The folk at mbaMission always recommend getting started with your MBA applications as early as possible. By taking action now, you can dramatically improve your chances of gaining admission to a top MBA program in the coming years. It is never too soon (and certainly not too late) to take several crucial steps to shape your MBA candidacy. So we’re presenting a five-part series to provide a step-by-step timeline to help guide you down the long road of applying to business school. These guidelines assume that you are setting out a year ahead of the January deadlines. Even if you are starting later, you should be able to leverage this timeline to help you prioritize each step along the way. This week, they lay out what you should be doing February through April. For more information on mbaMission and how they can help you in this process, click here.

View Part 1 here.

February

Meet with Alumni and Students
As you contemplate your choices and begin visiting campuses, consider augmenting your process of a priori discovery by meeting with your target school’s alumni or students, so that you can Read more

The folk at mbaMission always recommend getting started with your MBA applications as early as possible. By taking action now, you can dramatically improve your chances of gaining admission to a top MBA program in the coming years. It is never too soon (and certainly not too late) to take several crucial steps to shape your MBA candidacy. So they’re presenting a five-part series to provide a step-by-step timeline to help guide you down the long road of applying to business school. These guidelines assume that you are setting out a year ahead of the January deadlines. Even if you are starting later, you should be able to leverage this timeline to help you prioritize each step along the way. This week, they will lay out what you should be doing at least one year before you submit your applications. For more information on mbaMission and how they can help you in this process, click here.

Pre-Stage

The steps that we lay out in pre-stage planning are somewhat timeless. It is never too soon to take on a leadership position in your community, sign up for a supplemental course, visit your target schools, etc. We have therefore structured this piece so that you can consider the steps outlined in these sections ongoing. Read more

Our friends over at MBA Mission were excited to see the new BusinessWeek Rankings come out, although they made sure to point out that rankings aren’t nearly as important as fit when it comes to choosing the best business school for you. Check out the rest of their blog, and find the original posting of their article here: mbamission.com/blog
Read more

Today, we’re debuting a new feature”the MBA news roundup! Aspiring business school students should know what’s going on at their target schools. So we’ll be collecting big stories from around the web on a semi-regular basis to keep you updated.

In this installment:

UVA-Darden is launching a new Global Executive MBA program. Dean Robert F. Bruner promises: This new MBA format will deliver the Darden Experience for which we are so well-known but in an international format. The program will enhance the skills of high-potential executives who need to be ready on day one to do business in any market around the globe. More info is available here and here.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports Dipak Jain”formerly the long-time dean of Kellogg”will take over in March at INSEAD.

Nitin Nohria, the incoming dean at Harvard Business School, recently spoke to the Boston Globe about his ambitious goals for his tenure. Just to start with, he expects more from the school than just bouquets and butterflies.”

Also at HBS: The alumni bulletin has an interesting update on the school’s new executive MBA program for health care administrators. It’s designed to develop the strategy, leadership, finance, and operations skills that senior health-care professionals need to transform care delivery in their organizations.

Stanford is launching a new 20-week Program in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, aimed at engineers, inventors and others working in Silicon Valley.

For the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, Ross has released a fascinating study about how Twitter can help upstarts compete with bigger firms.

And finally, the Economist has released its MBA rankings. See a breakdown here.

Did we miss anything major? Let us know in the comments!

People often associate business school degrees with a handful of traditional fields, such as consulting. But according to this piece at Page Six Magazine, the growing fashionista crowd at Harvard Business School is demonstrating you don’t have to be Michael Bloomberg to go for an MBA.

Take Olga Vidisheva, a 25-year-old model and current MBA candidate. She attended Wellesley, did two years at Goldman Sachs, and then decided finance wasn’t for her. She applied to HBS, specifically aiming to change careers to fashion. Her plan seems to be paying off, as evidenced by her summer spent interning with Chanel’s marketing department. And she’s not alone. We’ve already covered HBS alums Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank, who founded Gilt Groupe. Other startups have followed, including FashionStake, a site that allows you to invest in newbie designers; Birchbox, which sends monthly beauty samples to members; and Rent the Runway, which rents designer dresses.

Ultimately, only 3 percent of Harvard grads go on to retail careers, as opposed to 57 percent working in finance or consulting. But sartorially-inclined students report the program is becoming the place for fashion”and they ought to know what’s in vogue!

Here at the Manhattan GMAT blog, we’re always interested in cool learning opportunities for b-school students. That’s why a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal caught our eyes. The paper reports MBA programs are securing real-world business experience for their students by farming them out as dirt-cheap consultants.

