Dr. Phil is in.
Monday, January 29, 2007
In a recent comment, Megan said...
I just happened to come across your blog. I am a junior in college right now and have always had my sights set high on a masters program. I found your blog really entertaining. At the moment I'm trying to decide whether to do a 5-year masters & undergrad program at the school I'm at now or if I want to change schools so my degree is a bit more prestigious. Also trying to decide if I want to take time to work between undergrad and masters. Any advice, send it my way. :o)
Disclaimer: Asking me for advice on how to get your MBA is kind of asking a blind guy how awesome the sunset was. Or asking for financial planning at the Special Olympics. You're gonna get answers, but seeing how the source of the answers is so underqualified, you might do yourself more harm than good following that advice.
Megan, I suggest that you finish your undergrad degree, go work for a few years and then go the best damn school you can. My reasoning is based on some words of wisdom I have gathered along the way, which I have paraphrased below.
1. You only get one MBA.
Not only that, but you're going to be spending $100K and 2 years of your life, so you better be damn sure it's worth it. Think about it, if you could only own one purse for the rest of your life, would you get some piece of shit at Walmart or would you splurge on that Prada bag? It's the rest of your life. Get the brand name. If anyone tells you that the Podunk U MBA program is the most amazing program that will change your life, they're lying. Think about it. If I told you I'm a Stanford MBA, it doesn't really matter what I say next, because you'll believe it and think I'm a genius.
2. An MBA is worthless without work experience.
If you get your MBA immediately after college, your first job will pay you not much more than a first or second year employee. The only difference is that they now have more experience than you and don't owe a fuckload of money to some school. The best bang for your buck is to get your MBA as early as possible AFTER you work your first job. You'll get the biggest pay increase and open the most career opportunities.
3. If you don't work, your peers will hate your guts.
MBA students with awesome experience loathe MBA students straight out of college. If it were legal, I'm positive that they'd round up all the straight-out-of-college MBA students once a week and piss on their faces. As a college graduate, you really don't know anything. (Trust me. Start working and you'll realize how worthless college really is.) You need to work at least a little bit in order to be able to offer any intelligent insight worth anyone's time.
4. If you don't work, your peers will really hate your guts.
I went to a recruiting event and met all kinds of intelligent, well-traveled, experienced people that I have no chance in hell beating out for business school. However, there was one girl who asked this question during the open QA portion. "How important really is work experience to business schools? I mean, because I'm, like, only a college senior, but I have a ton of leadership experience with my sorority. I planned at least, like, 2 fundraiser dinners." I could see the current MBA students stifiling their desire to choke this girl. Though, I do hope they read her application right before mine, because I'm going to look like a fucking god next to her.
posted by mbahunt @ 1:18 AM,
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Done, done, done, done, done.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Oh god, I'm done. Because these applications had prevented my from partaking in any of my vices for the past few months, the first things I did after I submitted my final application was shot Jaeger, clubbed a baby seal, had sex with an amputee, organized a bulldog fight, punched an old woman dressed up like an infant and then downloaded some MP3s. Man, did that feel good.
When all was said and done, I'm pretty happy with 3 of my 5 applications. The first two I did weren't as good, but they served as learning lessons. Too bad my dumb ass had to spend $500 for that learning lesson, so when little Bobby wonders why he doesn't have shoes or breakfast, he'll know that Daddy is a procrastinator and wastes money on grad school applications.
Now, I wait. I'll at least have one interview, since Kellogg interviews everyone, but I'm really hoping I have at least 3 by the time the end of February comes around. I feel like if I can land 3, my chances of getting into one school are pretty good, as my interview would probably be the strongest part of my application. If my charm and sweet-talking doesn't bowl the interviewer over, my stunning good looks will.
<bull shit>I want to wish everyone out there the best and hope you all get interviews and perform wonderfully in front of the adcom.</bull shit>
posted by mbahunt @ 12:31 AM,
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Applying to business school is so easy.
Monday, January 01, 2007
A really great way to lose a shitload of sleep is to put your business school applications off to the last minute. I haven't posted in about a month and a half because I needed to eliminate all forms of distraction and focus on applying.
Distractions successfully eliminated:
Distractions not successfully eliminated: everything else.
In a last minute change of plans, I scratched Chicago off the list of schools I will apply to and added Michigan instead. I learned that if you actually read about the schools, they are indeed different. I'm pretty happy with my list of schools and I've now calculated my chances of getting in to one of them at 2.63%. (I'm not delusional about my candidacy.)
I have learned some really important lessons during this whole process, and I know you're creaming your pants to hear them, so here you go. I'm still not done yet, I only have the Harvard application done, but I'm so god damn sick of my essays that I really can't work on them anymore.
1. You will get so god damn sick of your essays.
Maybe it's because I decided to write all 94 of my essays in the span of about 11 days, but at this point I would rather drink a cup of type 6 HPV than keep editing these things. See, if you're smart and do your essays months in advance, you can get other schmucks to read and edit them for you. But, if you're a Pulitzer Prize winning writing god, like myself, everyone you know is a shitty writer compared to you, so you will have to do all your own editing and it sucks nuts. To tell you the truth, I'm not even really reading my essays anymore because I know what they say, and I'm probably missing the fact that I used about 5 racial slurs on average in each prompt.
2. Make sure the undergraduate school you went to isn't retarded.
Some schools make you hand type all your college grades into an Excel sheet and submit them that way. Others want actual transcripts straight from your school. That's fine, but apparently my school's registrar hires their employees through a Down Syndrome outreach program, so needless to say it was quite a trial getting some official transcripts. When I finally did get them, it looked like they had been chewed on, so I don't know.
3. You suck at life.
Face it, you're pretty unremarkable. I know this because if you really are one of those b-school applicants who owns 3 companies and did 17 years of charity work in Somalia, you probably could give a shit what some assfaced blogger has to say about applying to business school. To the rest of us normal people, it's kind of hand to reword your extra-curricular activities and awards/recognition into stuff that doesn't make you sound like a piece of shit. I really tried, but the "Coke Snorting Club" and "Beer Bash '01: Best Impression of Christopher Reeve" just don't sound good when you put them down on paper. I'm convinced that people who have a nice fat list of stuff are either lying or unemployed, so I'm hoping that those massive blank spaces on my application won't hurt me too much.
4. If studying makes you horny, then the business school application process is like spanish fly.
That's pretty self explanatory (not really).
Stay tuned for updates on my status at each school, but it's gonna be boring to watch me get dinged everywhere.
Oh, and to AkilKalel: You are fucked. You can't change the GMAT keyboards to Dvorak. You have to do it in QWERTY. Actually, though, if you're a strong writer, you should have more than enough time and typing slow won't really hurt you.
posted by mbahunt @ 11:18 PM,
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