Got 30 minutes? Sign up for an online goal-tracking tool such as stickK.com, GoalEnforcer, or GoalsOnTrack to keep you on track to accomplish your remaining business school goals.

How has your internship and continued search affected your goals?

As you prepared to begin your internship, we encouraged you to re-evaluate your MBA goals. We hope you went through your internship with your goals in mind - and perhaps made some changes as the summer went on!

Now that you've completed your internship and, perhaps, additional rounds of recruiting, take some time to think about where you stand on your goals. (If you haven't thought about them in a while, you may find that you've achieved some of them already!) Determine which goals still make sense for you to pursue, and which need to be adjusted, or even eliminated altogether.  

• Specific - Did your internship allow you more insight into the details around your professional goals? Or has the fall recruiting cycle provided you thoughts about other career opportunities that you might pursue?
• Measurable - With the short time you have left, can you hone in on how to quantify what you hope to achieve?
• Attainable - Perhaps this summer gave you some new ideas around all of the things you can do before you finish your MBA. What new goals can you achieve in the time before school is done? 
• Realistic - If recruiting in your preferred industry doesn't seem to be going your way right now, it may be time to reconsider the best way to break into it - you might consider setting an interim goal that will allow you a more gradual transition into your industry of choice.
• Timely - Focus your goals on those that can be achieved in a short amount of time - after all, you only have about six months left in business school!

How can you effectively pursue a new goal with half a year remaining?

Though time may be short, you can definitely make progress on your business school goals. Simply taking a few actions to ensure your goals remain front-of-mind will help you continue towards successfully achieving many of them before graduation.

1. Define your next steps: after analyzing your goals using SMART criteria, make sure you identify what interim milestones you must hit to achieve them. At this point in time, determining whether a goal is timely may be the most important factor as you consider how to move forward. If it doesn't seem feasible to achieve a goal within the next six months, consider whether you should change the goal, or lay out a series of smaller goals that can get you there in a longer time frame.

Read on for more thoughts on how to kick-start your goals!

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