If you want to go where the MBA jobs are, go into healthcare.

Any long-time reader of this blahg will know that EssaySnark is not fond of those trying to game the system. When you come up with the goals you pitch to the adcom, they need to be REAL goals. LEGIT goals. THINGS YOU’RE REALLY GONNA DO goals.

That being said, sometimes people come to us clueless about all that. They don’t know what they want to do; they just don’t want to do what they’re doing. They’re at a dead end, either career-wise or emotion-wise, and they need a change.

While we dislike the mindset that puts the MBA over the education and has the goal being those three little letters placed after your name rather than a new career trajectory and a means to an end, we recognize that sometimes that’s where people are coming from.

To those people, consider healthcare as an industry.

This is not to say that if you have literally no experience in healthcare or the sciences, that you’ll be able to drop whatever you’re doing now and make the easy transition into this world. You won’t. The adcoms won’t buy it if, out of the blue, you claim that now your lifelong ambition is to do healthcare consulting or go work for a biotech firm. You need to establish some background that shows how this is a relevant and feasible goal for you.

But if you have an inkling of any of that in your background, then you might be in a very good position to catch the interest of the admissions folks.

Healthcare is one of those areas where there’s more jobs than graduates. We’ve heard at certain schools that the recruiters are desperate, that the qualified candidates are getting multiple offers and the companies are left scrambling to fill their spots. This is not likely to change for some time, at least not here in the States where we’re going through some industry upheaval around the world of medicine. And this means that the adcoms are on the lookout for qualified candidates that they can admit to their programs who will hopefully make those recruiters happy in two years’ time.

Compare this to the slews of wanna-be strategy consultants who some schools end up turning away only because they already got too many applications from people saying they want to go do the same thing. Strategy consulting is the current-era’s hedge fund; it’s super sexy and tres trendy.

If you’re agnostic as to your post-MBA career and you have a smidgen of healthcare industry stuff going on somewhere in your background (beyond that time in college that you went to the emergency room to get your stomach pumped after doing too many beer bombs), then this might be something to seriously consider for your future. Maybe healthcare consulting, even?

We offer this up in the hopes that BSers will take this seriously and actually truly CONSIDER this as their future career – not just say it in their essays as a ploy to try and get into a good bschool. Please don’t do that, it’s super lame.