Hello readers! Welcome to a brand new edition of MBA Mondays.

Applying to an MBA program at a top school requires a lot of planning, effort and hard-work. But beyond all that, what you need is a set of intangible qualities such as managerial, social or entrepreneurial skills which differentiates you from the rest of crowd and improves your chances.

George Andrews, Associate Dean at University of Chicago’s Booth School says, “The intangibles are in­cred­ibly important because they help separate the high-scoring GMAT candidates from each other and build a diverse class”.

Current students at these business schools, echo the opinion. For instance, Stefan who hails from Belgium and is an MBA student at Stanford says in a pre-recorded message, “From the classmate who climbed Mount Everest to the one who started a microfinance organization for individual entrepreneurs, these are the people who are your classmates and will ultimately become your friends — for life”.

So if you have been raised in Hong Kong, studied in another country and worked in Britain before applying to the MBA course, you might just make it to your dream school. The key is to demonstrate the value you bring to the school as an applicant. 28 year old Indian IT professional Radha Rai did just that by starting a company that builds smartphones apps for the GMAT, which is also the first hurdle for all MBA aspirants. Radha said, “I wanted to show I could bring more to the school”. “I show it from my start-up because in my regular job, you don’t get opportunity for taking risk.”

The strategy worked very well as Rai was accepted to the Both School of Business in University of Chicago, despite scoring well below the average GMAT score. Looking at the statistics, last year in 2010 only 22% applications were accepted out of a pool of 4299 applicants to the Booth’s full-time MBA program.

Another student Eric Bell took an innovative approach. Bell was interested in applying for the MBA program at Georgetown and was working as a financial analyst at Citi Private Bank. To improve his application, he started teaching financial literacy to children by launching a non-profit in D.C. That demonstrated his seriousness to start a business in the financial domain to the admissions committee.

Bell, who is still involved with the non-profit, Greater Washington Jump$tart Coalition, and is launching a personal finance advisory firm, YoBucko.com says, “It gave me a story to talk about”.

While studying in a high profile business school is an expensive proposition,  research by Bloomberg Businessweek reveals that graduates from these schools earn over $1million more during their career lifetime in comparison to median MBA programs.

Today admission consultancies across the world are coaching students with different parts of their MBA applications, i.e. writing essays, letters of recommendation and preparing for interviews. The bottom-line is that an MBA admission consulting firm helps students in formulating a strategy to market themselves to top schools. This guidance often paves the way to an admission slip.

To sum-it up, it’s not that you have to do things out of the world to get into a top school. It is about doing common or ordinary things in an extra-ordinary way. So you need not worry, if you haven’t climbed Mt. Everest! If you have done something that demonstrates your hard-work, dedication and initiative taking skills, that is what the school is looking for. It could be simple things such as re-structuring the recruiting process in your organization or introducing a new mechanism for internal organization collaboration.

For more guidance on pre-application strategies you can use the contact form on our website and write to us.