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.