Choosing the right B-school
Gautam Puri
|
Selecting a B-school can be difficult given the wide variety of institutes. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before making the choice. Gautam Puri
|
Photo: N. Sridharan
PICKING THE BEST: Students and parents make a beeline to a Chennai centre for the Common Admission Test.
If you want to get into a good B-school, it is often difficult to go purely by the advertisements, brochures and websites of the institutes. And given that applying to institutes is not inexpensive, an average of Rs. 1,000 per institute, one can ill-afford to go overboard and apply to all. The key is being selective, and yet hedging for risks.
First, an MBA aspirant needs to draw a `bottom line' — setting a minimum standard for institutions from among which he/she would seek to enter. This decision should be based on one's own abilities, ambitions, as also by consulting seniors and successful professionals. Of course, do not go by the bottom lines drawn by friends and peers. You must give this a good thought, discuss with others and then make up your mind. There are several myths, misconceptions doing the rounds and at times it will definitely get confusing. So, collect information that consists of hard facts and data.
Ask yourself, ``Is this an institute I definitely don't want to go to?''
One interesting way of making this decision is answering the question, "Am I better off dropping/working for one year, and appearing for CAT next year, rather than going to this institute this year?" If the answer to that is no, then you should apply to that institute. If the answer is yes, then you should not.
Hedge your risks
While selecting institutes, make sure that you do not get too choosy and price yourself out of the MBA market. So, you may want to apply to a couple of institutes for which the answer to that question mentioned in the previous paragraph is "yes". This way you give yourself the opportunity to change your mind at a later stage, rather than regretting your decision later. Sometimes it does happen that you start with an ambitious goal, but somewhere close to CAT, you realise that your preparation is not good enough and are willing to compromise on the institute you want to join. Having a couple of lower institutes in your bag comes handy in those situations.
Confused with rankings?
A difficult task lies in ranking the B-schools. Magazines and newspapers differ from each other while ranking B-schools.
We have arranged the B-schools into four clusters wherein the best institutes are in cluster one and the lesser ones are in clusters two, three and four. Thus, if a student has to make a choice between institutes in cluster one and cluster two, then he/she should go for the cluster one institute. Similarly, cluster two institutes should be preferred to cluster three and cluster four.
(The author is managing director, Career Launcher)
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Education Plus
Karnataka
Chennai
Coimbatore
Hyderabad
Madurai
Tiruchirapalli
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
