Five Years to B-School: The Fifth Year

In a year you'll be in business school. So wrap up things at work, finalize your list of top schools, and tackle those application essays

By Francesca Di Meglio

To help you, BusinessWeek.com is launching a new series: a five-year planner for business school. The five-part series—this is the fifth—will provide a year-by-year guide to what you should be doing and thinking about in building the sort of résumé and skill set that will be attractive to MBA admissions committees.

By the end of Year One, you had launched your career and found a mentor. In Year Two, you began taking on more responsibility at the office and in your extracurricular activities. Year Three brought a promotion or a move to another company. You made your mark on the job and started preparing for the application process in Year Four. Now, your life is about to completely change. You're ready to actually apply to graduate business school and become a student again. This year will fly by, so let's get to work:

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Aspiring MBAs, who have one foot out the door of their office during the application season, tend to catch senioritis, a disease that grips folks leaving their jobs, as well as kids graduating from high school and college, and has them doing little to nothing in their final weeks. Don't be among the ill. This is a great time to make yourself invaluable, says Liz Riley Hargrove, associate dean for admissions at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. "You don't want to put yourself in the position where you burn any bridges before going to business school," she says.

Even if you probably won't return to the company where you're working now, you still want to keep your options open, and to do that you must continue to give it your all on the job. Lengthy assignments that might not get completed before you leave for business school are less than ideal and should be avoided if possible. But smaller projects, as well as work that has you testing the waters of functions that might interest you in your post-MBA career, are worth taking on, says James Frick, director of admissions, operations, and recruiting at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. Besides keeping you in the good graces of your employer (who probably is writing a recommendation for you), these assignments can help you weed out post-MBA career goals you may not be suitable for or interested in, and provide fodder for application essays and interviews.

On your way out of the office, you should also make it clear that you're going to business school to expand your skill set and not because of dissatisfaction with your job (even if that's the real reason you're leaving), says Mae Jennifer Shores, assistant dean of MBA admissions and financial Aid at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In Year Five, you also have to reflect on what you've accomplished in your career so far. Besides keeping a leadership journal and evaluating how far you've come, both of which are recommendations from Year Four, you should also determine quantified outcomes of projects, suggests Dan Bauer, founder and managing director of The MBA Exchange, which is headquartered in Chicago but provides consulting services for MBA applicants around the world. Both you and your recommenders will want to point to numbers, such as process improvements or sales growth.

Still, not everyone is seeing roses and rainbows at work these days. Applicants who think they might get laid off or already have been laid off because of financial woes don't have to run and hide from the admissions committee. "It's the reality of our economy right now," says Hargrove.