Had a question come through in email recently that we coulda sworn we’d covered on this here blahg before – but alas, could not easily locate it. The basic situation is, Brave Supplicant will be applying to bschool in the fall, and here it is early summer and they’ve got this great new job offer. Or they’re just itching for a change. Or they can’t stand their job now and need to get out from under the evil boss (we did cover that last one a bit on this post here, wherein we explain that leaving a job after six months is not necessarily the kiss of death when it comes to your bschool apps). If you’re considering a new job right now, you can absolutely go for it and you likely can cover it with no problem in your bschool essays. You just need to be able to explain why you took this position, specifically in the context of the career goals that you’re mapping out for the adcom. (What’s that? You don’t know what your career goals are? Oh. Well, that’s the first place to start! Having those well-articulated is pretty darn important for a pitch to almost every bschool in the world.) Here’s the way to look at it any new opportunity that may present itself between now and your bschool acceptances:
What we’re getting at here is that the job needs to be in line with your pitch – for a reapplicant, it would need to sync up with the goals you’ve mapped out for the adcom previously, and for a “fresh” school it would just need to make sense in the overall context of your current background and what new skills you’ll be able to build up pre-MBA. Basically it needs to make sense. Will this job take you further towards achieving the goals that you’re saying are so important to you that you need to go get an MBA to pursue? Or will you just be warming a different chair at a different desk at a different company, doing something that is still unrelated to what you claim you really truly want to be doing? Even if it’s the former and this new gig would be more chair-warming for you (though gawd we hope that’s not the case, you are a Brave Supplicant are you not?!?) then it could still be a non-issue in the context of your apps. It all depends on positioning. We actually have a little more to say on this, which we will certainly do, soon. (And we did! Here.)
Tell us what you think.