We wouldn’t be doing you any favors by sugar-coating it — getting into a top business school is tough. Outrageously tough. In fact, the odds are quite stacked against you unless you’ve got a perfect combination of GPAs, test scores and the rather particular resume that these schools are looking for. According to MBA Data Guru, a website that calculates a candidate’s chances at MBA schools across the country, only 3% of prospective students with a sub-700 GMAT and a GPA under 3.4 managed to get an audience with the admissions committee at Stanford Graduate School of Business. At 5%, Harvard Business School wasn’t much better. Haas School of Business at California Berkeley and Yale School of Management came in at 12% and 15%, respectively, which is better but still not very encouraging.
The truth is, business schools place a huge emphasis on numbers, even more than colleges in other disciplines. After all, they’re business people and numbers are their preferred metric for success. So is there anything you can do to increase your chances? Yes! Let’s take a look at some of the ways of getting your foot in the door and earning a top-notch business degree.
Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Admissions officers at top business schools say that they look for candidates with self-awareness. Sit down and do some self-analysis. Where do you excel? Where have you had failures? What would former bosses and employees say about you? If you were already a maverick at everything, you wouldn’t need what a business school offers. Instead, know yourself, demonstrate humility, own up to your weakness and show the college you’ve got a yearning to improve. In fact, you can even go a step further. In your admissions materials, link up your weaknesses with the ways in which you see the school’s program helping you grow.
Make Your Resume Pop
If your test scores and GPA aren’t quite up to snuff, you may be able to make up for it with a strong resume (some admissions committees look at these before your scores). And that doesn’t necessarily have to mean a long or prestigious work history, either. Business schools generally want to see two things hidden in your resume: leadership and progression. In other words, have you held positions in which you were asked to be a leader? Has your career stagnated or have you shown a desire for growth? So when putting your resume together, don’t worry as much about showing top-name employers or distinguished positions; just worry about demonstrating leadership and a drive to improve.
Soft Skills Get Hard Results
Soft skills — things like communication, attitude and emotional intelligence — often count more in life than intelligence or achievement. The same goes for prestigious business schools. Admissions officers know that a high score on an aptitude test doesn’t always translate to success in the real world (or the classroom). If you’re stacked with soft skills, you can use this to your advantage, but how do you demonstrate that on paper?
Here are some of the common key elements that scream soft skills:
- Have you started a business or endeavor and scaled it up?
- Have you taken the reins on a project at a company and led the way with successful results?
- Is there a cause you’re passionate about? Did you do anything about it to impact your community?
- Creative problem-solving. Was there a time you had to think outside the box to find a solution to a business or organizational problem?
Put some thought into these questions and make sure your application does a good job of highlighting the times you’ve excelled at soft skills.
Here’s the takeaway — the competition is tough, but so are you. Having a perfect GPA, stellar test results and a spotless resume aren’t guaranteed to land anyone a spot at a major business school. Do some self-reflection, highlight your creativity, make those soft skills pop and you’ll increase your chances in a major way.
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