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hman768
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Greetings fellow applicants!
Preface: I spent about a month slowly writing this. PLEASE don't be offended by anything I write in here. I would value any thoughts or ideas. I have obviously left out names of schools b/c I don't want to be slanderous - instead I just want to try and make some sense out of this process. Also, I haven't spent a lot of time editing so please excuse any typso.
I want to start with a brief note: What I say here is largely my opinion and perhaps based on anecdotal evidence. By no means is everything I say in here correct 100% of the time. In fact, I'm sure there's an exception to every rule (for example, I mention studying hard to for the GMAT - YES, I realize some people don't have to study hard, but you know what I mean!). But, I believe that what I say is right more than 90% of the time. I'm only hoping to help other applicants and not get too bogged down in minutia. Additionally, I did not get into a top 10 school. Perhaps the applicants who did have better ideas than me. I think I didn't get into because my gpa and gmat were just too low and I don't think there was anything I could do to overcome both these obstacles.
I think that any applicant should begin by reading this extremely important article from the New York Times on January 9, 2011: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/busin ... ame&st=cse
The article is on law school but the information contained within is extremely relevant to business school applicants. I have no idea if that link will work or how long the article will be posted on their website so I will summarize it briefly: The statistics reported by US News and World Reports (as well as all other rankings) are a fabrication. Huge money is dependent on the statistics (alumni donations, number of applicants, etc.) and therefore the business schools are motivated to make their statistics seem better than they are. Yes, there are jobs coming out of business school where students are making the starting salaries that are listed in the rankings, but the percentage of graduates actually getting these jobs is quite low. For example, if a school posts a $100k average starting salary, perhaps only 60% of the class reported. And guess which 60%? The top 60% of course. The other 40% have much lower salaries. The same with the percent employed 6 months after graduation. Most schools report shockingly high figures, but the reality is that the schools make no differentiation between someone who is in private equity at Goldman and someone who couldn't find mba work and now has a part time gig waiting tables at Denny's. The conclusion that the article reaches is that most students go to school betting that they will win the "job lottery." They hear about one student that got their dream job and they are willing to bet (frequently much more than $100k in loans for tuition) that they will win as well.
The reason I've mentioned this article is to educate. Of course, business school is a personal decision for everyone. In my experience, however, there are a lot of graduates who regret the debt they took on. As I will explain I got into a couple higher ranked schools than the one I eventually chose. Perhaps this post is an attempt to justify my own decision to myself, but I also hope it educates applicants on this forum. At the very least, I hope it opens a lot of applicant's eyes to the issues that have been extremely important to me, but for whatever reason are unknown to many others.
Another point I wanted to make is about admissions staffers. They are nothing more than salesman for their schools! They pretend as if they have your best interests at heart but the reality is that their number one concern is with the bottom line: What is our ranking? Is the average GMAT up? Is the yield up? How much scholarship did they have to give out? For anyone who didn't notice - the 2012 U.S. News and World Reports came out recently. Some of the schools had huge gains and some had big losses. Do you think the schools with the losses said, "well that's ok because we got the students that best matched our programs here...."? Hell no! The president of the school probably called the director of admissions into their offices and threatened to fire them.... I don't want to sound too harsh - there are a lot of genuine people out there that work in these offices, but just take everything they have to say with a "grain of salt." The biggest example that comes to mind is the classic admissions statement, "you should find the school that suits your career goals." I can be corrected on this, but there are really only a handful of schools, most of which are in the top 10, that are actually known for something. Harvard is known for general management, Kellogg is known for marketing, Wharton is known for finance, perhaps to a lesser extent Yale is known for government... Are there really any other schools that have a specialty they can really brag about? NO! So is there really a school that is a better "fit" for you than any other?? No! (except for the obvious exception of geographic location) Every school says the same thing: "We are known for a cross-function inter-disciplinary hands-on technology driven approach to business." No kidding! We could probably all give sleazy salesman stories about business school (my worst involves an admissions director at an Ivy League school invoking 9-11 in an asinine attempt to impress me), but I don't think it's necessary to go into them. I'm just saying - think before you invest a HUGE sum of money and realize that anything someone in admissions says to you is a sales pitch - the same as if you were buying a car.
