Earn It: A Surprising and Proven Approach to Getting into Top Mba Programs

By Katie Malachuk

This book is far better than it has any right to be. My best advice is that you shouldnt waste the time and money it takes to get an MBA. But if youre going to ignore that advice, please (please!) read this book first.
- Seth Godin, Stanford MBA and New York Times bestselling author of Linchpin and Tribes
Heres the powerful truth about getting into business school: it starts by being honest with yourself. As a graduate of Stanfords Graduate School of Business, and throughout her career as a highly sought-after admissions consultant as well as yoga instructor and life coach, Katie Malachuk has learned that no matter your vocation, fulfillment is only achieved when you find your true place in the world. With Earn It, she offers her surprising yet highly successful approach that transforms the admissions process from burden to adventure.
Earn It can supply you with the practical, insider savvy of a winning consultant, but it goes well beyond other books in the field. It seeks to reveal your true self-your gifts, values, and callings. This is more than your average guide to getting accepted to prestigious programs. Its a guide to finding your bliss and making it last well beyond graduation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452577258

Katie Malachuk

Katie Malachuk—Harvard BA, Stanford MBA, Naropa MDiv—is a Buddhist chaplain, mind and life coach, yoga and meditation teacher, and college instructor. She is also the author of You’re Accepted and Earn It, which use yoga philosophy and life coaching to transform the college and MBA admissions processes into journeys of self-discovery. www.katiemalachuk.com

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Copyright © 2010, 2013 KATIE MALACHUK.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-7724-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-7725-8 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 11/27/2013

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

What Are The Real Reasons You Want To Go To Business School? Make Decisions For Yourself And Run Your Own Race

Chapter 2

What Can I Do To Be More Attractive To Schools? Follow Your Bliss

Chapter 3

Answer The Call

Chapter 4

The Dreaded Essay: Fear Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against Self-Discovery

Chapter 5

The Gurus: Family, Friends, Coworkers, Consultants, Recommenders, And Even Interviewers … And You. Remember, You Are Not Alone.

Chapter 6

Overcoming Obstacles: Bust Through Stress, Exhaustion, Boredom, Frustration, Waiting, Decisions, And Denials. Learn Your Lessons And Keep The Faith.

Chapter 7

It’s About More Than Applications: Inviting Your Highest Self To The Party Of Life

Final Thoughts: Earn It

Acknowledgments

References

About The Author

In Earn It Ms. Malachuk has captured the elusive spirit of the MBA application process. While the realization that there is no right answer can be frustrating for some applicants, those who are able to understand and embrace the value of honesty and self-reflection will find this book liberating. Having read tens of thousands of applications during my tenure as Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid for the Wharton School, I can say that Ms. Malachuk’s words of wisdom are spot on. Certainly she prescribes a path that is astonishingly simple (be honest with yourself, tell the truth, and take the time to really explore why you are doing this), but in this simplicity of course lies the challenge. Self reflection is no easy task, but this book serves as a refreshingly candid look at how this process can be used to enhance all aspects of one’s life. Required reading for anyone applying to MBA programs or looking to take a next step in their life.

—Thomas Caleel,

Wharton MBA and former Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid for the Wharton School

Malachuk’s application of eastern philosophy to the MBA admissions process is graceful, playful, and pragmatic. Earn It helps you chart a course to not only business school but also a rewarding and meaningful professional life.

—Chip Conley,

Stanford MBA, CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality,

author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow

Katie has always had a talent for connecting with our clients, easing their anxiety and making the application process more fun, successful and productive.  Earn It shows why. This book is full of heart, humor and wisdom. It is a vital tool for the MBA admissions process, but also so much more. Katie offers a toolkit for living an authentic and purposeful life.

—Stacy Blackman, Kellogg MBA,

Founder/President of Stacy Blackman MBA Admissions Consulting, author The MBA Application Roadmap

Earn It has many universal truths woven through its pages. For the applicant lost among the trees, not seeing the forest, this book will gently lead the reader through his/her predicament to find the path to answers. This book delivers much more than its title.

