Methods and apparatus are provided for aggressive beam selection during a handover procedure. A User Equipment (UE) measures a plurality of candidate downlink beams of a target base station (BS), wherein measurement opportunities for each of the candidate downlink beams are scheduled periodically. The UE reports measurements relating to one or more of the measured candidate downlink beams to a source BS. The UE receives a command to handover to the target BS, and in response to receiving the command, attempts to find a new downlink beam of the target BS having a corresponding measurement opportunity that is earlier than a next measurement opportunity of one of the one or more candidate downlink beam.