Book to read: Your MBA Game Plan. (Available here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/156414 ... 8AGT3JJ51W ) I read it cover to cover and most of the advice I have here has something to do with this book. Additionally, I work with a formed admissions consultant from a large, well known, prep company and he said that this is a training tool for all their consultants. I did not use a consultant because this friend told me that his company gives the consultants that book and says to read it and put it to use for the applicants. There really is no mystery about how to make your application the best it can possibly be. If you put in your time studying for the GMAT and putting into practice what this book says then you will be the best applicant you can possibly be.
Advice 1: Apply Early - If you're serious about business school there is absolutely no reason to not apply Round 1. If you're reading this now and haven't applied my advice is to wait to apply next year. Every school says that there is no benefit to applying in any specific round but don't be fooled. There is no debate: in Round 1 schools have lower standards (because the entire class is empty) and more scholarship money to give away. An article I read this morning about the University of Chicago said that 20% of applicants go round 1, 60% round 2, and the remaining 10% go around 3. It also stated that 80% of applications are submitted within 24 hours of the deadline.
Advice 2: Apply to MANY schools - The conventional wisdom is to apply to 3 schools. I HUGELY disagree with this for one reason: scholarships! Hopefully you have a reasonable idea of where you can get in. Let's say it's ranked between 10 and 20. My advice is to apply to all 11 schools in that range as well as a few "safeties." Hopefully, one of them will give you a scholarship and from there you're off and rolling. I have had enormous success getting schools to increase scholarship offers but they will only do it if they have something to compare to.
For example, let's say you apply to three schools - a reach in the top 10, a hopeful in the top 20, and a safety in the top 30. You get rejected from the top 10, accepted with no scholarship to the top 20 and a scholarship at the top 30. Now what do you do? Your hands are tied. You can either go to the top 30 for a greatly reduced amount (my personal recommendation) or the top 20, take on the debt, and cross your fingers that you win the lottery and get a good job. Now let's consider my advice. You apply to every school from 10-20. You get rejected from a few but you also get into three, one of which offers you a small scholarship. Hopefully you can take the one scholarship, scan it, put it in a very polite email, and send it to your favorite school asking for them to beat it. Then if they beat it you could take it back to the other school and they might beat that offer. If it's a competitive school (meaning close to it in rank) the school will do it. In the prior example the top 20 school isn't going to care at all about your top 30 acceptance because they are so much "better." Obviously you have spent much more on application fees; perhaps $2k, but you've also earned a scholarship which will undoubtedly be significantly more than that. I know this because I was in this exact position. I got into a top 20 school (a reach for me) and showed them 4 large scholarship offers from top 30 schools (my reasonable bet schools). The admission officer's words to me were, "if you hear from any better schools bring me their offers, but right now I can do nothing for you."
Advice 3: Take the GMAT Ultra Seriously - The GMAT is a part of the application you can control! It's not an aptitude test like an IQ test, but rather an indicator of how hard you are willing to study. Think of the GMAT as an opportunity to improve your application with a great score and not as an obstacle to admissions. I will talk about this later, but I believe my GMAT score was the key to my acceptances and scholarship offers. For better or worse it's important and I encourage you to view it that way. I took the GMAT in July, almost 4 months before my first application was due. I knew I was going to need that time to complete my essays and make my final decision as to where to apply.
Advice 4: How to get a great recommendation - First, ask early. Give yourself and the recommender plenty of time to make sure this gets done. I believe I asked both my recommenders around August 1st. Once they agree, tell them you're hoping for a two page single space recommendation. This is longer than most schools require, but I believe that the purpose of the recommendation is to demonstrate that someone in management at your company cares enough about you to do a good job. Therefore, the longer the better (up to a reasonable limit of course). They might gawk at this, but tell them that you want to make the process as painless as possible for them. As if you can make a bullet list of all the work you've done for them and send it to them in a couple days so that this will refresh their memory? Now, go write the bullet list, and be as specific as possible. Think a lot about not only your work but MORE importantly, the impact this work had on the organization. For example:
Before: Tasked to make a new accounting system.