—Lloyd M. Field, PhD and Author,

Business and the Buddha: Doing Well by Doing Good; Leadership Coaching: Personal Insights to Inspire Others

Katie Malachuk has written a book that rightfully belongs in the spirituality section as much as it does in the Business or College admissions section. She has skillfully integrated wisdom traditions and consciousness based practices such as yoga, meditation, mindfulness, compassion, and self-enquiry to transform the MBA admissions process from one of terror and burden that it is for many applicants to a journey of joy, adventure, and personal growth. There is so much wisdom packed in these pages that I would recommend it to friends as a way to lead a more awake and conscious life even if we are not applying to an MBA program

—Gopi Kallayil,

Wharton MBA, VP Google

Applying to business school is stressful, no question about it. Katie Malachuk has written a wonderful book filled with wisdom and practical advice on how to successfully navigate the increasingly complex and competitive world of MBA admissions.

—Carol Grayson,

Graduate Admissions Consultant,

former Admissions officer at INSEAD and Columbia

This book is an offering –

from an unexpected place,

a way to kneel and kiss the ground

To whom much is given much will be required. (Luke 12:48)

If you contribute to other people’s happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life. (Dalai Lama)

And mankind is naught but a single nation. (The Qur’an)

The highest form of wisdom is kindness. (The Talmud)

INTRODUCTION

SO YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT APPLYING to business school. Excellent. Yet it can feel not so excellent. It can feel like a huge, gross, pressure-filled push to get into the highest ranked schools. So how are you going to get in? Good question. And you could make this process simply that—getting into business school. Or, if you have the courage, you could take this game up a notch. Could you be so fearless as to make the challenge of applying to business school, and possibly all of life, being the real you?

And I mean the real you. Not the more strategically marketed version of you. I’m talking about the highest version of you. The you that you came here to be. The you that can change the world. No joke. You see, many could argue that business trumps politics these days in influencing the direction of the world. When you graduate from a top business school, you receive keys to the kingdom in many respects. People will hire you, trust you, promote you, listen to you…because of a brand on your resume. Whether or not that’s fair or right is a legitimate question. But the fact is, it’s the truth. By graduating from a top MBA program, you’ll have lot of possibilities and power. With this power, you can influence the lives of others and the direction of our world. Big stuff. Thus, the massive challenge of business school isn’t getting in, it’s what you do with yourself once you’ve left.

Top business schools know that their graduates wield tremendous influence, and they want to make sure you can handle it. To whom much is given, much is indeed required. So the admissions committees are higher minded that you might think. They understand that we all make up a single nation in our global economy and society. They know that you will have the power to influence this nation of humankind. Thus, they are wondering if you have goals that run deeper than simply getting a great job. What about your vocational and personal goals? Where you can share your kindness? Where you can contribute to others’ happiness? How will you change our world? Why should we trust you with the power to do so?

Are those questions daunting? Inspiring? A bit of both? If you want to step up and truly play this application game, then you need to go down this daunting, inspiring road of self-discovery. You need to let go of the What can I do to make you like me? state of mind and instead get curious about who you are and what you have to offer business school … and the world.

Indeed, you do have much to offer the world. Underneath all of the assumptions and roles and labels that you play out every day, at your core, you are a force for good. This can actually be really intimidating, to recognize that you are not simply your resume … to accept that you are something much bigger and much brighter and much more powerful. In fact, you are unique in your bigness and brightness. There are gifts only you can bring and callings only you can answer. There are ways only you can change our world. Granted, it takes a boatload of uncovering and listening and getting out of your busy brain to figure out who you are and how you can make a difference. And that’s what we’ll do in this book. We’ll look at how you can earn it—earn that spot at business school, earn that trust, earn that power to influence and shape our collective future.

OK, though, I hear you. You want to get into school! Don’t worry. I will certainly give you tried-and-true advice on specific aspects of the application process—school selection, competition, extracurriculars, interviews, recommenders, stress, decisions, and especially the essays. More important, though, this book will help you reframe how you look at applying to business school. You are embarking on what can be an incredible time to get to know who you are—what you value, what makes you happy, who is important to you, what experiences have shaped you, what dreams and plans you have. And when you approach the applications with the goal of self-realization, you’ll actually get better results. You are going to present a far deeper, more thoughtful, and thus more attractive application to top business schools.

