2012dreams wrote:
as far as a i know, there are no books that dig that deep. "mba gameplan" does a good job of highlighting unique characteristics of each school and giving a high level overview of what they seek in candidates, but the answers you're looking for are where your personal due diligence and research come in. it is on you to dig deeply into the curriculum, program offerings, strengths and weaknesses, faculty, culture, etc of each school and see which programs will benefit you. you may also find it helpful to initiate contact with a student at each school you are interested in and get their take on the subject. you have to put in the effort...
I realize its on me, not trying to get out of doing the legwork... I just don't really know where to start. I can't imagine that a school is going to advertise its own 'weaknesses' (and have yet to see that done), and comparing strengths can be difficult because the schools I'm going to be comparing are all going to be relatively strong at nearly everything...
When you say 'dig deep' into their curriculum... what do you mean? Going onto the required courselist, checking out some class syllabi (may have invented a word there), etc?
I figured that checking out each program's website probably is only going to give you a superficial idea what they're looking for and what they offer (and don't offer). From the little I've seen, I see things like "Haas values creativity" (well...uh... duh?) and the like on websites.
And then I could look at things like USNews and other rankings, but again... those rankings often tell only a tiny fraction of the story. I did my undergrad at Berkeley and its something of a tradition there to tear apart all of the various ranking systems because of the millions of flaws they have (which, strangely, always seem to hurt Berkeley's rank... of course, we don't generally argue with the ones Berkeley does well in... strange how that works
).
Anyway, I don't want to sound like I'm just popping off excuses, just trying to figure out what avenues are worth looking into and which ones arent.