After: Because of my experience you asked me to evaluate the current system for measuring the day to day cash flow for sales to returning customers. After evaluating the system I found some inefficiencies. Because this was a big task I organized a team that designed a new accounting system that eliminated the discrepancies and lead to $1000 in savings per month.
Obviously your recommender won't and can't use your exact language, but this will help them remember something that you did a year ago in a way that will come across a lot better in a letter. Be sure to TELL THEM that the most important things in the letter are the explanations of the impacts, rather than a list of tasks. If you give them a list that includes 3 pages of bullets like the one I just made then it should be simple for them to pick a few and write a great letter!
It's important to note that each school has a different requirement for recommendations. About half will allow a letter to be uploaded. The other half make you fill in boxes in an online screen. I would figure out what these boxes are ahead of time and tailor your request to the exact questions the school asks. Or, at a minimum, ask your recommender to include in their letter the normal questions (leadership, abilities, weaknesses, etc.) so they can make a quick copy and paste.
Advice 5: What's in a Great Essay: The standard advice, in fact I see it all over this website is, "be yourself, don't write what you think the admissions committee wants to hear." WRONG. I had a discussion about this with an admissions rep at the University of Chicago open house. Your application is your first business school assignment. Your purpose is to make the best "business case" as to why you are qualified academically and will be a great alumni. This means to take the statistics that you have, your work experience and your recommendations and make the best case. Consider it a marketing task. What does an advertisement for Cheerios say? It says exactly what it thinks it customer wants to hear (i.e. that it's healthy and tastes good). If it didn't say this then the advertisement would say, "eat cheerios. It's doesn't have much flavor and while this food doesn't provide any real health benefits there are certainly foods that are worse for you."
The most important thing about your essays, that I've heard over and over from different schools, is to make sure your story makes sense. If you've spent the last 3 years in marketing then how are you going to break into finance? In my opinion there really is no good way to explain this. Therefore, perhaps this is the wrong story. If you have the exact same credentials as someone else who has been in marketing and wants an mba so they can get ahead in the same company they've been at for 3 years then most likely you just got rejected. In my opinion it is NEVER ok to say that you are undecided about what to do after school. Always pick a story that makes sense and stick to it.
This is obvious but proof read your essays, do several drafts, make them the best 500 words you possibly can. Use the extra essay to explain the weakness in your application. I used mine to explain my low gpa. I said "no excuses, I was just immature."
Make your essays interesting! I read a great link from this website (I would post it but I'm not sure where it went) that said to write your essays like a magazine article. Start with a hook, or an interesting sentence that makes the reader want to continue with the full essay. For example, I might have started this essay with, "I'm a know-it-all Ivy League reject, but here are a few of my thoughts on the application process." You can try and make your essays funny, but don't go too far. Keep all metaphors and flourish language out of your essays. They should be simple, direct, and don't forget to answer what the question asks!
Advice 6: What's in a great resume: I have no special insight here, but this is EXTREMELY important. Every interview I've had and every one that I've heard of included a cold interview except the interviewer had a copy of the resume. I actually don't know, but I think there's a strong argument to be made that your resume might be more important than your essays (there's a strong argument for the opposite - I really don't know). Everything in mine is straight from the book I mentioned and all the resources on this website. First, make sure it's organized (typically from most recent jobs to least). Typically after work comes the education section followed by a community involvement section. Just like in the recommendations the most important thing is to include the impact of what you did. Don't just write, "tasked to create new accounting system." Write, "created and implemented new accounting system as the leader of a 3 person team 3 months before schedule that resulted in a $5000 savings because of the reduced hours required to input necessary data resulting in my first promotion." Include all promotions and give the % of pay raise. Ex: Promoted to such and such position with a 12% pay raise. It's a judgment call but I would advise cutting out unimportant jobs and instead including more about your most important. For example if you waited tables throughout college but have had a full-time job for the last 3 years I would remove any reference to the waiter job and instead put more detail about the more important full time job. Under education if you get an award be sure to explain what it was for. Ex: Cum laude in college (required a minimum GPA of 3.75, faculty nomination, and significant community involvement).
Advice 7: Volunteer - If you have nothing to put on your resume about volunteering go and do something today so that you can include it in your application. The argument is that it comes off as pandering but I think this is significantly better than nothing, especially with all the schools bull shit line about educating students "holistically." There is no excuse for having nothing. If you're going to apply next fall start volunteering now.
