How to do school research?

Question

All, i just finished the GMAT this past weekend and i'm moving on to the next phase - school research. I've seen varioius threads on the forum giving advice on how to do that. Is there an close-to-exhaustive check list somewhere of ALL the resources people have found helpful researching schools?

Here are the few that came to mind:
- school affiliated properties. school website, admission/dean blogs, students blogs, alumni blogs
- forums like gmatclub, BW forums, admission consultants blogs
- people. talk to students, talk to alumni
- ...

anything else? Can someone share their experience researching schools and lessons learned in terms of how valuable each resource is?

thanks a bunch!!

Av · Answer

The first step of school research is to sift through employment reports and identify all of the schools that have strong placements in your career of interest. The school profiles associated with the businessweek rankings are a pretty good resource to make a quick assessment of each school before downloading the official employment report. Once you've identified which schools appear to be strong in your area of interest, it's time to group them in order of selectivity - Hjorts ranking of Ultra Elites, Elites, etc. is one way of doing this. Now comes the harder part - assess each school for personal fit. Personal fit is a little difficult to gauge without visiting the school in person, but you can certainly evaluate the differences in each schools curriculum and teaching methods by reading brochures/websites.

Most schools have videos on youtube, so you might find that to be a helpful way to get a different view of each school and its students.

How to do school research?

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