B-School Wannabe

• Told me boss that I am applying - This actually went fine. She was very supportive (she has an MBA), and told me that she is available to help in any way that I need. I immediately told her that I will need a few letters of recommendation from her, and she said she would be glad to do it. We agreed to not really tell everyone else in our wokrgroup for a little while.
• Updated my resume -- I had not built a proper resume in a ocuple of years, and this actually took some time. But I think I have it in pretty good shape right now. A friend of mine who is in b-school right now helped me highlight my accomplishments, get rid of the passive voice, etc.
• Organized all of my accomplishments and hobbies -- Doing this before I wrote my resume may have helped. But I took a lot of time to organize everything I have done over the past few years, to help identify my strengths and weaknesses. The methodology outlined in Your MBA Game Plan really helped me here.
• Began my essays -- I got off to a monster start a couple of weeks ago, banging out nearly all of my Michigan essays in one weekend. But then I went back and looked at them a few days later (I highly recommend doing this), and realized that I was all over the place. I decided to go back and outline my essays a little more methodically before I write any more.
• Contacted people about recommendation letters -- This does not seem like a big deal, but a lot of people keep warning me to stay on top of this, so I am now using my list of accomplishments to create a mini dossier on myself, which I will send to my reco writers by the end of this weekend.

I think I will apply to Stanford, Kellogg, and Michigan in round 1, and then save UCLA and Haas for round 2. I may also add Duke (Fuqua) to the mix, depending on how I feel after my round 1 applications are in.

# posted by Kent Torokvei @ Saturday, September 23, 2006