There's a great scene in that Phantom Menace movie, where Liam Neeson and Ewan MacGregor are whizzing through the sea in their Jedi submarine craft and an enormous antediluvian fish with fangs is chasing after them.
MacGregor agitatedly refers to the impending disaster while Neeson blithely seems to ignore it, and maintains a posture of perfect serenity.
Then, just as the maw of the mighty beast is about to snap , a gigantic undersea Tyrannosaurus Rex (what else?) moves in from the side, and ambushes the Star Wars equivalent of Jaws on Dark Side steroids, putting paid to its hunt and snacking on it instead.
"There's always a bigger fish", preens Neeson, and on our heroes go to continue their task.
We're kicking off this series of posts on choosing an MBA by addressing what is, from our perspective, one of the least well understood aspects of choosing an MBA, namely going for "ranking" or general school "brand".
Our view is that both these characteristics are NOT the top considerations for a person choosing their next steps in executive education, however we realise that they can be used as a metric for how the whole experience works out for you, depending on what your ultimate goals are.
We are, it must be said, genuinely concerned when a GMAT Zone student or Admit Zone client tells us that they want to go to "an Ivy League school" or a "top 10 school". We fully support people's ambition (and of course, we here at the Zone studied at schools of this type) to aim for excellent schools, our concern is that "excellence" per se really only matters when it is relevant and suitable to your career plan. Read on, and see what else we think about with respect to the school's brand and ranking.