A student’s involvement with a company typically runs from 3 to 6 months, and companies have included Urban Outfitters and Harman International. Participants might help create a business plan or identify acquisition targets. For businesses, it’s a chance to benefit from a fresh set of eyes, typically at a very low cost.  And for aspiring MBAs, it’s a chance for practical professional experience.

For example, Green Mountain Coffee dispatched their b-schoolers to Nicaragua, assigning them to develop strategies for improving coffee quality and boosting production. “This will have impact on the quality, taste in cup and… the amount of coffees that [the farmers] harvest,” says Rick Peyser, a member of the company’s corporate responsibility department.

Improving a cup of coffee from the source”now that makes for a results-driven resume.

We recently read an article that listed seven reasons why the author thinks you don’t need to go to business school.

Going to business school is clearly a major commitment of an individual’s time, energy, and resources. It’s a complex decision, and there’s no right answer that applies to every person. To balance the aforementioned article, we asked Chris Ryan, our Director of Product and Instructor Development, who has his MBA from Fuqua, to give us seven good reasons that business school is still worthwhile. He gave us eight for good measure:

1. The Connections You Build in Business School Will Help You Throughout Your Career

Connections and networking are a huge part of the appeal of business school for many potential applicants. Many ventures, from Revolution Foods Inc., bringing healthy lunches to schools, to Brooklyn Boulders, New York’s largest rock-climbing gym, to BuddyTV, an up-and-coming entertainment website, have been started by people who met in business school.

In fact, our very own Eric Caballero, graduate of Sloan, has found his MBA network indispensable during his career:

I tap my network constantly, hunting for angel investors, marquee clients, channel partners and executive recruits. So long as you understand Networking 101 “ never ask a favor without offering a greater, specific one in return “ you should find your network ready to help. Ironically, the benefits do not end with your professional life. I once contacted an MIT alum, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of a major U.S. airline, to discuss a frustrating customer service issue with my honeymoon flights. He helped me cut through a forest of red tape in half an hour.

2. The Skills You Learn at Business School Cannot be Taught in Books

For some, like Chris, the most instrumental skills learned at business school include how to be a good leader and a good team player. Chris could lead a class of high-school students, but business school taught him how to relate to and lead his own peers in a way he would not have developed otherwise. Sure, you could learn economic theory and business management from books, but when you get your MBA, you’re learning them within the context of an environment that helps shape who you are and helps you become who you want to be.

3. Going to B-school Helps You Figure Out What You’re Good At

From the very first time you look at your application essay questions, business school forces you to make decisions about who you want to become and what you want to do. Even the process of applying helps you clarify your goals, because you have to discuss them in a convincing way.

In addition, business school helps round you out as a person. For example, many schools will film you while you present. They then make you review and improve your presentation skills by going over the video with a coach. “From what I hear, that doesn’t happen in law school,” says Chris.

4. Business School Can Be Useful for People at Any Age

Chris began his career teaching high school students, but chose to change fields in his 20s.  “At 28, less than a year after I was teaching physics, I was a management consulting intern at McKinsey,” says Chris.  “This would not have been possible without business school.”

But even if you aren’t switching careers, business school can still help you focus your career path, restructure and move ahead at a faster pace. A businessman who had worked in large companies, Dave Bosher, who graduated from the University of Richmond MBA program, noted: “The MBA program is a great way to round out your knowledge base and to take your career to the next step.”

5. Business School Broadens Your Personal Perspective and Outlook

At its best, business school forces you to learn to work with a diverse range of people in the business world. Because you are forced to make choices about your own career before you even attend, you meet people who have a variety of different goals, from traditional routes like consulting to unconventional ones like founding a new private business.

In fact, the best business schools help train you to work in diverse teams. Chris worked in a team with a student from Venezuela, and the experience helped him when he was working on a Mexican-Brazilian film post-MBA.  As a former teacher, Chris found that the opportunity to learn from “real” businessmen taught him a lot as well, and certainly the former bankers learned plenty from a physics teacher!

6. Your Business School Becomes Your Brand

The name of the school you attended will carry weight for the rest of your career. You will be able to find favors with other alums, and the name next to “MBA” will make your resume will stand out during job searches.

7. You Put Your Finger on the Pulse of the Future of the Business World:

You and your classmates will be the next class of business leaders. By virtue of being constantly surrounded by intelligent and driven individuals, you can see what the future of business will look like from a unique perspective.

