Ivey Class Visit Scheduled

When I'm not doing the mock tests, I browse the internet and find out about the schools I'm interested in. Ivey offers a class visit every month, when they welcome a bunch of prospective students to campus, sit in a class, sit through presentations, talk with profs/students/admissions people/etc. This is all expense paid if you live in southern Ontario, up to $600 reimbursement if you lived in North America (I think), and up to $1200 reimbursement if you're anywhere else in the world. If you fall under the reimbursement category, you do actually need to apply to Ivey for the next cohort, before you can get your money.

This is open to pretty much everyone, as long as you're more or less eligible to apply to their program. They do require your resume before they can confirm your booking.

I registered online and someone was quick to get back to me. They needed to know how I wanted to get myself to London. From Toronto, I could either drive and receive a gas card (forgot how much), or I could opt for first class train travel. I opted for first class train travel. Its net worth was more than the gas card, and I could relax instead of concentrating on the road. I was put in touch with a VIA rail booking agent, and I was now booked to visit Ivey on August 14th.

GMAT Scheduled

At this point, I was done with reviewing all the materials. I think it was a good move to book the test at this time, for three weeks down the road. This allowed enough time to still get an appointment time slot that was good for me. In addition, booking the test meant there was no turning back, no getting neurotic and thinking I needed more time, and giving myself more time. It was already mid-July and I still needed to take the test and do the applications. My plan was to do one mock test (almost) everyday, up until test day, so that test day would just be like a normal day.

Choosing Schools

Of course, preparing for the GMAT wasn't the only item on my agenda during this period of time. If I wanted to make it to the next class, I still needed to make some decisions about where to apply, and craft my applications. I also didn't want to be too late in the game, especially this year when many people are choosing to go back to school because of the recession looming in the background.

Believe it or not, my choices were actually very limited. As I've mentioned before, I have a weak undergraduate GPA. Specifically, most of the Canadian programs have a hard GPA requirement of 3.0, which I don't have. Now that I think about it, this was also part of the reason I put off doing the GMAT two years ago - I didn't think I had a chance of being admitted into a reasonable school.

With this in mind, the most popular schools in Toronto where I'm at - Rotman (U of Toronto) and Schulich (York U) - were out of the question. I had no doubt that they would not waive this requirement under any circumstances, partly because I've personally experienced the bureaucratic ways of U of T, and partly because there's surely no lack of good applicants that meet this requirement, so there would be no need for them to make exceptions.

On a side note, Rotman and Schulich rarely interview applicants. Rumour has it that if you had a stellar GPA/GMAT/both, you're pretty much guaranteed a spot in the program. This means that you might get a classmate who is an expert at studying (on their own) but lacks other essential skills.

I also figured that I didn't want to stay in a big city anyway, with commuter classmates. I wanted to go somewhere where the MBA class is way more than just schoolwork. I wanted an entire community, complete with networking, socializing and forming friendships. I didn't want to be in a class with people who disappear to go home after class. I also wanted to attend a small program, so that there's enough personal attention and less bureaucracy to go around.

The other thing I prefered was a one-year program, instead of two years. Basically, a one-year program does not contain much less material. First, a "two-year" program really only uses 8 months in a year, so it's only 16 months, versus the 12-months of the one-year program. Secondly, these 16-month-programs are way less intensive - specifically, many of them don't have classes on Fridays, for example.

The only real drawback is the lack of internship opportunities in a 12-month program, but considering that I want to stay in consulting, I don't think that it is necessary for me to have this internship experience. I'm not getting any younger and would rather just get it over with in less time.

Appleseed also briefly discussed the pros and cons of a 12-month-program here, as well as posted a very comprehensive list of what to consider when choosing a program here.

Eventually, without visiting or talking to any school (due to lack of time), I narrowed down my choices to three schools (links on the right):

Queen's School of Business
Richard Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario)
The Johnson School (Cornell University)

One thing that these schools have in common is that they're all relatively small programs in small cities, and most, if not all, of their students relocate for the year. I will talk about my experience with each of them individually in later posts.

I thought that my odds of getting into each of these schools are similar, and so applied to them all at around the same time.

I also picked out a few safety schools, and was going to do another round of applications in February if I didn't get into any of my top choices:

HEC Montreal
Specifically a business school with no other disciplines. Like Queen's, this place is accredited by all three of the world's leading accrediting bodies. One-year program, has a consulting focus that I'm interested in.

Telfer School of Management (University of Ottawa)
One-year program also with consulting options, accredited by 2 out of the 3 accrediting bodies.

DeGroote School of Business (McMaster University)
This made the list because it was close to home, although I was increasingly leaning towards not going there. They only have a 2-year program without a consulting focus, and an admissions lady at the MBA fair told me that their strength was in the co-op program, which is mostly for new grads without work experience.