Choosing Your B-School: Why Interacting with Current Students is Essential
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when trying to pick the right business school. From rankings to tuition fees, to deciding on the location, your head may well be spinning in several different directions. Where has the best career options? The top student clubs, or the most value?
Often, the best way to find out the real deal about a program is by talking to the people who’ve experienced it firsthand. After all, while rankings offer numbers, they can’t convey the genuine sentiments of students.
For example, most school websites say they offer career support, but only students who have navigated through it can truly describe the experience – from teaching quality to classroom atmosphere and campus life.
If you’re contemplating studying abroad, understanding the experiences of international students at your desired university is crucial. After all, you don’t want to arrive in another continent only to find out you won’t be provided accommodation, or that you’ll have to wait months for a visa renewal.
Plus, when it comes to making friends, other students can offer insights into which societies to join, and even share their own culture shock stories. All of this can provide some of the most important pieces of information when making your choice.
It’s no surprise, then, that despite the plethora of research tools available, a significant 57% of students find talking to school ambassadors the most helpful resource when choosing where to study, according to an Intead report.
But how do you find the right people to talk to?
Chat with students via Unibuddy
While many schools have ambassadors on hand to provide an insight into study life, they may not be able to answer all your various questions.
Spending hours trawling through LinkedIn or your target school’s alumni profiles is another way to get answers, but this sounds like an unwanted chore on top of all the other tasks involved in applying for a degree.
Business school is such a large investment in time and money – it shouldn’t feel impossible to find authentic, personalized guidance.
Fortunately, GMAC is now partnering with Unibuddy: an online platform that allows you to speak with students from all over the world to find out more about their university courses.
Easy to use and available on mba.com, all you need to do is complete a short sign-up process to make a profile, after which you can chat to students, ask questions, and get a feel for the programs they’re studying.
If you’re preparing for the GMAT exam, it can be a great way to hear from successful students on how best to study for it, including how much time you need, what scores you should aim for, and even how to deal with stress.
Plus, where better to find out the ins and outs of campus life? Every school has its own culture and its own stories, and we can help you get ahead of the curve. Get the low-down on the best study spots, the cheapest bars, and the local must-do experiences. By the time you start, you’ll be known as the go-to guru for making plans.
No one person’s experience of business school is going to be the same as the next. The ability to talk to multiple students on the same program means that you can get advice that is tailored to you. Interested in specializing in marketing? Tech? Finance? Make sure to seek out students who list these study areas on their profiles to find out more about how suited a program is for your needs.
An overwhelming 89% of Unibuddy users say they feel more confident in their choice of school after using the platform.
So, why not take a look for yourself? No matter where you are on your business school journey, GMAC and Unibuddy can connect you with new opportunities.