So why should you pay any attention to what I have to say? Before going to business school at Stanford, I was the director of admissions for Teach For America, which is similar to running admissions for a college or graduate school. There I found that the best applicants were the ones who truly knew themselves and could show that on paper, and I put that knowledge to use when I applied successfully to business school.

More recently, I have been an MBA admissions consultant, working with people applying to the top business schools. For years, I have been helping applicants structure their application stories, choose schools, create essays, prepare recommenders, practice for interviews and decide where to go. I’ve worked with an extremely diverse group of people— the ones you assume you’ll find at business school and the people you never would imagine ending up there; applicants with high GMATs and GPAs, and those who struggled on both fronts; people who have toughed it out on Wall Street and people from villages in rural India; mid–career changers and recent college graduates; bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, consultants, volunteers, painters, and poets. I’ve seen it all at this point.

And I have to say … my clients’ track record is very, very good. But here’s why—they were all willing to stop seeing business school as either something they were entitled to or something they feared. Instead, they reframed this process as an opportunity to earn that spot at a top MBA program and used self-discovery as the means to get them there. They let me infuse tricks of the trade from my other job, teaching yoga, to help them come to know and express themselves on a far deeper level than they’d anticipated. They found that writing the essays could be a life-changing experience in terms of clarifying where they had come from and where they wanted to go. Indeed, they stepped up to answer the call—and thought about how they could each uniquely impact humankind.

Again, the good news is that business school admissions officers are way more interested in this honest approach. They are not looking for tricky gimmicks and slick marketing. They are looking for genuine self-discovery on the part of the applicant. They want candidates who know themselves, who are ready to light up their campus and our world. That is what my applicants have shown them over the years, and that is why they ended up at top MBA programs.

But I also know a lot about school admissions from my own journey. Although my resume looks polished, the real story hasn’t been all that pretty. Here’s the fun version of my resume that I can tick off at parties: I went to Harvard, did Teach For America and then was the director of admissions for Teach For America, went to Stanford for business school, did strategy consulting and worked for an education startup, and then ditched office jobs to become a yoga teacher and admissions consultant, and I’m now writing books on applying to schools.

Wow, sounds so smooth and successful. Even the risky part of leaving office jobs worked out, with the yoga teaching and admissions consulting and now writing books. Yeah, well, behind that sound bite is more than a decade of stops and starts; suffering through some serious sadness; feeling totally lost; weeping all over Chicago, D.C., New York City, and much of northern California; and three stints of living with my parents (the shame!).

You see, I went to two colleges and two graduate schools. By age 29, I had attended Northwestern, Harvard, Georgetown Law School, and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, but I’d only graduated from Harvard and Stanford. I’d dropped out of Northwestern and Georgetown. A friend of mine from college, upon hearing that I’d started doing admissions consulting, joked that I was the perfect person to help people get into schools, but they should talk to someone else about staying. Exactly.

I’m not going to lie to you: my relationship with school admissions has been a complicated one. At low times in my life, I used it as a proxy for self-acceptance. I grew up with the common, chronic afflictions of perfectionism and overachievement. Perhaps you’re familiar with this? It was all too easy to let admission processes feel very personal. But at my higher moments, I used school admissions as a tool for self-discovery. And what I found through this decade of applications is that, as with love, you really need to accept yourself before someone else (even schools!) can accept you.

In my first admissions process, as a senior in high school, I had my heart broken by Duke, a college I’d fallen in love with simply because it was a popular choice at my large, competitive, public high school outside of Washington, D.C. I was terrified that I wouldn’t get in and tried to create a perfect application for them, focusing on their needs, not mine. When they rejected me, I saw myself as a complete failure. It didn’t help that the day after we got the news from colleges, I walked through a hallway at school only to hear someone say, Can you believe Katie Malachuk didn’t get into Duke? Ouch. I headed off to Northwestern, a great school but one I only applied to because a lot of other kinds in my honors English class were doing so as well. There I became incredibly depressed for a lot of reasons, none of which had to do with Northwestern because it’s a wonderful place. But one of my biggest issues was this idea of having failed at college admissions, which stuck inside the perfectionist, young adult me.

