Stig Lanesskog
What do you recommend that students do to prepare to go back to school?
We hope that they would be able to develop their plan for how to best use the next two years, in order to get the most out of their MBA. When students first get here, I ask them “what’s your story going to be?” In other words, what are you going to tell a future employer in terms of, here’s what I did before I got my MBA, here’s what I did while getting my MBA, here’s my experience – this is my story.
We want students to be in a position to be able to answer those questions, knowing that the responses might change once they get here, but to have some trajectory in mind from day one.
At the University of Illinois, students can take advantage of a flexible curriculum, where they can, with their electives, take classes even outside the college of business. Because of that flexibility, they have to figure out how they can take advantage of the resources of the university. So I suggest that they familiarize themselves with what they can take advantage of, through, in our case, the University of Illinois.
For example, if you think you want to do marketing, which is a very traditional concentration – maybe you want to get into the mind of a consumer – so you can take a psychology class that might be helpful for you to really get into the behavior and mind of a consumer.