The Interview: If you google the school's name and "mba interview questions," there are a few websites where students post the past interview questions. Be damn sure you have a rehearsed an answer for each question. I usually re-read all of the schools literature right before the interview so I could tout off a bunch of facts during the interview and say I'm excited about them. Ex: "why do you want to come here? Well, I'm super excited about your quarter system because I'll be able to take more classes and I'm super excited about your immersion program because I'll be able to hands on experience in what I will be doing in a couple years." Have a bunch of soft ball questions ready for the end of the interview. I would recommend questions that you know are going to get positive answers. For example, I wouldn't ask them to explain last year's poor employment statistics but instead opt for, "your school seems really great at integrating technology into the curriculum, could you go more in depth about that?" or "orientation seems like a great time to start the networking process, what kind of events are there to facilitate this?" After asking these questions the interviewer will probably smile because you're being engaging and because they will know the answer. From all my reading it is unacceptable to say you don't have questions. If you don't have questions you appear uninterested and unengaged. I never brought up scholarships during my interview - I would guess that's a bad route to take because you might come off sounding entitled. I also never brought up other schools during the interview unless I was asked about them (I was once at one interview and I was prepared because I had read the question already online and had prepared an answer).
The application itself: Interestingly, this is rarely mentioned on the forums but in my mind it can be as important as the essays. What I mean by that is that you should still plan out what you're writing and make sure you don't have silly errors. As I mentioned with the essays, in everything you write make sure you keep in mind the impact. For example, almost all applications ask for a description of your job. Frequently they give you enough room for a small paragraph. In my mind this was a small essay that perhaps could be more important than my real essays because all of the schools claim that work experience is one of their most important factors. Like the essays, this is another chance to brag about your impacts. Keep in mind, once again, that this should all make sense! You are telling the story of why you want to go to business school and why their school. When you write out your employment focus on the relevant parts for business school. For example, if you work in marketing, but want to go into finance perhaps you should write: "Marketed computers for two years and earned the opportunity to find the present value of our investment."
How to negotiate scholarships: Somehow, I was offered scholarships at 4 schools immediately upon being accepted - this all happened in December, except for one school that lost my application and didn't accept me until late January. All of these schools were ranked between 25 and 50. Somehow, every school offered me almost the exact same amount of money - approximately 70% of tuition. Of course the scholarship amounts were different, but if I started from the cost of the school and subtracted out the amounts they all came out to within a couple thousand of each other. In my mind this seems a little too coincidental - I think that these schools all have standard offers that they make to someone with my stats. I straight up asked an admissions person at one of these school if there was some sort of collusion on these offers and she told me there wasn't, but she was very new to the staff and probably has no idea how this works and probably wouldn't have told me anyways. Perhaps they all just know what the others offer. Anyways, that doesn't really matter. One of these 4 schools invited me to a scholarship weekend which I declined because I decided I didn't want to go there mostly based on the location (I had only applied because of a application fee waiver).
Another school, this one in the top 20, invited me to a scholarship weekend. So I packed my bags and spent around a grand and flew there. We were wined and dined all weekend and told we were the best 20 applicants from the first round and then the Tuesday after the weekend they called and offered me 10% of tuition. I was insulted. I couldn't believe what a low offer and it really changed the way I viewed the school - so I turned them down, even though after my complaint of them on the phone they upped it to 20%. I also think this decision was made a lot easier because this school is in the middle of nowhere and I really want to be in a city. As you can tell I'm not overly impressed by the ranking bullshit out there and I actually could care less about how nice a business school building is.
I took the other scholarship offers, scanned them, and made a very nice email up and mailed it to each of my 3 remaining schools asking them to up the offer. Two of them did without hesitation. They were small increases, but I can't complain (I think about $3k each). I ended up deciding on the school that didn't increase my scholarship based on location and a couple other factors.
