Profile fitment simply means whether your profile is apt for the B-school(s) you are applying to.
For instance, say you are a 32 year old MBA aspirant with 9+ years of banking experience.
Given your age and work experience, what would be a good MBA program for you? The one-year IIMA-PGPX program, where the average age of students is 34 years, will be a great fit! But what if you are just 25 years old with 3 years of IT work experience? Your profile will not fit this PGPX program. In fact, you may not even be eligible to apply as this program requires a minimum of 5 years of work experience! Similarly, a typical two year MBA program at Darden is also not what you should look forward to, where you will be surrounded by much younger and less experienced peers!
Age and work experience are not the only criteria that determine profile fitment. You should also look at your background. For instance, if you are essentially looking for a diverse classroom, applying to a school where most of the students are from an IT background will not be fruitful to you, irrespective of the ranking or reputation of that B-school.
Why do you need to look into MBA class profile or business school profile? And why is profile fitment so important?
Once you join a B-school, for the next 1 or 2 years (depending upon the duration of your program), you will be spending most of your time with your peers rather than with the faculty. Thus, your peers will influence not just your learning but also your experiences and perspective. If you are not able to strike a chord with your peers right from the beginning, or if you feel that you have very little to learn from your batchmates, you will definitely not be able to benefit from your MBA program fully! The fact that networking is one of the primary reasons why MBA aspirants select a particular B-school makes profile fitment all the more important.
The entire idea behind profile fitment is that you should fit in with the average class profile of the B-school(s) you wish to apply to!
You can easily find the class profiles of previous batches on the official websites of most top B-schools.
Profile Fitment Parameters that you need to consider:
Age (mean, median)
Number of years of work experience
Educational background
Pre-MBA industry
Class composition
Wondering which top B-School you can get into? Let us help you!
Get your Profile Evaluated!
Here is a snapshot of an MBA Class Profile!
Harvard Business School: MBA Class of 2019 Profile
Source: http://www.hbs.edu/mba/admissions/admission-requirements/Pages/class-profile.aspx
So go ahead – before you invest money and efforts applying to a B-school, spend some time researching whether you are the right fit for the school!
Do you know how to select a business school? Read this write-up to know more…
Also check out our second blog to this series on “Why the location of a Business school is important!”
An ideal shortlist will have a mix of Dream, Stretch and Reach schools, with some applications for Round 1 and some for Round 2.
