Advice for Incoming MBA Students

by Stacy Blackman Consulting, Apr 15, 2015

If you're headed to business school in the fall, your brain is probably near melting with an information overload right about now. We're going to add just one thing more to your overflowing plate, though you'll probably find this next bit quite useful.

The admissions blog at Kellogg School of Management has a regular columnist this year in first-year studentRohan Rajiv, who blogs once a week about important lessons he is learning at Kellogg. His recent entry, written as a letter to an incoming MBA student, covers all the basics of what to expect at business school, but then he takes a deep dive into how to "frame" the MBA experience.

The post covers three principles:

• the MBA is a two-year course in decision making and tradeoffs;
• the experience is entirely what you make of it;
• foolishness is believing your value multiplied by 10 just because you spent two years running around a university campus.

"The MBA journey is the first step to the next phase of your life journey," Rajiv writes. "The lessons from this post arent just about doing well in graduate school. I think the principles apply for life after school."

Fair warning, his post is long. But it does provide ample food for thought and may serve as an important reality check for the newest members of the MBA Class of 2017.