Right now, there are veterans across the country getting ready to apply to the nation’s top MBA programs and get a jumpstart on their post-military careers. Business schools are a great place to go to match leadership skills gained in the military with practical business acumen. You may be able to lead a team, but can you read a balance sheet or model a discounted cash flow?
Here are 50 things every veteran should know before they start applying.
- Aim high. Yes- I just stole an old Air Force recruiting slogan. More often than not, I talk to a veteran looking at MBA programs and think that they are aiming too low in their school selection. But it is true. More often than not, I see veterans not giving themselves enough credit for their accomplishments. What’s the worst that happens if you apply and don’t get accepted? Since most schools waive the application fee for veterans, it’s really just time to put together the application. So swing for the fences.
- An MBA isn’t a golden ticket. Generally speaking, your career prospects look good if you have an MBA but it is not a guaranteed ride on the Easy Train to Riches. You still have to show up and put in the work in whatever you do.
- Rankings do matter. The fact of the matter is there are three sets of MBA rankings. There are the M7 (the most elite: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Kellogg, Booth, and Sloan) the Top 20 (all those plus everything else in the Top 20), and then….everything else. You really want to go to a Top 20 program. There CAN be some sensible reasons to go outside of this, but that is really on a case-by-case basis (ex: If you KNOW you want to work in the mining industry in Arizona, then maybe go to Arizona State and not Harvard as those connections will likely come much more in handy).
- But rankings are not everything. Don’t use the rankings as your only way to decide where to go. Take into consideration the culture of the school, the people, and their employment outcomes. I got into a higher-ranked school than where I ended up going and do not regret turning down that offer for a second as it was not the right fit for me overall.
- You can determine your future. The military told us what to do but now we can decide what is important to us. Think about that both during your school selection and in finding your first job after business school.
- Talk to the veterans club. Every business school likely has a veterans club of some type. This should likely be one of the first groups you reach out to and can be a great resource to help you in the admissions process. They got in and should now want to help you.
- Talk to civilian students. Sometimes I think veterans can be “blinded by the lights” when at a great business school. We spent years working in windowless SCIFs, living in shi**y housing, and spending months in the dust. A fancy business school can seem like some other-worldly place by comparison. That’s why you should talk to some civilian students. Someone who worked at McKinsey or J.P. Morgan before business school may not think the place as amazing as someone who just came from Ft. Bragg (*ahem* I mean “Liberty”).
- Talk to alumni. It is also really important to get a sense of how much the school may hurt or help you after you graduate. It’s only two years of your life and it will go by FAST. Talk to alumni about the strength of the alumni network, how helpful (or not) the career center is, and what their career has been like after school.
- Assume the admissions committee is ALWAYS taking notes. They will see who signs up for events, who leaves early, who talks to the veterans club, and more. At least assume that they are. The point is-show interest and BE interested.
- You do not need to be an officer. It doesn’t matter what your rank was, it matters what you accomplished while in uniform. An E-6 with a stellar record will look better than an O-3 with a standard one.
- You also don’t have to be a SEAL, Ranger, or fighter pilot. Yes- the alpha types will flock toward MBA programs, but you don’t have to come from this background. I had loggies, intel, submariners, and cryptologists in my class.
- You are completing mostly with other veterans. Schools have a makeup of their ideal class. Meaning, that they have a preference for the amount of people from different backgrounds in the class, meaning veterans also. You need to pass the minimum bar to get seen by the school, but then assume you have to stand out against other veterans.
- Your recommender does not need to be the highest-ranking officer you worked with. Both of my recommenders were O-4s and had been or were my company commanders. They knew me best and could speak on my performance better than anyone. Could I have asked for the O-6 to write? Yes- but he didn’t know me nearly as well. Choose people who know you.
- Veterans tend to do well in interviews. We are confident, respectful, and can usually speak halfway well. Interviews are usually a new thing for a lot of veterans, but it will be OK. Interviews are, in large part, to make sure you aren’t a total weirdo and can get hired somewhere.
- Dress for success. I beg of you. With everything I hold dear in my heart. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, wear your military dress shoes while in a civilian suit. But seriously, you may be in need of a professional upgrade. To start, at a minimum, you need one tailored navy blue suit (for men), and a tailored suit (for women). Brown shows with brown belt. Don’t get crazy. This isn’t a fashion blog.
- You can choose between the GMAT, GRE, and the Executive Assessment. The traditional wisdom was that you needed the GMAT, but the GRE is way more common now (I took that instead of the GMAT). The EA is new on the scene but can also be a viable option. It is usually thought that you may be able to get away with a lower score on the GRE and EA as they don’t get reported to the major ranking services.
