What have you been told about applying to business school? With the advent of chat rooms, blogs and forums, armchair “experts” often unintentionally propagate MBA admissions myths, which can linger and undermine an applicant’s confidence. Some applicants are led to believe that schools want a specific “type” of candidate and expect certain GRE scores and GPAs, for example. Others are led to believe that they need to know alumni from their target schools and/or get a letter of reference from the CEO of their firm in order to get in. In this series, mbaMission debunks these and other myths and strives to take the anxiety out of the admissions process.

Harvard Business School (HBS) offers an excellent MBA program—this is largely a given, and we are not questioning that. However, what we will call into question is whether Harvard Business School (or any other school, for that matter) is right for you. Every year, we get a few calls from confused MBA aspirants who say, “I visited Harvard Business School, and I am not sure if there is a fit,” as if that indicates some sort of problem. Indeed, and this may be shocking to some, Harvard Business School is not for everyone—particularly those who do not relate well to case-based learning, those who want a lot of flexibility in their first-year curriculum, and those who would prefer a small class size (HBS’s Class of 2019 has 928 students, while the same class at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, for example, has just 282). Read more