The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley has released the application deadlines for the 2013-2014 MBA admissions cycle.  The three round deadlines are:

Round 1

Deadline: October 16, 2013

Notification: January 15, 2014

Round 2

Deadline: January 8, 2014

Notification: March 26, 2014

Round 3

Deadline: March 12, 2014

Notification: May 15, 2014

The new fall 2014 application will be available in August. For more information, visit the UC Berkeley Haas School admissions website.

The University of Michigan Ross School of Business has posted the MBA application deadlines for the 2013-2014 admissions cycle. This year’s deadlines are as follows:

Round 1

Deadline: October 1, 2013

Notification: December 20, 2013

Round 2

Deadline: January 2, 2014

Notification: March 14, 2014

Round 3

Deadline: March 3, 2014

Notification: May 15, 2014

International applicants are strongly encouraged to apply in the first or second round, and all applications are due at 11:59 p.m. EST on the day of the deadline. For more information, visit the University of Michigan Ross School of Business admissions website.

Columbia Business School has posted the MBA application deadlines for the 2013-2014 admissions cycle. The upcoming deadlines are:

August 2014 Entry

Early Decision Deadline: October 2, 2013

Merit Fellowships Consideration Deadline: January 6, 2014

Regular Decision Deadline: April 9, 2014

January 2014 Entry

Deadline: October 2, 2013

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All applications are due at 11:59 p.m. EST on the day of the deadline. Applicants should note that the August entry has two review periods — early decision and regular decision. Because the School uses a rolling admissions process, it is always to your advantage to apply well before the deadline. For more information, visit Columbia’s admissions website.

This post originally appeared on Stacy’s “Strictly Business” MBA blog on U.S.News.com

As a prospective MBA, you’ll benefit enormously from taking time at the beginning of your application process to contemplate the path you’re about to take. This is a great time to ask yourself critical questions, as self-evaluation and reflection are crucial to any MBA application journey. Setting aside some time for heavy thinking before you start writing your essays will prepare you for a solid and strategic application.

Question 1: What are your career goals? As you contemplate applying to MBA programs, the very first step in your self-evaluation process is to consider where you want to be in your career. Ask yourself what you would do if you didn’t need to work for money and what your core values are.

If your career goals are not immediately revealed, ask your friends and family what they see you doing. This process should reveal good ideas and a spark of passion for your career path.

If you are in a field where MBAs are not traditionally required, you may still benefit if your career goals include rising to senior management within your company or starting your own company. As a first step, look around at the people you most admire and want to be like within your target company or industry. Read their bios to see their skill set and educational background.

Talking to people who are pursuing your target career, at any level, is also a great way to understand what you need to do to accomplish your goals.

Question 2: Why do you want an MBA? While an MBA is a great experience, ultimately it’s a tool to advance your professional aims. The degree is highly focused on practical business applications, not intellectual curiosity.

Preferably when you answer the question of your career goals it will be clear why an MBA is the right degree for you. If your career path doesn’t immediately reveal the need for an MBA, yet you know you want one, you may want to delve into your motivations.

Consider your expectations for the degree and critically evaluate whether your hopes match the reality of an MBA program. If you know current MBA students or alumni, sounding them out first is a great way to start your research and make sure you are committed to the MBA application process.

Question 3: Is an MBA the right degree for you? Evaluating your professional goals might reveal that a different type of graduate degree would be useful.

Those interested in finance might also consider a master’s in finance, which typically prepares students more specifically for a career in corporate finance, financial analysis or investment management. That degree may prepare you to be the chief financial officer of a company, but may not be the ideal degree for a general manager or CEO.

If you’re interested in public policy work or managing in the nonprofit sector, you might look into a law degree, a master’s in public policy or master’s in public administration. On top of those options, you could pursue a joint J.D./MBA or a joint M.P.P./MBA or M.P.A./MBA.

While any one of these degrees can help you achieve your goals, you may want to consider the environment of each school, the academic focus, the time you will spend pursuing the degree and what works best for you personally.

Question 4: Are you competitive in the MBA applicant pool? As you think about entering an MBA program, you should be aware of the competitive pool of candidates who apply every year. Evaluate yourself against successful candidates to the schools you are considering.

The easiest first step is to see what the mean GMAT and GPA is for a successful applicant to your target programs.

If your “numbers” are much lower than the mean at your dream schools, you may want to consider taking classes to build an alternative transcript or retaking the GMAT. While no candidate is perfect, minimizing any red flags in your application will ensure that you have a strong chance at admission.