Conclusion: So there you have it. I'm going to a school in the 30's rather than one in the teens because of the cost. I'm sure a lot of you think I'm crazy, but I think this is the best decision for me. One other factor I considered was that at the school I'm attending I am going to have a named scholarship that I can list on my resume. I think a lot of people are very impressed with scholarships so I'm hoping this makes up a little for the mystique of a much better school. Ooh yeah - I'm also waitlisted at two schools that are slightly better than the one that offered me the 20%. If one of them accepts me I might spend the money and go but I'm not sure yet. I might not. The latest rankings show about a $13k starting salary difference between schools in the 30's and those in the teens. Obviously, if this worked out I would make back the $70k difference in about 15 years (I'm assuming that I will be paying a loan with interest around 6% and making the minimum payments so I will be paying a TON of interest). Another way to look at it is that the difference is probably about 2 years worth of salary (after taxes). BUT right now I'm of the mindset that paying all that money would REQUIRE that I take a certain type of job - meaning a high paying one. What if I find that dream job and it only pays $90k and I find a job that I have no interest in that pays $120k? If I have the debt I will have to take the $120k a year job. I'm actually not sure if I'm playing it safe by not taking the debt or actually being much more risky by choosing a lower school - only time will tell.
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Preface: I spent about a month slowly writing this. PLEASE don't be offended by anything I write in here. I would value any thoughts or ideas. I have obviously left out names of schools b/c I don't want to be slanderous - instead I just want to try and make some sense out of this process. Also, I haven't spent a lot of time editing so please excuse any typso.
I want to start with a brief note: What I say here is largely my opinion and perhaps based on anecdotal evidence. By no means is everything I say in here correct 100% of the time. In fact, I'm sure there's an exception to every rule (for example, I mention studying hard to for the GMAT - YES, I realize some people don't have to study hard, but you know what I mean!). But, I believe that what I say is right more than 90% of the time. I'm only hoping to help other applicants and not get too bogged down in minutia. Additionally, I did not get into a top 10 school. Perhaps the applicants who did have better ideas than me. I think I didn't get into because my gpa and gmat were just too low and I don't think there was anything I could do to overcome both these obstacles.
I think that any applicant should begin by reading this extremely important article from the New York Times on January 9, 2011: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/busin ... ame&st=cse
The article is on law school but the information contained within is extremely relevant to business school applicants. I have no idea if that link will work or how long the article will be posted on their website so I will summarize it briefly: The statistics reported by US News and World Reports (as well as all other rankings) are a fabrication. Huge money is dependent on the statistics (alumni donations, number of applicants, etc.) and therefore the business schools are motivated to make their statistics seem better than they are. Yes, there are jobs coming out of business school where students are making the starting salaries that are listed in the rankings, but the percentage of graduates actually getting these jobs is quite low. For example, if a school posts a $100k average starting salary, perhaps only 60% of the class reported. And guess which 60%? The top 60% of course. The other 40% have much lower salaries. The same with the percent employed 6 months after graduation. Most schools report shockingly high figures, but the reality is that the schools make no differentiation between someone who is in private equity at Goldman and someone who couldn't find mba work and now has a part time gig waiting tables at Denny's. The conclusion that the article reaches is that most students go to school betting that they will win the "job lottery." They hear about one student that got their dream job and they are willing to bet (frequently much more than $100k in loans for tuition) that they will win as well.
The reason I've mentioned this article is to educate. Of course, business school is a personal decision for everyone. In my experience, however, there are a lot of graduates who regret the debt they took on. As I will explain I got into a couple higher ranked schools than the one I eventually chose. Perhaps this post is an attempt to justify my own decision to myself, but I also hope it educates applicants on this forum. At the very least, I hope it opens a lot of applicant's eyes to the issues that have been extremely important to me, but for whatever reason are unknown to many others.
