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I'm torn on this decision. I got in to both and a partial scholarship at both, but on paper they seem so similar that it's a tough decision. Rankings-wise, Vanderbilt shot up this year, but Emory has traditionally been a consistent top 25 school.

I'm a mechanical engineer leaving a large power utility to return to school. My career goals after school revolve around energy/tech. I'd love to get into energy trading or even consulting with a focus on tech/energy. I want to make the move toward the oil/gas boom in Texas or possibly West Coast although that's a stretch. There are also a lot of attractive, smaller firms in both Atlanta and Nashville. Any words of wisdom from current students or people that also applied to either of these? I'm a Georgia Tech grad, so I've done the Atlanta thing once before. Is it important to diversify my location/network and choose Vanderbilt instead?

Hey JJShannon3 - First of all: CONGRATULATIONS! These are both really good schools, and getting some $$ means that you impressed them with your pitch. Great job.

And now for the quandry, right? What to do from here?

Our best advice is what you've hopefully already done: Visit the schools and talk to people. Choosing a bschool is, in the end, a very personal decision, and it often comes down to culture and community. People in your position will frequently report back to us that one school just "felt" right. It's an intangible but very real factor that you should honor in your decision-making process.

On a more practical scale, you can look at the recent job reports from both schools and see which one has placed more graduates in the types of companies that you want to work for post-MBA. Both of these programs tend to have more regional recruiting, so getting a lead on a job on the West Coast may be a little trickier, but certainly not impossible at either.

The other strategy might be to really focus in on what you want to do after bschool. Energy trading is pretty darn different from consulting. Narrowing down that decision is obviously really difficult at this early stage of the game, but to EssaySnark, "trading" vs "consulting" could be the more important angle to be considering over "energy" (given that neither of these schools is top-of-mind for energy anyway).

We have just one additional datapoint to offer in that regard, and that is a former client who has now graduated from Emory and who reported significant support from them in helping to expand the school's offerings in the area he was most interested in (hedge funds). He enlisted help from some prominent alumni and got a new club going on campus and they brought in some big-name recruiters while he was there. You'd probably get a similar reception at most any school if you came to them with such ideas, however we were especially impressed by how much Emory threw itself behind this guy in helping get new things rolling there.

Hopefully some of this helps! Let us know what you decide - you really can't got wrong with either one, but at the same time, the choice of school does change your entire life trajectory from here on out! It's non-trivial. Good luck with it and congrats to be in such an amazing position with these programs!

EssaySnark