The GMAT verbal is by no means easy, especially if you are not fond of reading texts on grammar, or passages drawn from academic papers.  But the answer to the question of how hard is the GMAT depends on how you study for the test. Below are some useful tips for increasing your GMAT verbal score.

Have the best foundation

Success on the GMAT verbal is not just a question of skillfully applying strategies; without the proper understanding of basics you can only go so far. For example, knowing how to quickly eliminate wrong answer choices and home in on the correct answer on Sentence Correction questions will help you greatly, only if you have the grammar know-how to eliminate the wrong answers.

For the best of the GMAT books reviewed, look no further than Manhattan GMAT, which provides an excellent series of books that really allow you to build on your foundation. The Sentence Correction guide can help the grammar neophyte navigate the complexities of English grammar, all the way from comma to summative modifiers.

Similarly, Magoosh has broken up the Sentence Corrections, Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension into discrete modules. That way you can learn one concept at a time, and apply that knowledge in specific questions.

Practice with the best questions

What do I mean by “best”? Questions that best mimic the questions you’ll see on the actual GMAT. This mimicking includes the look and feel of questions. For example, the GMAT likes to write long Sentence Correction sentences that draw on some arcane person or event from history.

Then there are the way the “distractors”, or wrong answers, as they are more commonly known, are written. Remember, often the trickiest part of a Critical Reasoning argument is the way the trap answer lures you in, giving you a false sense of confidence.

Train with a schedule

You can still work with the best material, yet not maximize your study time. To really make sure that you are improving—and preparing for the grueling four-hour experience that is the GMAT—you have to take practice tests, do problem sets consisting of question types you struggle with, and spend time reviewing areas in which you struggle. To help you focus your training, you should follow a useful and targeted GMAT study plan.

Learn from your mistakes

The most important part of review is not only to look at the correct answer is but also to really figure out why you missed a question. This process can be difficult—indeed uncomfortable—but the struggle in trying to reason why the correct answer is correct and why your original answer was wrong will help improve your problem solving skills. It will also help you avoid similar mistakes in the future.

Tune your brain

A great way to improve at verbal is when you are not actually studying verbal. Sounds counterintuitive? Well, our brains clearly need down time to process what we’ve learned. But watching marathon sessions on Netflix of your favorite show is not going to help your GMAT verbal score much. Reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will. Part of the reason is you are exposing your brain to the very complex syntactical patterns you will see test day.

For those of you who struggle with some of the vocabulary on the GMAT, you might want to make flashcards of the words. Sure this is not the same as how to memorize words for the GRE, as anyone familiar with the GRE format will know. But knowing words that pop up often in Critical Reasoning can make the difference between knowing the answer to a question in less than a minute, and blindly choosing an answer.

This post was written by Chris Lele, resident vocabulary wiz at Magoosh. For more advice on taking the GMAT, check out Magoosh’s GMAT blog.

As if worrying about your GMAT scores, essay prompts and letters of recommendation wasn’t enough, more and more business schools are incorporating assessments in emotional intelligence quotient, or EQ, for incoming applicants.

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions, and according to Melissa Korn‘s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, looking at EQ is “the latest attempt by business schools to identify future stars.”

Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business has been posing a 206-item online questionnaire called the Personal Characteristics Inventory since 2010, which screens them for traits such as teamwork and leadership abilities that the school has found in its most successful students and graduates, the WSJ reports.

Andrew Sama, senior associate director of M.B.A. admissions at Mendoza, notes that companies select for top talent with these types of assessments, adding “If we are selecting for future business leaders, why shouldn’t we be [using] similar tools?”

Meanwhile, the Yale School of Management plans to try out the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test on volunteers from the current crop of applicants in the coming weeks. Bruce DelMonico, assistant dean and director of M.B.A. admissions, tells WSJ that for now, the school is merely in the process of gathering data on what traits predict success, so the results of the online self-assessment won’t affect admission decisions.

Admissions Director Dawna Clarke of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth tells the WSJ she’s still searching for a test that accurately and consistently measures EQ, but notes that the school asks people who recommend a student to score the applicant on their ability to cope with pressure, intellectual curiosity and other traits.

While the inclusion of EQ assessments in MBA admissions decisions may strike fear in the heart of some applicants, others—perhaps those with lighter resumes—will find relief in being valued for their competencies in this area.