Like any other organization, business schools are interested in you as a person outside of school. However, for MBA programs the definition of what an extracurricular is can range widely. Since extracurricular activities are anything that you do outside of your college classes, they can include work experience, volunteer experience, hobbies, and much more. The most important thing is to have something in your life that you are passionate about beyond getting a business degree.
Your resume for getting into business school will be organized much like a resume for a corporate consulting job would be. On one hand, the school wants to know about your initiative and leadership potential. It’s important to have dedicated significant time and made lasting changes to the organizations you’ve been involved with, rather than having been a passive member of a huge range of groups. Hiring managers from consulting firms say that unlike many technical jobs, where your academic and engineering credentials are the priority. Instead, business organizations really want to know what makes you a person outside of your business credentials. Are you a dedicated skier? Are you an amateur portrait photographer? Have you been volunteering at an animal shelter part time since you were 15? These are all positives in terms of proving yourself as a well-rounded person.
“If you’re planning on going to business school, you do all your work with bschool application, and you get in, you should really take the summer before you begin to think about what you want to get out of your Top Ten Business School experience. You will encounter a lot of opportunities, and you will be recruited to join a lot of clubs and activities. You should weigh each one carefully to avoid being sucked into a “banking/consulting” trap in which you end up joining every club and event just because everyone else is doing it.” –Jessica Wang
An original application is always stronger than a cookie-cutter one, especially if it has the grades and test scores to back up its non-traditional interests. Business schools are looking to create the most diverse classes possible, in order to increase the range of discussion and exploration. Your summer work is especially important, because rather than being bogged down in classes, you will have three whole months to dedicate yourself to an organization or a cause. If you are interning at a large business, you should be dedicating yourself to getting a returning job offer as the rock star intern. If you’re somewhere like a non-profit, you want to try to bring yourself to the top of the organization, and work so well that they want to keep you in the group. Focus your work on deliverables rather than responsibilities– it’s better to have a completed large scale project after three months that you can talk about in detail than to be someone whose job was to handle day-to-day tasks without having anything interesting to show for it beyond the experience.
“Harvard Business School recognized that what I wanted to pursue was non-traditional in the area of business. Perhaps it was not as non-traditional as if I had been pursuing one of the natural sciences, but still, it helped me to qualify. My application was mostly research based. I had not had a job, but I had interned at some major non-profits. That was as close to an office job as I had during college.” –Steven Rao
Your area of study is less important than being able to show why business school can help you in whatever field you choose to pursue. Do you want to start a charitable organization that’s going to distribute vaccines in third world countries? Obviously, someone will have to manage the business end of that organization. Are you that person? Does it make more sense to hire a business manager and run the visionary aspects without the degree? You need a clear vision of what you are going to do with your MBA, and your extracurriculars can speak to this. On the other hand, you might list that you were a varsity athlete in college. It shows leadership and the ability to work in a team setting towards a common goal. It may not be relevant to what you aim to do with your degree, but it shows qualities that business schools want to see in their candidates.
On the other hand, just because you want to be the CEO of a billion dollar company doesn’t mean you need an MBA. In fact, of the CEOs of the top 25 companies in the Forbes 400, only two (Warren Buffett and Phil Knight of Nike) have MBAs.
“The way I usually tell people to approach it is that whatever organization you’re in, show somehow that you’re a leader in that organization. If you’re working at a consulting firm, obviously you have to do well on your cases, but there are things that some people do like start initiatives, like a global initiative to improve carbon footprints or something. Or, they try to change a really bad process in the training program. That’s what I did, I tried to revamp our training program. It’s not a huge accomplishment, it’s not a huge extracurricular commitment, it just shows that wherever you go, in the organization you’re in you have some position of leadership without being asked, that you take initiative.” –James Hu
More and more, business schools are emphasizing the ethical responsibility that comes with being a business leader over the purely technical and profit-driven aspects. In your activities, rather than showing what honors you received, there is an added benefit to show what lasting contributions you made to the organization. If you were a leader in student government, it’s important to show what contributions you made to the lasting well-being of the student body beyond throwing class celebrations. If you worked for a non-profit, show how you implemented a fundraising strategy that greatly increased the financial stability of the group. These contributions can help you to stand out as a potential leader for the next generation of business-people.
“Awards, extensive research publications and so on will show how you have used your time. These will give you good information to add to your application and resume, as well as giving you good springboards for your essay topics. This sort of accomplishment will also come through in your recommendation letters from people who know about your level of commitment and the number of hours you put into something you really care about.” –Steven Rao
Top business schools like Harvard and Stanford’s GSB love quantitative data. Awards and figures are a way to show exactly what your responsibilities were and how well you completed your tasks. Some schools are more focused on a personality fit, and are interested in what you learned from the experience. No matter what, it’s essential to show that you attacked the endeavor with enthusiasm and passion. You don’t want to come of off as someone who is going to coast through business school; rather, you want to seem like the kind of person who will make all of his or her classmates a better leader in the future.
In this section, Extracurriculars, you will learn how to organize both your life up to the point of your business school applications and your resume sections within the applications themselves. You’ll show the top MBA programs exactly who you are as a person, and why you’d contribute greatly to their incoming class of students.