- Your classmates and professors want you in the classroom. People will appreciate your life experience and perspective. Especially in questions around the management of employees, a veteran may be one of the few people in the classroom who managed direct reports.
- Fellow veterans are great friends at business school. It can be great to have a group where you can share in dark humor, talk about challenges with the VA, or grab a beer and swap war stories. Not to brag, but the Darden Military Association (where I went) was also known for throwing some of the best parties.
- But you should also make other ones. After living in military towns and moving around every few years, you may find when you start school that most of your friends are veterans. Business school can be a great time to make new kinds of friends.
- An MBA is a very versatile degree. MBAs can be found all over organizations. It is a degree known to encourage problem-solving, strategic thinking, and quantitative analysis. That can be helpful in A LOT of places.
- Consulting is popular, but you don’t HAVE to do it. Consulting and banking are usually the top two post-MBA career paths. Veterans in particular flock to consulting as it can be a great path to go if you are unsure what you really want to do, as a lot of veterans are. But you absolutely do not have to do it.
- Entrepreneurship is a path straight from business school. Going for a startup or going to buy a business can all be done. You may have had the GI Bill help pay for school and still be on VA healthcare, which makes the time right after business school great to pursue an entrepreneurial path. P.S. Are you thinking of buying a business? I recommend taking a look at Acquira and its accelerator as a way to get started. They place you in a cohort with other business buyers, help you vet deals, and then help you put together the financing to close on a business. Take a look HERE and use the link to get 10% off.
- Show up with a plan or find yourself following the crowd. One of the worst things you can do is show up on campus without a plan of attack for your post-MBA career. I know so many people who did this, then followed the crowds to the consulting and banking recruiting events, wasted a lot of time doing that, and then decided to go another direction. Business school is only two years and it goes by FAST.
- Take time while at school to test out ideas and try new things. I’ve seen people do this and it can work really well: they recruit for consulting and then land a summer internship and a job offer. Now they have guaranteed employment after graduation. Then they spend their second year at business school working on an entrepreneurial project. If it succeeds- amazing. If it fails- they have a great job waiting for them. The point is that business school can offer you some time and space to explore new ideas and the network to help make it happen, so take advantage of that.
- Be ready to be exposed to new ideas and a different set of values. You are going to have people in your classroom from countries who, just a few months before, you may have viewed as an adversary. There will also be people with wildly different political views than yours. Building intelligence is about being able to navigate different points of view and being open to changing your mind when presented with sound arguments and data. Be open to that.
- You may be a little older than your classmates. I had a 26-year-old classmate say, “Mark, I heard a rumor you are 31. Is that true?!”. I confirmed this was true. She then asked me where I was on my 26th birthday. I thought about it and said “Baghdad.” She was caught off guard and had no idea what to say. But on average, most veterans are likely a few years older than the rest of their classmates. I never found it to be an issue and I wouldn’t worry about it.
- Other students will also have families. As mentioned above, veterans skew older and often come with families. But you won’t be the only one pushing strollers around campus. Plenty of MBAs start school with a family or start having one while a student.
- The Vet Net can help you get into a great school and help with your first job after school. When looking at a company, talking to a veteran there can be a great first point of contact. Oftentimes, you may find that veterans will give you an unfiltered view of the company. They can also make introductions for you to get you a job. Take advantage of those connections.
- There are lots of ways to help pay for school. GI Bill, VRE (formerly known as voc rehab) and scholarships can all come into play. And yes, even if you have military benefits paying for school, you can still win merit-based scholarships. I know a veteran who had a fully-funded GI Bill and then won a scholarship worth $80,000/year. She got to pocket that money (talk to a tax professional to understand any potential tax implications).
- Some schools have endowments and scholarships just for veterans. A lot of MBA programs have scholarships just for veterans, and many more will offer generous financial aid packages that you won’t know about until you get accepted. To get an idea, Chicago Booth and NYU Stern both have sizable endowments just for veterans.
- Your resume likely needs some work. You may not have ever needed a resume before applying to business school. That is fine.
- Talk less about responsibility and more about results. A common phrase I often see on a military resume goes something like, “Responsible for $23.2 million in equipment.” I hate to burst your bubble, but no one cares. What matters is what you did with that responsibility. Did you improve maintenance metrics? Save money on repairs? That is the kind of stuff that goes on your resume. A helpful convention is Situation-Action-Result (SAR).Situatiuation: What was happening?Action: What did YOU do in that situation?Results: What measurable impact came from that action?
- Check your ego on the resume. Veterans want to list their awards, say how many combat missions they led, and list all the units they served in. Let me say it again: no one cares. Don’t say you have a Bronze Star, say why you got it and the results (SAR). Don’t say how many patrols you went on but DO say how you made an impact on that area.
