HEY! R2 Consortium Applicants
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Ellipsing My Way...To Business School is my first hand account of the b-school application process through the eyes of a prospective applicant. |
Hey Guys and Gals! I’m sitting here on my couch waiting for 5:30am (it’s currently 10:52pm) because that’s when I’m going to hop on a plane to go on Johnson’s West Coast Trek to Silicon Valley & San Francisco. As excited as I am to visit all of the high-tech companies out there, I couldn’t help but reminisce about where I was at this time just a year ago! I remember stressing about my essays that were due only a short couple of days away.
With that being said, I wanted to write this post for all Consortium R2 applicants since the deadline is getting closer and I (and the rest of my Consortium Class) had to deal with last year. Just know that you all will get through it!
I remember that I was very excited this week because I knew that this madness that is the application process would soon be over! That excitement/adrenaline is what keep me going up until the day when I had to hit submit.
1. Try not to let yourself get overwhelmed as it won’t do you or anyone else any good. Make sure that you find a break at some point to watch a movie or something. You may think “NO, I don’t have time for that!” But trust me… you MUST find time to do so. You can’t stare at the same essays all day and be able to see where changes need to be made.
2. Have someone else take a look at your essays one final time! If you don’t then you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage compared to other applicants who have consultants or teams of people behind them. Trust me, many people have a whole host of people (not just MLT coaches) behind them. If you send your essays to someone new who hasn’t reviewed your essays yet, ask them to recap for you what they take from each essay.
3. If you have to put someone on retainer to review your essays, do it! I remember I had a friend who was a writer who had just been laid off and needed money. So 2 days before the deadline, I put her on a $250 retainer and when I finished editing an essay, I would send it to her to review while I worked on another one. We went back and forth with 14 essays for 2 days probably through 3 rounds of edits total. I knew that my weakness was grammar and being concise and I knew that she could help me fine tune the essays. It worked!
4. DO NOT FREAK OUT IF YOU CANNOT COPY AND PASTE IN THE CONSORTIUM APPLICATION! Here is the post that I made last year on submission day because I was freaking out. FREAKING OUT! The reason I say, not to freak out if you can’t copy and paste is because you will need to use Internet Explorer I believe. I think I was using Mozilla or Chrome at work and I thought we had to type our essays into the boxes, but then my friend who is now at Wharton said that she used Internet Explorer and it worked. BE CAREFUL IF YOU’RE USING A MAC!
5. Another thing that you’re going to want to do before submission day, is log into each system and check to see how large each file should/can be. I remember that when I scanned my transcripts the file size was too large for the system. Thankfully, I was smart enough to bring my transcripts to work so I could re-scan them and send them to a friend to compress them. Also be weary about the file sizes if you have to upload essays.
6. Of course we all know not to wait until the last day, but the truth of the matter is that people do! If you do this, DO NOT WAIT UNTIL 11PM when everyone else is trying to log into the system. In a perfect world, I would have submitted everything the previous day, but we all know that this world is NOT perfect.
Try to stay calm! Keep yourself healthy this week! Try to get some sleep! Basically do the very opposite of what I did last year and you will be ALLLLRIGHT! Do whatever it is that you need to do in order to get through this week (EXCEPT DRINK!) You’ve all gotten this far with the GMAT, Essays, Recommenders, Perusing the Message Boards, Worrying (huge one there) and just all other things.
The end is in sight – KEEP PRESSING ON! The other side of this equation is much brighter (for about a week until you realize that you’re waiting for your fate to be decided), but I don’t want to scare you!
Here are some posts that I made between the 3rd of Jan last year and the day when I hit submit:
Coffee at 3am – Deadline Looming
Adrenaline Rush – Countdown: Day 2
Application Submission Exhaustion
I know I offered to read people’s essays, but due to the fact that I’ll be on our West Coast Trek this week and next week, I will not have time to review anyone’s essays. I don’t want to have anyone waiting on me to respond because this is the time when you need instant feedback.
