dmateer25 wrote:Any chance you would be willing to talk with me about what turned you off about Kellogg? I would be very interested in hearing what happened.
Great article your dad sent you. Seems like just about everybody gets dinged from Harvard!
Sure, I can go into it a little bit of detail. This was just my experience, and I may have had just a string of bad luck on some things. I know from the people I've talked to that it's a great school, but some parts of the admissions process were frustrating for me.
1. I'll get this one out of the way right away - delivering admissions decisions over the course of three weeks is just torture. I don't think a top tier program should deliver results over that long of a window. I understand their class sizes are relatively big, but my personal opinion is that they should release decisions over the course of one week tops.
The big frustration was around my interview (on campus) - it could have been better. Part of it was my fault since I was nervous and it was my first interview. But my interviewer (a first year student) made me sort of uncomfortable. I talked to a current Kellogg student who also interviews, and he said I had almost the exact opposite experience of what they aim for. Since I knew my app was 'on the bubble' so to speak, I knew I needed a good interview. It was unfortunate it wasn't quite up my alley. Since I've interviewed at a few other schools since then, I've seen them conducted much better (in my opinion). Things that turned me off include:
2. The interviewer doesn't see your resume until 15 minutes before your interview. Other schools ask for it a few days in advance. My work is pretty complicated and can be difficult to explain, so that didn't help me during my interview. Also, my interviewer had nothing in common with me, so I had a hard time finding any common ground and had to really simplify my accomplishments, which I think made them sound less impressive. Meanwhile at Texas when I interviewed, they matched me with someone who had a similar pre-MBA background and post-MBA objectives, so I felt much more comfortable talking about things like I usually do.
3. My interviewer was very, very stone faced. I can't expect them to be all friendly to everyone, and I'm very much ok with that, but it was pretty much a strict Q&A, Q&A, etc. for the whole session. Honestly it didn't seem like my interviewer was excited to talk to me from the get go. It didn't seem conversational and I couldn't get a good sense of a collaborative, Kellogg community. My UCLA interview was the complete opposite, and I believe showed the personality and community feel that Kellogg has, but didn't come through in my interview.
4. On the sheet they have you fill out when you get there, you write down your short and long-term goals. For long-term I wrote something about eventually working my way up to becoming CMO of a consumer electronics company. During the interview, my interviewer legitimately asked me what a CMO was. I was sort of dumbfounded, but answered. Then the interviewer moved on to the next question. That was weird...
5. At the end of my interview, my interview closed basically saying, "Ok, I think that's all I think I need to make a decision. Thanks for your time." (quote isn't 100% accurate, but that was the gist of it) I had to rein my interviewer back in to ask my questions - no time was offered to me. I should probably read that as writing on the wall that I didn't do well for the first 30 minutes, but I think they should still offer you time to ask questions.
So, one of the most important interactions with Kellogg turned out to be somewhat underwhelming for me. They probably had the same impression talking to me (lol) but those are the breaks sometimes.
