Returning to business school can take a toll on your ego. In your company, you’re considered the expert. Your peers rely on you. They respect you. And they think you’re special. Come class, you’ll find yourself among other companies’ senior leaders and high potentials. Like you, they’re armed with a wide range of experiences and a daunting list of achievements.
In any room filled with high performers, there is one truth above all others: They are just as intimidated by you as you are by them. That’s when it hits you. You’re here to learn. And learning only comes when you let go and open up.
MOVING FROM LEADER TO LEARNER
Call it the student mentality. Here, you let go of being an expert, says Arnab Roy Choudhury, a communications consultant who earned his Executive MBA degree at Rutgers Business School this spring. He points out that a student’s degree of growth is tied to their willingness to “unlearn.” That starts with listening.
“The most valuable thing in that classroom isn’t the curriculum. It’s the cohort,” Choudhury continues. “Treat every peer as a professor. Ask more questions than answers. And show up, fully and presently, because the compounding effect of real discourse, real relationships, and real challenge is something no online module can replicate.”
Adriana Kiedzierska-Mencfeld is equally bullish on her classmates. A 2026 EMBA graduate from Switzerland’s IMD Business School, Kiedzierska-Mencfeld urges future students to “be as open as possible” – knowing there is something valuable to learn from everyone.
“When someone shares a perspective that feels foreign or irrelevant to your work: lean in, not away,” she tells P&Q. “That discomfort is usually a signal that something worth learning is nearby.”
Craig Norris, UC Irvine (Merage)
LEAN INTO YOUR CLASSMATES…LIKE YOU WILL DO FOR THEM
As an EMBA student at UC Irvine’s Merage College – and the CEO of an AI firm – Craig Norris understood that balancing work, school, family, and self involved occasional limitations. In those times, he observes, it will be your classmates who step up. That makes them all the more valuable to your education…and beyond
“It helps to understand and accept that sometimes there is only so much you can do,” Norris continues. “Being in a cohort with such amazing people – even if you feel you aren’t coming 100% prepared for class – trust that someone there did. Trust that they have a great perspective that maybe you weren’t able to consider and will be able to fill in the gap for you.”
What other advice does the EMBA Class of 2026 offer, be it getting into business school or making the most of it? What would they do differently – or more or less of? When Poets&Quants reached out to top students from the Best & Brightest Executive MBA cohort, we asked them to share their best advice to future students. Here are the 10 things they want you to know before you start your business school journey.
1) Be Authentic In Your Application: “Tell the story of what you genuinely care about and why your particular background makes you the right person to pursue it. Once you’ve met the baseline requirements, the thing that will set you apart is coming across as a good human who takes positions, works hard, and is willing to invest in themselves and others to be a force for positive change in the world. Describe your passion in a way that gets others energized about it. In my opinion, that’s what admissions committees remember, and it’s what your classmates will remember too.
When I applied, I led with what I’d built, why it mattered to me and others, and what I was looking forward to building next. That felt right then and I’m glad I did it.”
Gerald Glover III, Wharton School
2) Be Intentional About Your School Choice: “[This will] ensure the school and programme’s DNA aligns with your intended development plan for post-MBA. An Executive MBA is not just the curriculum, but a vehicle for academic theory to be stress-tested against the lived experience of your course peers.
My greatest growth during the programme didn’t come from a lecture, but from ‘picking the brains’ of senior leaders in my cohort to understand how they applied complex frameworks to real-world challenges in their organisations. I would prioritise a programme where your classmates represent the future version or industries that you want to grow into.”
Luke Parker, Warwick Business School
3) Get Your Family On Board: “Go in with the understanding that it’s not just your commitment—your family and friends are committing alongside you. For two years, they are effectively donating your time, and that’s something you need to recognize and respect. It’s similar to the military in that sense—the individual serves, but the family carries part of that burden as well. Beyond that, don’t approach an executive MBA as a way to get your next promotion. Approach it as an opportunity to become a better leader—someone capable of building organizations, shaping industries, and driving meaningful impact. If you go in with that mindset, the sacrifice has purpose, and the return is far greater than the degree itself.”
Corbitt Huseth, Vanderbilt University (Owen)
Sardana Mikheeva, Duke University (Fuqua)
“An executive MBA is not a solo journey, it’s a team effort. That team includes your family, your workplace, and your broader support network. Make sure they understand the commitment and are ready to support you through it.
I’ve seen firsthand how much families carry behind the scenes, how colleagues step up to take on extra work, and how critical it is to have supportive partners and managers. I’ve also seen the opposite, and it makes the journey significantly harder.
No matter which program you choose, the outcome depends on how you show up. But without a strong support system, sustaining that effort over two years is incredibly difficult. Don’t overlook it.”
