Financing your MBA - What, When, Why and How ?

Courtesy : Simon Howden

As its been said multiple times, MBA decision can be one of the most important decisions in one's life and it doesn't stop there. As every applicant is aware, the MBA process starting as soon as from the GMAT time is highly expensive. One needs to really put some sincere effort towards planning his/her finances for MBA. People usually tend to postpone the finance planning till the last moment of MBA application process as the pressure of other aspects like school selection, essays, recommendation, interviews gobble up the major share of applicant's time. But this may not be the wisest thing to do as there are lot of financing options available which needs to exercised at a much earlier stage of application process.

I just finished reading the E book - Financing your future by Accepted.com and found it useful for planning our finances for MBA. The book has a lot of information about the types of financial assistance available to applicants. Not only that, it also goes on to the way in which applicants can win those scholarships by aptly planning for it. In this post I am gonna share few useful pointers for applicants to help in their finance planning.

Takeaways from the E book - Financing your future

•  Start planning early. Never ignore the financing part. Parallel the financing research with your school research. Many schools offer merit based, need based and special criterion based awards. Make sure you know what your target school has to offer. E book offers a really well planned timeline for the financing part and also offers great insights on type of awards available to students and the differences between them.
  
  
• There are a lot of external funding available for MBA students. For example Forte Foundation offers fellowship for women students, The consortium offers the Consortium Fellowships for minority students. These prestigious fellowships go beyond the financial aspect and offer  professional mentoring and networking opportunities to selected candidates. So keep your eye open for such tremendous opportunities. You can also search for scholarships in external online databases on Scholarship-Experts and Fastweb.
  
  
• Treat the scholarship application process (if any) with utmost sincerity and diligence as the efforts can pay rich dividends. While some scholarships have a elaborate application procedure which includes essays, SOPs and recos, some school scholarships doesn't need any extra application but will be decided based on the merit of the application.
  

Things I wished to see in the E book

While the book has some very useful resources for domestic applicants, it would be more useful for international applicants if the book adds some more dedicated resources for international applicants.

MBA applicants should also research for school specific financing information which is available on school websites or by contacting finance office. Let me know how you planned your MBA financing and any other sources which you found helpful.

PS: Thanks to Accepted.com for providing me with a copy of this e book. You can check out more about the book here.