- Avoid jargon. Ask 10 people in the military what “readiness” means and you will likely get 10 different answers. The point is, be conscious about what language you are using and if someone with no military background will understand it. Helpful tip: have a civilian friend or family member read over it.
- You can work with a consultant. Most veterans who use an admissions consultant view it as a high return on investment. If a consultant can help you get into a better school, that can positively impact your employment outcomes and make that investment well worth it. Yes- there are many free resources out there to help veterans apply, but sometimes when you use a free resource, you get the value you paid for….That being said, you can do both.If you would like to work with a consultant, I recommend Military MBA Consulting. Founded and run by a military spouse and former MBA admissions officer, they exclusively work with veterans applying to business schools. I am a consultant for them so feel free to tell Emily (the founder) that I sent you over.
- Yes, the network is important. But so is the education. One of the most ridiculous things I hear about business school is that the only valuable thing is the network. What?! Professors at the Top 20 business schools are leaders in their fields. They get sought out by Fortune 500 CEOs, write books, and get invited to speak at large corporations. And you get to be in a room and learn from them and talk with them. Many professors are also practitioners, meaning they might be an active hedge fund manager teaching a finance class. If you don’t learn something then you dropped the ball.
- The “soft” classes are typically the ones people value the most years later. Our finance professor was teaching us about building a discounted cashflow model (don’t worry if you don’t know what this is) and told us, “if you are still doing this in 3 years, you messed up.” What did he mean? He wanted to point out that in career progression, you stop doing the technical work and start moving into managing people doing that. Every business school will have some type of class about leading people or teams and many people will write it off, but years later will recognize that what they learned in that class was the most useful over the course of their career.
- Grades basically don’t matter at business school. Seriously. Don’t sweat it. Do your work, go to class, and put in effort. But getting straight A’s only matters for scholarships and no one cares if you just squeak by.
- Make friends with your professors. They aren’t your boss or your commander. They want you to talk to them and learn from them, just as they want to learn from you. Take advantage of having so much time with these experts.
- You can view business school as a “break”, you just can’t say that. After 8 years on active duty and three deployments, I needed a break. I viewed business school as a chance to take a knee, breathe, and reset some things in my life. Many of you probably feel the same way. Here is the thing- you just can’t say that when you are applying. You have to play the game and show that you expect business school to be a challenge. So just don’t say that while you apply.
- You don’t have to stick to the goals you write in your essays. No one from the admissions committee is going to see you going to a tech recruiting event when you said you wanted to be a consultant in your admissions essay and come at you like, “What!? How dare you lie to us like that. Expelled!No. That won’t happen. You are allowed to change your mind.
- Take an Excel course before you start. I thought I was decently competent with Excel when I started business school. I had used it (for only the most BASIC functions) in the army and thought I could get by. Then I saw my classmates who had been private equity analysts start working on a spreadsheet and I felt like a Neanderthal child watching a NASA astronaut explain rocket propulsion. Spreadsheets are the language of business and you HAVE to be comfortable with them, so take some time to learn.
- Take some time off before you start school. Every person I’ve talked to who went straight from the military to school or a job, sometimes signing out on a Friday and starting on a Monday, regretted it. They were burnt out. Everyone I know I took a few months to travel and relax, was so glad they did it. You can read more about my thoughts here.
- Be ready for a tax and cost of living adjustment after the military. Military pay and bonuses like BAS and BAH often don’t get taxed. That goes away after service. A former Marine exclaimed after he got his first McKinsey paycheck and saw the tax hit, “Ooph.”
- Visit the school if you can. Really important. It shows the school you are serious and it is also really important to see what life on campus is like. Do people live there or commute? Does the building atmosphere promote networking? Trust me- these are important questions.
- You will now have access to a much more powerful network. Before I started business school, you could have handed me a perfect business plan and told me I had 1 week to raise $1 million. I would have had no idea what to do. Now I could do that in 48 hours (theoretically). My point is that you are going to be exposed to alumni with deep networks and deep pockets. I interacted with people in the classroom worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was a wild new experience for a lower-middle-class kid. You have that power now, how you use it is up to you.
- You may be able to have a student or alumni write a “letter of support.” This is different than a letter of recommendation and goes through informal channels but can mean a lot.
- Be patient if you are on the waitlist. It’s tough. I know. I was there. There isn’t much you can do other than wait.
- Shoot for Round 1 or 2 . Or go early at your dream school. The general word from admissions committees is that R1 and R2 are the same. All else being equal, I would shoot for R1. If you wait until R3, it will be tougher. Schools like Darden, Fuqua, and CBS all have early admissions options that can help you signal your desire for these schools.
- You got this. I believe in you.
Go crush it.
Mark
The Veteran Professional