I ended up dropping out of college, taking time off, and doing some massive soul-searching. I wasn’t sure if I’d return to Northwestern, which I knew would be different with a different frame of mind, or if I should transfer. I decided to explore my options and fill out a couple of transfer applications. It was completely different experience than my first time applying to college. I was really open and honest in my essays and applications, and the entire experience helped me to understand what I’d been through and how I’d grown. I ended up transferring to Harvard, which was a major victory, not because I got into Harvard but because I had come to know and accept myself in an unprecedented way.

Of course, I didn’t get the self-acceptance lesson in one take; such lessons repeat themselves until we get the picture. So I had a lot of twists and turns throughout my twenties as I tried to find my place in the world. Indeed, my graduate school experiences mirrored the undergraduate in many ways. I applied to law school as I was finishing up my two-year teaching commitment to Teach For America. I had no interest in being a lawyer. I was applying out of fear, scared to be in the world without the safety of an affiliation. I was tight and stiff in my applications and got rejected from my top schools. Again, Georgetown was a great school—I just had no interest in being there. Having been through this experience at Northwestern, I recognized the sadness and detachment, and I left after one semester.

Again, I entered soul-searching mode, and that’s when I returned to Teach For America in the director of admissions role. I applied to business schools because I loved managing my team and was interested in studying nonprofit management. But a part of me still felt like a failure from the law school episode, like I needed a graduate degree of some kind. I wasn’t dead set on going to business school. I approached the process in an exploratory way. What would I gain from this? Why should I be making this move? As with my transfer applications, the process was about me, not the schools. I only applied to three schools (Harvard, Stanford, and Yale), and I was accepted to all three. Stanford felt like home immediately, and I loved my time there.

However, the greatest gift was to see that at Harvard and Stanford, just as at Northwestern and Georgetown, I had natural ups and downs with classes, extracurriculars, boyfriends, all of it. Sure, Harvard and Stanford were a better fits for me, and I was in a better place emotionally during those times, but I still had a normal human existence full of joy, sadness, laughter, and tears. I started to learn though that the real game in life is trying to keep it real and stay grateful through all of it.

And I am extremely grateful for that ride I took through two college and two graduate school admissions processes. Those times of falling down and dropping out taught me how to pick myself up and dive back in. Trees only grow in the valley, as my mom says, and it was in the depths of sadness and fear that I planted the seeds to live a life that is now full of hope and faith. And living from hope and faith is a way better time.

In fact, this hope and faith were what allowed me to leave traditional jobs and take the risk to become a yoga teacher and admissions consultant and now a writer. These changes have brought more challenges and joys. Throughout all of it, I have learned the importance of being authentic, tapping into your intuition, learning your lessons, following your heart, and keeping faith that the universe has much bigger and brighter things in store than you can imagine. These lessons have become clearer to me through teaching yoga and exploring that philosophy. As such, there is for sure a spiritual side to this book. Try not to be freaked out about seeing the word spiritual. We’ll get into that later, but it’s simply about feeling connected to everything else and understanding that you have a deep well of effortless wisdom and compassion.

Perhaps as you feel the stress and competition around business school applications, you doubt if you have a naturally radiant, patient, compassionate, graceful, and loving part of you. Don’t sweat it. We all do. As it turns out, your grandma, your kindergarten teacher, your rabbi, your minister, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Bono, and Oprah are all onto something—you’ve got a peaceful, joyful, content place inside. As mentioned, you are much more than your resume. You are much more than what you do. We are each far more powerful than what we tend to show day to day. However, we habitually bury that glowing Self, as it is sometimes called in yoga, underneath our chattering human minds, which feed on fear and ego to try and protect us in this scary, competitive, changing world.

I am using Self in this book to stay consistent with the yoga tradition, and this is even a casual way of using Self – meaning your highest Self. But we can use Self, soul, spirit, God, Buddha Nature, nothing at all. Different traditions and people have different ways of pointing to innate wisdom. For me, the differences between these concepts fade before the luminosity of that wisdom itself. So we will roll with the Self in here. The point is to start seeing that you are much bigger and brighter than those everyday chattering thoughts and unconscious behavior patterns that we all have.