It’s not just your classmates from whom you’ll learn, either. Business schools make a point of bringing in today’s business leaders. Just ask the women who started Gilt Groupe: they met at Harvard Business School and founded their online store with the help of designer Zac Posen, whom they had advised while still in business school. Or try sitting in a room with the founders of Threadless. They might not have gone to business school, but the students at MIT certainly gained a lot of insight from their background! Overall, the CEOs, founders and business bigshots you meet at b-school give you an opportunity to see the business world in a whole new light.

8. B-school can be a lot of fun:

Whether it’s making videos to show to your classmates, or wrestling with the complexities of a business case with your team, there is both real fun and geeky fun in going to school, even while you learn and shape yourself into something better.

Need more convincing? Check out Why MBA? to read why other students chose business school.

You’ve probably spent lots of time weighing the merits of various business schools”professors, location, course offerings. But this month’s Bloomberg Business Week offers some food for thought about the individuals who lead the whole operation: deans.

The article profiles two programs that have recently hired former corporate executives as deans. Boston University has recruited Kenneth Freeman, formerly of Quest Diagnostics, while Viacom’s Neil Braun will start in the fall at Pace. And they aren’t the first, either. Corporate deans are still rare, but you’ll find them at both Wake Forest and Ohio State University.  Why the non-traditional choices? They can bring a new perspective, as search committee chair N. Venkat Venkatraman explains: “We wanted someone who could think outside the box, and the committee felt that Ken Freeman brought something new and exciting to the school. There’s also the appeal of a candidate with extensive management experience. The search committee told Freeman they wanted a builder, someone who could advance the school’s strategic plan”and that’s what they saw in the former CEO.

Don’t expect a sea change in the hiring of b-school deans, but this is certainly an interesting development in MBA education.

What’s the latest trend in MBA curricula, according to Business Week? It comes as no surprise to us here @manhattangmat: Courses on social media!

As more businesses realize the awesome power of Facebook and Twitter, they’re hunting employees who can navigate the tricky waters of social media. So b-schools see a rapidly growing field for which they can equip their students. “Social media skills are the ones that can set them apart. Those are the skills that employers are looking for,” argues John Gallaugher, who teaches Social Media & Web 2.0 for Managers at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Columbia now offers four Internet marketing classes”one of them taught by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. And if HBS’s Competing with Social Networks is any indication, students are enthusiastic, as well: When the course launched, it had three times as many sign-ups as spots in the class.

Once again, business schools are pushing out ahead of the curve!

Two weeks ago, we featured free classes available online for prospective and newly-admitted b-school students. Today, we’re featuring podcasts. Almost all universities have podcasts these days, and if you’re interested in a school, it’s worth poking around the website for lectures or interviews. But here are the top five that stand out:

1. Knowledge at Wharton: Wharton’s podcast follows a traditional radio-interview format. A host sits down with an interesting guest to discuss a meaty topic, like the next generation of Internet search or the future of the book business. Podcasts regularly feature Wharton professors speaking about their own research, as well as CEOs, government officials, venture capitalists, and others. And you don’t actually have to download the files”you can just stream the interviews from the website.
2. Darden School of Business, Speaker Series: UVA’s Darden School of Business uploads recordings of anyone who visits campus as part of the Darden Distinguished Speaker Series, the Darden Leadership Forum, or the 50th Anniversary Speaker Series. That makes for a lot of podcasts featuring a wide variety of leaders, from former Mexican president Vicente Fox to Under Armour founder Kevin Plank.
3. The London School of Economics, Public Lectures and Events: The LSE seems to host speakers constantly, and it’s no surprise the school draws some big names. Besides professors, the roster includes a number of presidents, plus social media guru Clay Shirky and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. This series is especially great if you’re interested in emerging markets or global business. But their offerings vary widely, and they aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. The archive includes lectures on contemporary art, climate change, and even Slavoj Žižek on the end of capitalism.
4. Insead, Leadercast: Also good to check out if you’re globally inclined is Insead’s Leadercast series. Professors sit down with European leaders like Thomas Rabe, CEO of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, and Todd Stitzer, CEO of British confectionary company Cadbury. You can either watch them as embedded videos or download the audio as mp3s, and next to each video is an overview of the company discussed, for further reading.
5. Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge: It isn’t updated regularly, but HBS has an archive of their Working Knowledge podcast, which features faculty members discussing their research, current events, and the like. It’s not extensive, but the available content is worth a look.

Have we left your favorite off the list? Let us know in the comments what other podcasts you like!