Another point I wanted to make is about admissions staffers. They are nothing more than salesman for their schools! They pretend as if they have your best interests at heart but the reality is that their number one concern is with the bottom line: What is our ranking? Is the average GMAT up? Is the yield up? How much scholarship did they have to give out? For anyone who didn't notice - the 2012 U.S. News and World Reports came out recently. Some of the schools had huge gains and some had big losses. Do you think the schools with the losses said, "well that's ok because we got the students that best matched our programs here...."? Hell no! The president of the school probably called the director of admissions into their offices and threatened to fire them.... I don't want to sound too harsh - there are a lot of genuine people out there that work in these offices, but just take everything they have to say with a "grain of salt." The biggest example that comes to mind is the classic admissions statement, "you should find the school that suits your career goals." I can be corrected on this, but there are really only a handful of schools, most of which are in the top 10, that are actually known for something. Harvard is known for general management, Kellogg is known for marketing, Wharton is known for finance, perhaps to a lesser extent Yale is known for government... Are there really any other schools that have a specialty they can really brag about? NO! So is there really a school that is a better "fit" for you than any other?? No! (except for the obvious exception of geographic location) Every school says the same thing: "We are known for a cross-function inter-disciplinary hands-on technology driven approach to business." No kidding! We could probably all give sleazy salesman stories about business school (my worst involves an admissions director at an Ivy League school invoking 9-11 in an asinine attempt to impress me), but I don't think it's necessary to go into them. I'm just saying - think before you invest a HUGE sum of money and realize that anything someone in admissions says to you is a sales pitch - the same as if you were buying a car.
Book to read: Your MBA Game Plan. (Available here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/156414 ... 8AGT3JJ51W ) I read it cover to cover and most of the advice I have here has something to do with this book. Additionally, I work with a formed admissions consultant from a large, well known, prep company and he said that this is a training tool for all their consultants. I did not use a consultant because this friend told me that his company gives the consultants that book and says to read it and put it to use for the applicants. There really is no mystery about how to make your application the best it can possibly be. If you put in your time studying for the GMAT and putting into practice what this book says then you will be the best applicant you can possibly be.
Advice 1: Apply Early - If you're serious about business school there is absolutely no reason to not apply Round 1. If you're reading this now and haven't applied my advice is to wait to apply next year. Every school says that there is no benefit to applying in any specific round but don't be fooled. There is no debate: in Round 1 schools have lower standards (because the entire class is empty) and more scholarship money to give away. An article I read this morning about the University of Chicago said that 20% of applicants go round 1, 60% round 2, and the remaining 10% go around 3. It also stated that 80% of applications are submitted within 24 hours of the deadline.
Advice 2: Apply to MANY schools - The conventional wisdom is to apply to 3 schools. I HUGELY disagree with this for one reason: scholarships! Hopefully you have a reasonable idea of where you can get in. Let's say it's ranked between 10 and 20. My advice is to apply to all 11 schools in that range as well as a few "safeties." Hopefully, one of them will give you a scholarship and from there you're off and rolling. I have had enormous success getting schools to increase scholarship offers but they will only do it if they have something to compare to.
For example, let's say you apply to three schools - a reach in the top 10, a hopeful in the top 20, and a safety in the top 30. You get rejected from the top 10, accepted with no scholarship to the top 20 and a scholarship at the top 30. Now what do you do? Your hands are tied. You can either go to the top 30 for a greatly reduced amount (my personal recommendation) or the top 20, take on the debt, and cross your fingers that you win the lottery and get a good job. Now let's consider my advice. You apply to every school from 10-20. You get rejected from a few but you also get into three, one of which offers you a small scholarship. Hopefully you can take the one scholarship, scan it, put it in a very polite email, and send it to your favorite school asking for them to beat it. Then if they beat it you could take it back to the other school and they might beat that offer. If it's a competitive school (meaning close to it in rank) the school will do it. In the prior example the top 20 school isn't going to care at all about your top 30 acceptance because they are so much "better." Obviously you have spent much more on application fees; perhaps $2k, but you've also earned a scholarship which will undoubtedly be significantly more than that. I know this because I was in this exact position. I got into a top 20 school (a reach for me) and showed them 4 large scholarship offers from top 30 schools (my reasonable bet schools). The admission officer's words to me were, "if you hear from any better schools bring me their offers, but right now I can do nothing for you."
Advice 3: Take the GMAT Ultra Seriously - The GMAT is a part of the application you can control! It's not an aptitude test like an IQ test, but rather an indicator of how hard you are willing to study. Think of the GMAT as an opportunity to improve your application with a great score and not as an obstacle to admissions. I will talk about this later, but I believe my GMAT score was the key to my acceptances and scholarship offers. For better or worse it's important and I encourage you to view it that way. I took the GMAT in July, almost 4 months before my first application was due. I knew I was going to need that time to complete my essays and make my final decision as to where to apply.
