A crucial part of your school research process is talking to students, ideally on campus when you go for a visit, or second-best at a school’s recruiting event, or if nothing else, then hopefully at minimum by phone. You’ll want to talk to them in-depth about their experiences (Pro Tip: not about your apps). Do this with as many students as you can, at all the schools that you’re interested in.

But! Warning! This is a one-dimensional source of information!

The hardest thing of all is that once you’re talking to students at one school or another, all they do is rave about THEIR school, and perhaps explain why they chose School X over School Y when they were in your shoes — but it’s IMPOSSIBLE to do a truly apples-to-apples comparison since nobody goes through 2 bschool programs. So all they can say are the things they like (often parroting what the school promotes, like “Columbia! It’s amazing! We’re at The Center of Business!”) or every now and then you’ll find some disgruntled student who is more forthcoming on what they don’t like about their school…. but this is pretty rare, because they know how much student satisfaction ties in with rankings, and everyone wants their school to be highly ranked. Plus, once you’re there, you become part of the cult and you’ve drunk the kool-aid, so expressing negatives about your choice can make you feel ostracized from the tribe. Most people aren’t that brave (or aren’t that pissed off about whatever they’ve experienced as negatives to voice it to a stranger met in this context). And, having YOU choose their school validates THEIR own choice for having chosen it, too. Complicated human emotions.

Recent grads are sometimes better able to have perspective but they too can be subject to those same factors, and hop on that bandwagon to try to convince new admits to sign up.

Here’s a refreshingly introspective editorial piece from a current Stanford student (the college, not the bschool) who recognizes the issue.

Definitely keep talking to people. But as we’ve cautioned before: Be a sponge, yet have a filter.

Fit: The Ferrari is super sexy but have you ever tried to drive one of those things? Or just ride in it – stiff. Or just get in and out of the darn thing.

Fit is when you find your peeps. It’s when you find your tribe.

We’re not trying to imply that everything about your bschool experience will be, or should be, comfortable. Maybe the challenge of driving a Ferrari is what you need for awhile in your life. Or maybe, if you’re already someone with caviar tastes, the challenge of driving a Ford is what you need to evolve as a person. You know, to, like, keep the ego in check and make you humble.

In bschool-land, fit comes in many forms. It comes in many questions. It’s things like:

Do you want to go to a large school or a small school?

When starting out your research for an MBA, a good way to filter out appropriate schools is by the size of the program. There’s a few angles to this, including:

1. Does the business school have a lot of other degree programs? If so, there’s obviously going to be a lot more students on campus. Schools like Wharton and UC-Berkeley and Michigan and NYU offer undergraduate programs in business. While you probably won’t be interacting with the college kids at all during your MBA studies, it does make for an overall bigger school and gives the place a different feeling, with more stuff happening and more people involved.
2. Does the school have a wide variety of MBA programs? If they offer a part-time and/or executive MBA, do students in those tracks interact with the full-time classes? Some schools have a more segregated approach, based mostly on class scheduling; part-timers and EMBA students are around during evenings and weekends whereas full-time students take classes during the day. Other schools like Columbia offer mixed classes where you may be studying alongside people from the different MBA programs along with law school students too.
3. Most important: How big is each entering class of full-time MBA students? This information is easily found on the schools’ websites and on the BusinessWeek school listings.

Most people focus on this last metric – class size – when they talk about the size of a business school. Harvard is one of the largest MBA programs, with about 900 people in each entering class. This means that there are almost 2,000 students at school every day – which is quite a lot! It also means that their network is vast, global, and diverse. Many people feel that that alone is a key benefit to attending a big school.

By contrast, you have schools like Yale, Tuck, or Berkeley with only around 250 students in each class. Such a small class size fosters a more intimate environment. There’s a greater likelihood that you will get to know the majority of your peers at one of those schools than would even be possible at a larger school. It also means that there are fewer professors on campus, but the ones who are there are more likely to be permanent members of faculty and it is often easier to forge longer-term relationships with teachers who are more embedded in the university like that.

So, as you can see, there’s a tradeoff. What you should be thinking about is, what kind of environment will you do best in? Some like the experience of meeting new people all the time. Others feel that they may get lost in a community that’s too large. What’s your personal learning style? Think back to your college days, and what type of environment that was. Did you attend a larger school or a smaller one? Do you think that was the ideal for you? If so you can seek that out for business school, and if not then this might be an important factor to use in choosing your school targets.

Using school size as a filter can be an easy way to make the first cut on which schools might be appropriate for you, to start to narrow down your choices.

Another much less methodical approach is choosing schools by the people who went there.

Different schools attract different types. You find out someone went to School X; that gives you info about the school. Do people you work with have MBAs? Where did they go? As an extreme example, you could compare the manager who went for a local MBA vs CEO who went to Harvard (obviously we’re playing to stereotype there but often, stereotypes hold true). Look through your network, find out who you know went to bschool and — especially if they graduated within the last five years — reflect on what type of person they are. Sometimes (not always) that can give you a degree of insight about the school.

This really only works for more recent grads, however. It wasn’t until the past ten-ish years that schools began putting such an emphasis on culture, and they only have the luxury of doing so in times of increasing app volumes. When app volumes go down, then they select the best candidates they can out of the pool and they might not be quite so discriminating when it comes to character and these qualities of individual fit.

Or if all of this is too much trouble:

Don’t worry about “School Fit” — just apply to the Top 10 schools. It’s bound to work out!

Are you just starting to kick the tires on the idea of going to bschool?

Hopefully you’ll put into it at least as much effort as you would if you were buying a new car.

