(MBA50.com) If you are one of the roughly 23,000 students about to enroll in a 'top-50' global MBA program this year, you’ve already done a great job at conquering the MBA admissions criteria. However, the skills you cultivated to gain entry into business school are poor proxies for the capabilities you’ll need to succeed in business school itself. Given your considerable investment of time, money, and effort in pursuing an MBA education, can you afford not to have a pre-matriculation strategy?
For Ivan Kerbel, CEO and Founder of Practice LLC and The Practice MBA Summer Forum, pre-MBA coursework not only ensures that you hit the ground running, but may become a critical component in all aspects of your business school experience, whether academic, professional, or cultural. “If you are a new member of the MBA class of 2015, your goal this summer should be to create a vision for your time in business school and at least a rough plan of how you can apply your interests and abilities to both acquire new knowledge and project yourself into your future career.”
As the former Director of The Career Development Office at The Yale School of Management and himself an MBA graduate of The Wharton School, Kerbel is well placed to judge the skill set that will best serve you at business school.
“Completing your b-school finance homework requires expertise with financial modeling via Excel, rather than quantitative reasoning concepts honed for the GMAT, and making sense of accounting depends on performing debt and equity capital structure research via Capital IQ, an online financial data platform.” Working knowledge of these tools, and familiarity with a
“Compare entry to business school with that of medical school,” he explains. “Your admittance entails not only passing the MCAT, but undertaking a year of biology, a year of physics, two years of chemistry, and a range of additional prerequisite coursework. But you can enroll in business school without any prior knowledge of accounting, finance, marketing, or operations (and the analytic skills that go with them). The result is a first-year MBA core curriculum experience in which accounting courses are populated both by students who are CPAs and students who have never encountered income statements, balance sheets, or statements of cash flow.
Kerbel sees additional challenges for those heading to business school from abroad. “There are additional nuances and hurdles not addressed by the MBA admissions process. Agreeing and disagreeing with others during class discussion without losing face, and raising your hand to express an opinion, are not common classroom behaviors across cultures. Neither are a host of soft skills that inform the classroom experience, professional networking (including how to behave during ‘coffee chats’, a fixture of the MBA recruiting process), and social interactions integral to completing group work assignments and participating in business school club activities.”
Unless you were an undergraduate business major, or a veteran of an intensively skills-based work environment such as investment banking or management consulting, starting an MBA program without first acquiring a comprehensive set of academic and professional skills and tools can feel overwhelming. Likewise, familiarizing yourself with your new host country, while also grappling with the newness of being an MBA, is daunting, and can make it all but impossible to form friendships outside of your own circle of countrymen and women.
Business schools do offer pre-term orientation courses that address the variability in training and experience among incoming MBAs, as well as help facilitate international students’ transition to a new environment. Achieving parity, however, remains stubbornly out of reach for most programs. During the summertime prior to the official start of the school year, time is limited, faculty and staff resources are stretched, and pre-term course content is often scaled to accommodate sizable portions, if not the whole, incoming class, thus leaving less scope for customization (e.g., language and culture orientation programs, for example, that address issues specific to different countries of origin for incoming MBAs).
The end result is that MBA orientation programs work well to provide an introductory or refresher course function for new students on a limited set of key topics – such as quant skills and statistical analysis – but most are not of sufficient scope or duration to fundamentally alter disparities in students’ relative levels of preparedness.
Kerbel argues that there is something that the individual student can do, prior to the start of school to ensure that he or she will be able to keep pace with classmates. He calls it having a pre-matriculation strategy, which involves using the relatively long timespan between your admission to b-school and arrival on campus to assess your: 1) academic, 2) professional, and 3) cultural (including linguistic) preparedness, as well as taking appropriate action to bridge any gaps.
Fortunately, Kerbel says, you don’t need more than common sense to realize what your greatest areas of need might be. “If you have a predominantly non-commercial work background (including teaching, military service, professional sports, journalism, law, medicine, or the arts), or you have limited or no academic exposure to management and economics principles, you will likely want to acquire that knowledge and capability in a pre-MBA context. Similarly, if you’re an international student and have never traveled to or have spent only a limited amount of time in your anticipated host country, you likewise need to take action.”
With a bit of research, you can identify and pursue online self-study options such as the MBA IQ, MBA Math, or GMAC Essential Prep programs. Instruments such as CareerLeader and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator offer useful feedback for professional planning and personal assessment. You can also acquire finance analytics skills via Training the Street or Wall Street Prep, attend industry-specific or diversity-based boot-camps such as the MBA JumpStart Diversity Forums, the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management (for participating schools), and Forté Foundation summer conferences, or you can enroll in a multi-course immersion program such as The Practice MBA Summer Forum.
In all instances, your first point of contact should be the MBA program you’re planning to attend, not only because your school may already have user licenses for online services, but because they may offer financial support or guidance regarding pre-MBA coursework.
Of course, somewhere in the midst of preparing for business school, it makes sense to enjoy the last relatively commitment-free period of time before you’re thrust into the high-stakes environment of the MBA. All the better if your pre-matriculation strategy lets you get to know fellow classmates as well as students admitted to peer MBA programs.
Your ultimate decision regarding whether to take on pre-MBA coursnework encompasses the trade-off between continuing your current job versus simply taking time off during the summer, an understandable impulse given the amount of effort it took to apply and be admitted to b-school. As you weigh your options, consider the opportunity costs that you are likely to face as an MBA, and whether or not you will mind having to learn about using pivot tables in Excel when you could be spending that time interacting with classmates, professors, employers, and alumni … in short, taking advantage of all that is unique to business school.
Of course, summertime can feel all too short. But if you are starting your MBA in the fall, it’s time to start thinking now about how you will perform in a new and demanding academic and professional environment, and about how you can maximize both your effectiveness in and enjoyment of school.
Also on Forbes:
Does an MBA Make You Happy? The MBA Happiness Index 2013
Business schools breaking out of the 'West is Best' mindset
The MBA Admissions Process Should Be About Self Discovery and Development
