We’ve been talking about the difficult conversation of telling your boss you’re leaving to go get an MBA and the Everyworkers’ Dream of “I just want to quite this thing!”.

So let’s talk the future.

If you are applying to a two-year MBA with a traditional schedule, like most of the programs in the United States, then when would you be exiting your current company? When would you resign your role? When would you be out of there?

Working backwards, you might assume that most universities start up class in the Fall, right?

Well, sort of.

Most two-year MBA programs in the States have an orientation that starts at least a week or so before classes officially begin. You will need to be on campus much earlier in the year for your first year, than you will when you return as a second-year student.

In addition, most bschools have pre-term programs like math camp or language lab. Sometimes these are required for certain admits (e.g., if you’re an international student with a TOEFL score below a certain threshold); agreeing to attend could be a condition of acceptance into the program.

And then of course there’s the super fun stuff like pre-MBA travel. Many schools have a tradition of incoming students going off on trips with second-years before school starts, as a fun bonding experience before studies begin. These are optional, and they’re not included with your tuition, but they’re certainly a lot of fun.

Finally, most people have to do the whole hassle of relocating to wherever their bschool is. Sometimes people decide to relocate early, to get established; others put it off till the last possible moment, especially if they’re moving to a more expensive city and want to minimize the amount of time they have to pay a higher rent.

Every school has different requirements and opportunities for all of this, and since you don’t yet know where you’re going to be going to school, you can’t be too exact about it. However, when you add it all up, you should expect to, most likely, be quitting your job and packing your things to make the move sometime in May or June next year. Mid-July would be the latest, for most people.

Yes. In about a year, you will be loading up a moving van and driving away from your current apartment for good.

Wow, now didn’t THAT suddenly make this whole bschool thing more real for you?

When you’re thinking about what to say to your boss when you tell her you’re applying to business school, then you’d better have all of this straight in your head.

Exciting stuff, Brave Supplicant!

There’s all sorts of information and advice out thar on them interwebs about applying to bschool. We’re sure you’ve already found gobs and gobs of the stuff, and you’ve bookmarked your favorites and made a habit out of returning to those sites on a regular basis. Today we wanted to point you towards some specific ones that may have gone overlooked.

Specifically, we’re talking about blogs from the bschools themselves.

Even if you’re not planning to apply to these schools, you might want to check out what they have in their social media and what they post as advice to their applicants, and even consider subscribing to their blog feeds. While our caution that all admissions advice issued by a school is specific to their school always applies, there’s still good info to be had from these resources, and they’ve proven themselves to be consistent over time. These are some of the schools that we trust, and refer to, as we go about our jobs, and they’re blogs that you might find value in, too.

In no particular order:

• Michigan Ross Admissions Blog. Soojin Kwon, Admissions Director at Michigan Ross, maintains probably the most transparent policy of all MBA adcoms. Her blog is awesome, and it helps with insights into how admissions works overall at any school, in terms of explaining the holistic review that admissions professionals conduct, and sometimes with warning you about not being a pest when you’re on the waitlist. That sort of thing. Lots of the info is specific to Ross but this one is worth reading for any BSer.
• Tuck360 MBA Blog. Lots of admissions-specific stuff, including an excellent series of posts for Indian applicants especially. Other incredible articles are about career services and recruiting at bschool. This blog also has posts from students and sometimes from partners. Worth subscribing for anyone.
• The MBA Insider Blog from UCLA Anderson. Practical and helpful tips that are applicable to many, many schools. Anderson is also working to be transparent in the admissions process and we’ve noticed the changes in their approach to the applicant marketplace. Anderson also sometimes does alumni profiles and other community-centered posts that can be interesting and inspiring. Good stuff coming out of this school.

Why is HBS not on this list? It’s not because they don’t have a blog; they do . It’s just that they don’t really give you anything useful in applying to HBS or other schools. It’s still worth tracking them because it’s where they publish important dates in their process (when will interview invites go out, for example). But HBS does things differently, and they’re probably one of the most opaque of all schools (them and Stanford) in terms of providing information that will actually affect your chances of admission.

Two additional schools have maintained a more lackluster blogging presence in recent years – Chicago Booth and Wharton . If you’re going to be applying to these schools then certainly subscribe to their blogs but if not, we don’t see too much value in what they tend to publish these days, both because posts go up infrequently and because what they tend to talk about seems quite narrow in both cases.

How about you, BSer? What school resources have you found useful? Any bschool or adcom blog that we’ve missed? Tell us in the comments!

 
 
 
You might also be interested in: