MBA Admission process

Last week I received my first Ding!* (For those who don't understand the MBA admission Jargon yet, see the bottom of post) from my top priority and dream B-school. Considering I only applied to only two schools in the round 3, my future prospects of getting an admit to B-schools for fall 2009 look dire. I am now waiting for results from my other application.

That was an update about me, but I am sure you are not here to read about my failures and ramblings, so let me talk about the MBA and the MBA admission process in general in today's post.

MBA admission, unlike admission process for most other academic degrees, requires tremendous thinking and planning. Depending upon the priorities, one can either choose an Indian MBA or an MBA from international university or institute. Among Indian MBAs my knowledge is mostly limited to ISB and the IIMs, with a personal preference for the former since it is better for experienced candidates. ISB has a similar admission process to other international B-school whereas most of you may know IIM admission process. Since, despite my two half-hearted attempts at cracking CAT, I wasn't able to make through to the IIMs, I think it would be fitting if I don't talk about IIM admissions at all.

So coming back to admission process for an International MBA, let me give a short overview of different components. Most MBA programs require three things to evaluate a candidate's applicability to their program:
1) GMAT scores: It is a standardized test which one can register to take at any time of the year. Indian nationals form one of the most competitive applicant pools in the admission process. Hence, as Indian a competitive GMAT score becomes even more important to differentiate yourself from rest of applicants. A competitive score could range from 650+ to high 700s depending upon the school you are applying. I will talk in lot more detail in upcoming post regarding GMAT as it is my favourite topic and I really enjoyed going through the whole experience.
2) Essays: I would say one of THE most important and most torturous part of applications. If you are one of those mortals like me who do not have natural talent for writing, then you will have to put substantial effort in getting these in shape. My experience says they take around 2-3 months to get into good shape. I will again talk about these in more details in my subsequent posts
3) Work Experience: For most international program, you do need some work experience to be eligible. However in exceptional cases they also consider candidates with no work experience, but those exceptional candidates don't read such blogs. On a serious note, each school's requirements are different so check at their website to see eligibility.


* Ding! - A term used by MBA application geeks to describe the heart-breaking event of getting a rejection of admission from a b-school.