Optimizing The Summer Before Your MBA

Are you wondering how to best prepare for your first year of B-School? Are there things you can be doing before you start the program?

Rising second year student, Anya Thomas shares here tips:

1. Find housing and move in by the beginning of August (don’t wait until September 1^st, your classes start before then and you’ll be stressed if you’re still moving)
   
   If you can . . . take a few weeks off of work and use the time to move to Boston, rest, travel, spend time with family. Basically get refreshed and be ready to give 100% when the semester begins.
   
   
2. Do informational interviews. You’ll get more training for this during Pre-term, but take advantage of contacts you’ll be leaving behind in NYC, San Francisco, Lima, Beijing etc. Use the fact that you’re a student to put people at ease and to learn about roles, functions, and industries that you were always curious about.
   
   
3. While you do not need to spend a lot of time preparing for specific subjects, you can get a head start or review key principles by reading some of the following books:

• FINANCE: Corporate Finance (Plus MyFinanceLab Student Access Card Package (2nd Edition)
  By Jonathan Berk, Peter DeMarz
  
  
• STATISTICS: The Manager's Guide to Statistics
  by Erol A Pekoz
  
  
• ECONOMICS: Managerial Economics
  by Susan Samuelson
  
  
• D. The Accounting Primer will be sent to you. Try and check this over before school starts.

**(note the professors will not post the updated reading list until August, so you may want to check these out from a library or just wait until the exact edition is posted

4). Connect with your future classmates through facebook, BU clubs/organizations you plan to join, contacts you made at Open House. Also, there are several 2^nd year students who are in Boston over the summer and they would love to meet you.

5) Make a list of companies that you are most interested in learning about or working for and search your LinkedIn network to see if people in your social sphere work for these companies.

6) When you get to Boston, visit the gardens in Boston Common, go on a Duck Tour, eat Italian food in the North End, or Clam Chowder at one of Boston’s famous seafood restaurants. Get to know your new city.

I hope that gives you some good ideas. All of us here at BU look forward to welcoming all the incoming students to campus in the coming months!!

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