Again, though, this book is very much about getting into business school, because beyond the self-acceptance lessons learned during my admissions processes, I also learned a very big gem during my time at Harvard and Stanford. That is what I’ve already mentioned: you gain great power from attending very highly regarded schools. To be honest, it frustrated me at times. I mean, nothing would change except the school name on my resume, but I was afforded much more respect and influence because of it. And you will be afforded this respect and influence too. And you will have to make choices as to how you use your power. Now, as you are applying, is the time to think about that. It is time for you to earn this opportunity.

So this book will help you get to know the real you, the highest you. You will work on recognizing your unique gifts and challenges. You will explore where you are called to serve. You will learn how to express this potential through your writing. You will gain perspective on how continually to earn this privilege of graduating from a top business school throughout the course of your professional career. And, of course, you will learn how to communicate all of this to business schools.

However, you’re here for a far greater purpose than getting into business school. This application process is not the be-all, end-all of your life. It’s really just the beginning—the beginning of putting your powerful Self out into the world. Get ready to be you! For real. Get ready to own it and bring it in a big, big way.

CHAPTER 1

What Are the Real Reasons You Want to Go to Business School? Make Decisions for Yourself and Run Your Own Race

IN MY WORK AS AN MBA admissions consultant, I have had countless conversations that go a little something like this:

Please do! Because who really wants to talk about building business acumen and gaining leadership skills? Of course, going to business school is about such things. But you’re usually looking for many things professionally and personally when you apply to business school, as is the case with any major life change. Because it’s essential to think about why you want to go to B-school before you apply, we’ll start our journey discussing various reasons for going, the ones we say out loud and the ones we don’t.

Then we’ll take a look at the obvious next question—Where are you thinking of applying? From what I’ve heard over the past few years, most people want to apply to the same two, maybe four, maybe six schools. There are legitimate reasons to only apply to a select group, but there may be reasons to expand the search a bit. So we’ll discuss the strategy around the number of schools and discuss traditional school choice variables like size, geography, diversity, culture, academics, and financing.

With both the why and the where, we’ll look at examples, and in some cases, I’ll provide a list of questions. All of this is presented with the intention of helping you get your creative juices flowing as to how you might want to prioritize schools. Remember, this process is about you getting clear about why you want to go to school and where you want to go. What do you want from your professional and personal life? How will business school help you get there? Are there specifics you need to study? Where do you want to live and work? What is important to you about your social environment? How do you like to play? It’s important stuff to know about yourself in general so you can create a life, during and after school, that actually fits with who you are.

Also, for most of us, applying to business school marks a change. We’re no longer messing around and instead getting more serious about our careers. As we’ll discuss throughout this book, your career can be a satisfying reflection of who you are and what is important to you. So you can use the application process for the higher purpose of getting clear about exactly who you are … and, thus, how you differ from others. As such, this is an opportunity to practice thinking for yourself across your entire life. To that end, we’re going to look at how to tap into your intuition to do the considering on why go to business school at all and where to go. I know that using intuition sounds very yoga teacher. But it’s just a way to clear out the voices of others that get stuck inside our heads so you can begin to make decisions, about school and work and everything else, for yourself.

Finally, we’ll look at the competition beast that rears its ugly head in the business school admissions process. Once you start thinking about why and where to go to school, you start thinking about everyone else who’s applying and comparing yourself. Hopefully, a big takeaway from this book is that you should run your own race. To that end, we’ll explore feelings around competition and how to pay attention to your reactions and move forward with a focus on doing your thing. Alrighty then, let’s go.

WHY GO TO BUSINESS SCHOOL: THE REASONS WE TELL OTHER PEOPLE (AND THE ONES WE DON’T)

Learn about Business and Build Leadership Skills (Get a Graduate Degree and Feel Like a Grown-up)

As discussed in the intro, I went to Georgetown Law School. The main reason I left after one semester is I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer. One might wonder then how I ended up at the professional training school to become one. Well, for some reason, I felt I needed to get a graduate degree to be a grown-up, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. As a women’s studies major and writer type, I figured my kind of people went to law school. Plus I heard a lot of You can do anything with a law degree, and that’s true. But, once there, it seemed like I was going to end up being a lawyer, at least for a little while, and I wasn’t ready to commit three years and a lifetime of school loans to that pursuit.

