3. Visit programmes and actively use your intuition.

After reading through the programme information and identifying those programmes that seem to satisfy your major concerns or criteria, arrange to visit each.

a) Facility visit

Where are MBA classes held? What resources are available on campus or within the facility? Who will assist the students throughout the programme? What is the MBA culture like?

Meet with the MBA Director, faculty and current students, if possible. If a tour can be arranged at the campus or facility, visiting the MBA classrooms and other resource space can be very helpful.
Some programmes offer Information Sessions, which provide prospective MBA students an opportunity to meet with some of the current students, as well as teaching and administrative staff members. Attending one or more of these sessions and chatting with the people involved can provide very useful information.

b) Intuition

Which programmes seem best, intuitively? How did you feel when you talked to the people who manage the programmes? How did you feel when you asked for information? How did you feel when you attended an information session or visited the institutions? How do you feel about the graduates or students you met?
Actively factoring in one’s intuition and feelings is an important part of making a wise decision. Totally analytical decisions can be the wrong decisions. Therefore, I encourage you to consider your feelings and factor those into your decision, as well.

4. Analyse your options and select a programme by using the decision matrix.

PRIORITISING YOUR CRITERIA
After identifying your important criteria, a next step is to prioritise them. Use a weighting of 1 to 10 for your criteria; clearly identify ten as the most and one least critical.

Example: You may identify five criteria: personal objectives, commitment, location, cost and intuition as important to you. In prioritising these five criteria, you may place a weight of 10 on intuition as it is the most important to you followed closely by your personal objectives and commitment, which you might weight at say, 9 and 7 respectively. You might consider cost to be less important of the other criteria and weight it 2. Finally, location may be weighted 5, placing it between cost and intuition in importance.

Note: These weightings are yours and reflect your priorities. It is important that the criteria are not equally weighted.

With your critical criteria prioritised and understanding how you feel intuitively about the programmes, you can analyse your programme options and select the ‘right’ one for you.
Remember that the effectiveness of this decision process depends on you clearly identifying what is important to you (your critical factors) and the importance (weights) of each factor.
(Click Here to use The MBA Decision Matrix)