How An English Teacher Got Into Ross, Part 2/3 – Exit Interview

by Beat The GMAT, Jun 11, 2010

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyakRuP5vY[/youtube]

Last week I shared Part 1 of my exit interview with Jen (click here to see it), a Beat The GMAT member who recently got admitted to Ross. Today I will be sharing Part 2 of our interview, where we discuss details about the advantages and challenges of being a non-traditional applicant as well as a re-applicant.

Here are some notes from Part 2 of this exit interview:

(0:19) What are the advantages/disadvantages of being a "non-traditional applicant"?

• Advantages

  • As a woman applying to an MBA program you often have an advantage, Ross has a terrific woman's initiative
  • Coming from a non-profit background has also helped and Ross showed interest in that

• Challenges

  • For people with an education background, I think Adcoms have gotten used to these people's profiles having a Teach for America background or other urban city school backgrounds; I had to do a good job of selling some of the other experiences that I had, including my leadership and management skills
  • Even though I didn't have a Quant-based background, I worked hard on showing that I had Quantitative skills not only with my GMAT score, but I also took extra classes and volunteered in a Treasury role at a non-profit
  • No one in my close circle expected me to go to Business School, as cheesy as it may sound, a big challenge was believing in myself and knowing that this was the right decision for me

(3:38) What were some of the challenges you faced as a re-applicant?

• Reapplying is psychologically very difficult; rejection was really hard but I took that opportunity to analyze "what happened?"
• After reading an article from Stacey Blackman on Beat The GMAT about reapplying, I realized I rushed into the process and didn't do my research

(5:59) How did research help your second round in applying whereas it didn't help your first round?

• What I realized was that I didn't research my schools; I had a narrow criteria my first round focused just on location, but this time around I allowed myself to focus on other criteria like "Where can I focus on Education Business as a niche? Where can I find a great network of people interested in the social sector?"
• Revising my criteria and doing my research allowed me to look up things on schools like "How many people are in their Education Club? How many people end up going into the social sector after graduation?" These were some of my criteria that don't show up in general ratings. What I discovered was that Ross was rated #1 in the nation for having a curriculum and extracurriculars around Social Sector and Sustainability.
• Doing this research allowed me to feel confidant in my choice for Business School
• Another piece of advice is to reach out to as many people you can at your school of choice; I could name 11 people I talked to about Ross and I flew over there and experienced first-hand the type of community and classes that Ross had to offer

Part 3/3 of this Exit Interview coming next week!

If you are a recent MBA admit living in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to participate in this Exit Interview Series, send me a private message (my username: beatthegmat). For your time Ill buy you dinner.