I talk to a lot of people considering business school who have that same motive of just wanting a graduate degree. And I tell them You can do anything with an MBA, and that’s true … with the exception of being a lawyer. Business school is the new law school in many ways, meaning that people are drawn to it who don’t necessarily want to work in business. Folks who formerly would’ve gone JD or MPP are going MBA. Plus the market is signaling that you can get hired many places (e.g., government, nonprofits) with an MBA. (Tossed in market signaling to warm you up to B-school jargon!) But business school isn’t just some graduate degree to get. You actually learn about business and you learn it in a particular way.

Since my career at law school was brief, I don’t remember much besides many bleary-eyed hours in the library trying to cut through dense texts. Fast-forward to a couple years later on the tour of Yale’s School of Management when I was there for an interview. The student tour guide showed us the central hangout place and a spiffy computer center-type thing. At which point an applicant asked, Where’s the library? Standard question for a school tour. But after much What-do-you-mean-library? I-mean-the-library, back-and-forth, the final response was There is no library. A hush fell over the crowd of good-grade-getter applicants. There. Is. No. Library. The unspoken questions darted around: Do we use books? What do we do here? How do we learn?

Now at Stanford, there was a library, and students were there using the Bloomberg terminals or meeting with study groups in small rooms. But there wasn’t much checking out of books, and it’s not where the academic action was. So don’t expect to be holing up with texts and writing massive papers. The business school course of study is mostly real-time, interactive discussion and idea generation, not sitting alone reading and writing papers. And, despite some arguments to the contrary, you actually do learn things.

Usually people break down the B-school curriculum into two groups—hard skills and soft skills. The hard skills include subjects like accounting, economics, finance, statistics, data analysis, operations, and financial modeling. (I wouldn’t have known what modeling was coming from a nonprofit background, so let me explain that it’s the building of quantitative models using spreadsheets to predict and analyze outcomes. May sound like a drag, but when those puppies run, it’s kinda hot.) With the hard skills, you learn formulas and possibly do problem sets … there is math involved. And if math’s not your thing (as will be indicated by your GMAT breakdown and college transcript), many schools will host math camp before orientation to get you up to speed.

The so-called soft skills include topics like management, leadership, ethics, marketing, government-business interaction, human resources, and leading in a global economy (increasingly big topic). These are areas where you’re exploring behavior—yours, others’, and organizations’. This brings us to how you actually study this stuff, because, um, how do you explore human behavior or practice leadership sitting in a classroom? For the most part, you are doing case studies. You will read about a scenario a company faced. Either on your own or in a study group, you’ll analyze how the company handled the situation. Then you’ll go to class and discuss, debate, etc. In this way, you can study the behavior of the company, but you can also observe your own behavior and that of your classmates as you work together and debate.

Here’s where the leadership building comes in. B-school, generally speaking, is a group thing. In addition to study groups, you will have group projects. When creating your own groups, it can be good to mix up the lot—balance the finance woman with the nonprofit guy, add in someone with marketing experience and the ex-engineer—and mix up the tasks so that you can all learn new things. Many times my patient, quantitatively inclined classmates taught me finance and statistics by helping me during group projects.

You’ll also take on leadership roles outside of the classroom. You’ll be running clubs and organizing events from classroom speakers to great vacations. Everything is very well run at business school! It’s no mystery that business school tends to attract the type A team. A friend who went to Harvard Business School joked that every group meeting began with someone saying, Someone needs to be in charge of this group. I’ll be in charge of this group! As someone who has taken charge of things her whole life, at Stanford, I got to cultivate my inner type B girl because someone else was always stepping up. In this way, B-school is good practice for leading and being led. You all have different talents and interests and can create a really stimulating campus by sometimes stepping up to take on leadership and other times hanging back to learn new things from classmates.

One of the massive life skills is playing nice. We’ve all be working on it since preschool, but that doesn’t mean it gets any easier. We’re individuals with egos, and as such, we can all get selfish and self-absorbed. All this teamwork in and out of the classroom is good practice for getting on well in life.

So whether you just want a graduate degree and a little training on being a grown-up or you want the business skill set