($) Career goals ideas, if you honestly don’t know what you want to do with the MBA

Warning: We are not suggesting that you plug these goals into your essays and call it a day! We’re simply offering some ideas of career paths that the MBA is a great preparation for, where there are plenty of jobs coming to campus to attract high-quality students like you will be, which pay well and which you may find interesting enough to research further.

The keyword there is “research further”; these are meant as suggestions for you to consider! You’ll need to find out if they’re actually good ideas for you personally! This comes from learning about what the career is/does, by talking to people who actually do these jobs, and learning about the day-to-day functions and what type of work is involved.

Today’s post is a follow-up to our Spotlight On: Career Goals post from a bit ago. You may want to start there if you’re new.

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Your career goals are likely to change, but you need to start SOMEWHERE at this point in the process
 
 

 
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As always, we will end this very long post with a shout-out to how to get more help from The ‘Snark: Our Career Goals App Accelerator is designed to teach you what needs to be in your goals statement, and offers two rounds of feedback on the goals you produce.

You can also just geek out on the posts here on the blahg on such topics as this. We go by the teach-you-to-fish model, and do our best to offer tools and information for self-education, so that you can fully own your own process and become empowered by what you yourself produce.

We’re talking about your future, right? You don’t want to adopt wholesale what some other person thinks sounds good as an idea for your life.

Again, it’s likely that your career goals will change as you go through the process of earning your MBA. You’re going to be exposed to so many new ideas, people, and paths. That’s expected. The point of the schools asking you for goals now is that they can see how you’re approaching this, what your ideas are today, and how you’ve come up with the plan that you have. It’s not set in stone or a lifelong commitment. It’s your best strategy, based on known facts today. If you can justify it and rationalize it and support it with reasons, you’re good to go. That’s all that’s necessary* for a compelling pitch to the schools.

 
 
*Granted, easier said than done.

 
 

 
Oh hey also: Bruce DelMonico at Yale SOM posted a down-to-earth article about the importance of developing goals that are meaningful to you (with an unfortunately clickbaity title).