is having a solid understanding of yourself - your aspirations, your successes and failures, your strengths and areas of development, and ultimately your career goals. This type of self-reflection takes time and provides the basis for what makes you a competitive applicant in your interview. Without this deep understanding of yourself and where you are headed, you'll have a difficult time differentiating yourself from the thousands of others applying to your target schools.

However, this preparation will serve you well even beyond the interview. Admissions officers will be looking to see that you have a career focus. And this is important because at strong MBA programs the recruiting process starts within the first three months of the beginning of school. Knowing what you want to do career-wise has a direct impact on your ability to begin preparing for recruiting once you do start your MBA program.

Reflect on Your Pre-MBA Career

To understand where you're going in your career, you need to have a good sense of where you've been. As you reflect on what you've done so far, there are major themes you'll identify in your career in terms of accomplishments, what motivates you, and why business school seems to be the right choice at this time. You will also want to begin thinking about what significant accomplishments and key skills from your past experience could transfer well to your MBA career.

Complete Your Pre-MBA Career Inventory to begin identifying the high points and defining moments of your academic and professional career.

Once you have completed the Inventory, you will be ready to Envision Your Future MBA Career...

Envision Your Future MBA Career

Before you can make the link between getting your MBA and your future career goals it is necessary to have an idea of what your vision for your post-MBA career looks like. Whether you're thinking about a career in marketing, company finance, investment management or the non-profit sector, imagining what your future career could be will help you understand how you'll leverage your MBA as a tool to reach your goals. This is an essential step in building a strong case for your fit with a given business school.

Think about Your Post-MBA Career Vision and what it means to actually apply all you will learn in business school towards that career. Spending time to envision what that future could look like allows you to begin to make the connections to how the MBA will be instrumental in helping you get there.

When you have identified the key highlights of your pre-MBA career and understand how to bridge these experiences to your future MBA career, you are now ready to State Your Case for the MBA...

State Your Case for the MBA

After you have spent time reflecting on your pre-MBA career and envisioning what your post-MBA career could be, you should now be able to effectively articulate why you want to get an MBA and how you will use it to catapult your career to the next level. At this stage you should be able to describe how the various facets of the MBA experience (i.e. academics, students groups, interactions with alums, and career development, etc.) will make you a very well-prepared business professional, able to successfully compete for some of the most coveted jobs in the world.

Stating Your Case for the MBA will prompt you to think about the key considerations for choosing to do an MBA and how to articulate your reasons for doing so.