General question: what is a good way to find out which schools are strongest for certain specialisations? Take biotech for example. Just because a school as a concentration does not make it the best b-school if I'm interested furthering my career in biotech, right?

What are the factors I should look for? Alumni hiring? Student clubs? Location? Any others?

Most of the really strong MBAs don't have specialisations. Biotech firms are full of people who know biotech. They recruit MBAs to get general management skills, which biotech firms often lack.

Yes ok, fair point, but certainly there are schools that make more sense to apply to if I want to work in one field over another. So, if you think I should ignore the presence of a specialisation, what other factors should I weigh in? And please don't tell me rankings only.

In other words, when someone says X school is good for finance, what do they mean?

Well, let me turn it around: London Business School and Dartmouth College are two of the top business schools in the world, but they don't have specialisations at all.

You need to look more deeply. I looked on LinkedIn just now for MBAs in biotech. The ones at the ten largest firms studied mostly at:
Pepperdine University
Northwestern University
Wharton
Rutgers
University of Phoenix
Berkeley
UCLA
UC San Diego
Fundação Getúlio Vargas
New York University
MIT.

Several of these are in California. Other big schools like Harvard, Bangalore, Amity, Pune, Columbia and schools in biotech clusters like Johns Hopkins, Toronto, Imperial and Cambridge are also strong.

Generally, speaking I think any respected MBA near a city with a big biotech concentration, like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Bangalore, Philadelphia or Mumbai could open doors and networking opportunities. What might be more important is whether the school is part of a university with a strong biotech capacity. Again, that would push forward the MBA programmes at Berkeley, John Hopkins, Bangalore, UC Davies, UC San Diego, Mumbai, Rutgers, Wisconsin, Toronto and Penn State.

OK, using LinkedIn alumni is interesting, and so is looking at the university's location and the other university departments.

Thanks.