Are You B-School Ready? 5 Quick Things To Do Before You Enter A B-School

Here are 5 quick things you can do to become B-school ready:

 

I) Excel and Power-Point

Excel and PPT are the bread and butter of B-School students. This would become a part of your life even before you realise. Even if you have an initial basic understanding of these, you need to align your skills to business presentations. You should be able to decide: what font to use, which colour to put, how many slides to make, how to reduce text on slides, among others. Here are Some Quick Courses that you can do for free (or by paying minimal charges) to Master Excel and PPT in less than a week:

• GoSkills: GoSkills website has a free trial for the first 7 days. One can easily complete at least a couple of courses in seven days.
  N.B:  “Excel Advanced” is a must.
• Udemy: Unlike GoSkills, Udemy is a paid platform but it has been priced very reasonably.

II) Master CV

Your CV is your sole spokesperson in a B-School. Whether it be committee selections or summer internships, the first touchpoint is always your CV. You just can’t mess with it. Making a good CV becomes a lot simpler if one has all points (yes all: big/small, relevant/irrelevant, new/old, all…. just all) written at one place. The 2 months you have at hand is the perfect time to recollect all that you’ve done & achieved in life and get the first draft of your CV ready. These points can be worked upon once you’ve joined a B-School, but only if you have a rough draft ready.

Don’t bother about the CV format. Most B-Schools have their own template. However, you can check Latex-Templates for some good CV templates.

III) Financial Accounting

Engineers, we feel you! This is for you.

As soon as you set foot in the B-School land, the phantom of Financial Accounting will start haunting you. Every term has a mandatory Finance subject, therefore it is imperative for one to develop a basic understanding of financial statements and their analysis. You can do the following courses to do so:

• Basics of Finance
• Basics of Accounting

 

IV) Basic Domain Knowledge

B-Schools are known for their batch diversity. Different students have different backgrounds and therefore contribute very differently during class discussions. To be able to appreciate the depth of such discussions it is essential to know the basics of these domains:

• Operations
• Marketing
• Microeconomics
• Statistics
  

V) Networking & Soft Skills

Research says that successful managers spend over 80% of their time in building stout networks. If you’re an introvert, you are bound to miss out on a lot. Develop the ability to break the ice with strangers and to learn with whomever possible. The importance of soft skills can never be sufficiently explained. As a B-school student, you are required to make one or more presentations for every course and also during your internship, therefore being presentable always helps you earn brownie points.

Having said that, don't forget that this is the last time you'd get so much time to spend some quality time with your family/friends, go on a trip, to follow your passion, and to live your dream. Do all of it alongside your B-School preparation.

Good luck!

Let me know if you have any query, in the comments section.