We don’t mean “effort” like hanging out in applicant forums. Reading all the posts in the Harvard Business School thread is highly unlikely to be a useful expenditure of your time. You may as well be hanging out in a fanforum on the latest Real Housewives segment. There is hardly anything of concrete value to be had if you’re there.

Obviously we’re biased. 😀

That doesn’t mean you can’t hang out on those boards if you like to, but often they’re filled with half-truths and falsehoods along with one or two kernels of data you can use. Sifting through all of that is fine but recognize that it’s entertainment. You’re there because your brain enjoys reading about other people’s trials and tribulations and opinions. You’re not there to learn how to get into Harvard.

Really, the process of school research should be approached at this early stage like you’re shopping.

If you’re in the market for a big-ticket item, then likely you start by reading up on the thing. Whether you want to buy a house and you’re spending all your time scouring the real estate sites, or you’re looking at cars and you’re immersed in makes and models and options packages, or you want to buy a new surfboard or the latest iPhone or some gadget, you’re probably doing it by reading the web.

You can do that with bschool too. It’ll at least help you get acclimated to the whole process, and perhaps get an appreciation of the challenges of breaking in to a school like Harvard or Wharton or Kellogg or wherever.

But if you really want to understand what the options are, you need to experience them in person. We have already suggested that you plan a road trip to get on campus and see these schools for yourself. If you can do that, we highly recommend it.

That’s not the only thing you can do, though. At this early stage, you can be nurturing a mindset. You’re in “shopping mode” where you’re researching and investigating and finding out what’s available. You’re taking inventories of all the options and filing them away in the brain. You’re being a buyer where you’re looking to see what the market offers, and finding out what’s important to you.

Before you start shopping for a new car, for example, you are vaguely aware that there are cars, and trucks, and SUVs, and gas, and hybrid, and all-electric. But you probably don’t really know what you personally care about. Your priorities are not yet fully formed.

The only way to discover what matters to you in a business school is to learn about business schools. Saying “I want an MBA!” is only the beginning. Most people have very little appreciation for what an MBA is about.

Maybe you know that you’ll learn finance and accounting and stuff (or at least, we HOPE you know that!). But what else is there?

What does bschool even teach you? What does the MBA involve?

Then, you need to go to the next level. In college, you declared a major. Does it work that way in business school too? Will you major in some specific topic or discipline like you did in undergrad?

Well you might, at some schools — but not most. Some allow you to declare a concentration or an area of focus, but most only require their standard core curriculum and then you get to determine the rest of your education, based on electives. Every school does this part differently. Some even require you to apply to a specific concentration or program within the curriculum, like the Columbia Value Investing Program which is very selective and not everyone makes it in. These are the details that you need to be conversant in if you’re going to be applying there as a finance person (just to use that as an example).

So, knowing what’s common to all MBA programs, and what are specific to the school that you’re interested in, is very important.

None of this even is touching on the other very important aspect of culture. A school’s culture is developed through any number of forces, including school size, location, physical placement of the bschool on the overall university campus, and most especially its leadership and where the administration places its attention. A school like Haas was one of the early adopters of culture as an important element of their school; other schools have also surfaced culture more directly as part of their pitch to the marketplace of MBA applicants. Most recently Tuck embedded their values into their essay questions, telling candidates that “Tuck students are nice, aware, accomplished, and smart” or some such, and asking applicants to write about themselves in those dimensions as well. (Not an easy essay question to do!! We hope and pray that Tuck modifies its approach at least somewhat this season.)

So at this early stage of your MBA journey, you need to go into shopping mode. Be a sponge (but have a filter). Soak it all up, and take lots of notes. Talk to everyone you can. Figure out all the ways that an MBA can be done, by learning about how these different schools do it.

Later in the process, you’ll move from “shopping” mode as a buyer, to “selling” mode as an applicant, where you need to package yourself up and present yourself effectively in the essays to pitch the adcom on why they should select you. That’s the essence of this “school fit” thing that you may be hearing about. The dynamics will be different then, when you go from the fun part of all this researching and excitement of hearing about the adventures of bschool, to the stressful part of identifying the elements that the schools care about in your own profile, and figuring out how to tell the best stories in those essays, in response to the school’s essay questions, in a way that lets you highlight those qualities well. Writing essays is to some extent a marketing exercise, and your approach there needs to have your audience in mind. You’ll be in a position of wanting the adcom to pick you so that’s a seller’s mindset, where you need to be attractive to the one who is choosing.

Then — hopefully!! — later on, after you have done all the hard work of convincing these adoms, you will switch back into buyer mode again, when you (again, hopefully!!) will be in a position of choosing between two or more great offers of acceptance. You will be amazed at how much the tone of the admissions process changes once the schools have said “yes” to you and they are actively courting you as an accepted candidate who they hope will matriculate. For the Class of 2022 candidates, that’s way far off in the future, so let’s not get too ahead of ourselves with the optimism.

For now, leveraging the buyer’s mindset as you gather information and learn learn learn about what options are available is the fun part. Doing this type of on-the-ground firsthand research is the very best way to discover what you want out of an MBA experience, and to find the school and the school community that can give that to you in a way that fits your personality, priorities, and style.

When we say “do research on the schools” then that may be a turn-off, as it can sound like work, like we’re giving you a task to complete. But really this is where you can do some exploring and future-self dreaming. You may also want to pop for the Comprehensive Profile Review at some stage along the way, to make sure that your dreams are lining up with the realities of your profile, and gain even more fuel for the research effort at hand. Either way, enjoy this part; being a shopper and learning about options can be exciting and fun, and now is the time to be tackling that.