Sardana Mikheeva, Duke University (Fuqua)
4) Build Your Support System Before You Start, Not After: “That might mean childcare, meal planning, household help, a flexible manager, and a patient spouse or friends who understand that. For a season, you are going to be a less available version of yourself.
Set expectations early with the people you love. You will say no to dinners, trips, birthdays, casual weekends, and things you genuinely wish you could attend. It is not that those things do not matter. It is that capacity is real, even for ambitious people who like to pretend it is not.
The people who love you will not need you to be perfect. They will need you to be honest. The Executive MBA journey feels long while you are in it, and then suddenly it is over. The work is hard, but the harder part is learning how to ask for help, accept help and let people stay close even when you are temporarily unavailable.”
Kathleen Perley, Rice University (Jones)
5) Know What You Want Ahead Of Time: “Make a list of what matters most in a program and assign points across those priorities to figure out what your most important criteria are. (Mine were about leadership focus, reputation, racial and gender diversity, academic rigor, cost, and location.) Then pressure-test your choices with people who know you well. Interview programs seriously. Then ask yourself a harder question: do you actually want to do this? It’s okay if the answer is, “Not right now.” If the answer is yes, commit. And protect your life while you do it—learning and growth do not require burning out or burning everything else down.”
Steven Cole-Schwartz, University of Michigan (Ross)
“Build your decision matrix before you show up.
First semester will throw more at you than you can take on. Courses you did not expect to want. Clubs. Speakers. Conversations that quietly become opportunities. Without a framework you will drift toward whatever feels exciting and look up at the end of year one wondering why it does not add up.
Write it down before orientation. Two or three things you are specifically there to accomplish. Concrete enough to test. Then every time something new lands in your inbox, run it through the filter.
You will still be surprised. You will still find the class you did not plan to love. But you will do it on purpose, and in an environment this fast, that is the whole game.”
Theodore “Theo” Davidson, Columbia Business School
6) Operate In Weekly Cycles: “I made deliberate tradeoffs to remain fully present at work, engaged in the program, and committed at home. One key strategy that helped me was shifting to operating in phases. Instead of trying to divide each day across work, school, and family, I structured my time in weekly cycles. This allowed me to stay in flow within each domain rather than constantly switching contexts, which made me far more effective. This period also required strong alignment with my wife, who was an incredible source of support and stability, as well as close coordination with my EMBA teammates. We all experienced fluctuations in workload and life demands, and we stepped in for one another when needed.”
Rony Takchi, Washington University (Olin)
Adriana Kiedzierska-Mencfeld, IMD Business School
7) Ask Questions: More than feels comfortable. There are no stupid questions in a room full of experienced leaders, only missed opportunities. The EMBA is one of the few spaces in your career where curiosity is fully welcomed and genuine dialogue is the whole point. Use it.”
Adriana Kiedzierska-Mencfeld, IMD Business School
8) Just Do It: “Do not wait until you feel ready, because that moment may not come.
I dropped out before the first class. I thought I was not ready. My English felt insufficient. The finances were tight. The timing did not feel right. Every one of those concerns was real, and none of them should have stopped me.
The program will be hard. There will be weeks where you feel behind or wonder why you signed up. That is completely normal. Keep going.
The two years I spent in this program were the most valuable of my life. I met people who changed how I think. I learned things that changed how I work. And I found things about myself that I could not have found any other way. If you are on the fence, that is probably a sign you should go.”
Jay Moon, Southern Methodist University (Cox)
Mat Moakes, London Business School
9) Make The Most Of The Experience: “do it for the skills, not the badge. That’s the headline, but the real answer is the one the LBS careers team gave us in week one: you get out what you put in. Someone in that same first week said something that stuck with me: “You have to ‘drive it like you stole it.” For me, that sums it up brilliantly. Throw yourself into things. If you don’t know how you’ll get it done, you’ll work it out. If you can’t, there are ten people sitting around you who can.
Be fearless. This is a rare window to try new things, to be pushed well outside your comfort zone, and the people next to you will become friends for life if you let them.
Get close to the faculty. I’ve built real relationships with professors whose curiosity and depth I found genuinely humbling, and I’ve since brought LBS faculty into strategy projects at my company. That’s compounded the value of the programme for me and for my team. Make the most of it. You only do this once.”
Mat Moakes, London Business School
10) Never Forget – You Belong: “First, don’t doubt yourself. If you have been accepted, you belong there. That voice telling you that others are more experienced, polished, or prepared than you? Ignore it. Everyone in the room is carrying some version of that same doubt.
And whatever you do, don’t compare yourself to others. It will steal your focus and distort your experience. The person sitting next to you is not your competition. They are your greatest resource. The diversity of the cohort, industries, cultures, functions, and backgrounds is not incidental to the program. Some of my most valuable insights came from people whose worlds looked nothing like mine, precisely because they saw things I had long stopped questioning.
Adriana Kiedzierska-Mencfeld, IMD Business School
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