Advice 4: How to get a great recommendation - First, ask early. Give yourself and the recommender plenty of time to make sure this gets done. I believe I asked both my recommenders around August 1st. Once they agree, tell them you're hoping for a two page single space recommendation. This is longer than most schools require, but I believe that the purpose of the recommendation is to demonstrate that someone in management at your company cares enough about you to do a good job. Therefore, the longer the better (up to a reasonable limit of course). They might gawk at this, but tell them that you want to make the process as painless as possible for them. As if you can make a bullet list of all the work you've done for them and send it to them in a couple days so that this will refresh their memory? Now, go write the bullet list, and be as specific as possible. Think a lot about not only your work but MORE importantly, the impact this work had on the organization. For example:
Before: Tasked to make a new accounting system.
After: Because of my experience you asked me to evaluate the current system for measuring the day to day cash flow for sales to returning customers. After evaluating the system I found some inefficiencies. Because this was a big task I organized a team that designed a new accounting system that eliminated the discrepancies and lead to $1000 in savings per month.
Obviously your recommender won't and can't use your exact language, but this will help them remember something that you did a year ago in a way that will come across a lot better in a letter. Be sure to TELL THEM that the most important things in the letter are the explanations of the impacts, rather than a list of tasks. If you give them a list that includes 3 pages of bullets like the one I just made then it should be simple for them to pick a few and write a great letter!
It's important to note that each school has a different requirement for recommendations. About half will allow a letter to be uploaded. The other half make you fill in boxes in an online screen. I would figure out what these boxes are ahead of time and tailor your request to the exact questions the school asks. Or, at a minimum, ask your recommender to include in their letter the normal questions (leadership, abilities, weaknesses, etc.) so they can make a quick copy and paste.
Advice 5: What's in a Great Essay: The standard advice, in fact I see it all over this website is, "be yourself, don't write what you think the admissions committee wants to hear." WRONG. I had a discussion about this with an admissions rep at the University of Chicago open house. Your application is your first business school assignment. Your purpose is to make the best "business case" as to why you are qualified academically and will be a great alumni. This means to take the statistics that you have, your work experience and your recommendations and make the best case. Consider it a marketing task. What does an advertisement for Cheerios say? It says exactly what it thinks it customer wants to hear (i.e. that it's healthy and tastes good). If it didn't say this then the advertisement would say, "eat cheerios. It's doesn't have much flavor and while this food doesn't provide any real health benefits there are certainly foods that are worse for you."
The most important thing about your essays, that I've heard over and over from different schools, is to make sure your story makes sense. If you've spent the last 3 years in marketing then how are you going to break into finance? In my opinion there really is no good way to explain this. Therefore, perhaps this is the wrong story. If you have the exact same credentials as someone else who has been in marketing and wants an mba so they can get ahead in the same company they've been at for 3 years then most likely you just got rejected. In my opinion it is NEVER ok to say that you are undecided about what to do after school. Always pick a story that makes sense and stick to it.
This is obvious but proof read your essays, do several drafts, make them the best 500 words you possibly can. Use the extra essay to explain the weakness in your application. I used mine to explain my low gpa. I said "no excuses, I was just immature."
Make your essays interesting! I read a great link from this website (I would post it but I'm not sure where it went) that said to write your essays like a magazine article. Start with a hook, or an interesting sentence that makes the reader want to continue with the full essay. For example, I might have started this essay with, "I'm a know-it-all Ivy League reject, but here are a few of my thoughts on the application process." You can try and make your essays funny, but don't go too far. Keep all metaphors and flourish language out of your essays. They should be simple, direct, and don't forget to answer what the question asks!
Advice 6: What's in a great resume: I have no special insight here, but this is EXTREMELY important. Every interview I've had and every one that I've heard of included a cold interview except the interviewer had a copy of the resume. I actually don't know, but I think there's a strong argument to be made that your resume might be more important than your essays (there's a strong argument for the opposite - I really don't know). Everything in mine is straight from the book I mentioned and all the resources on this website. First, make sure it's organized (typically from most recent jobs to least). Typically after work comes the education section followed by a community involvement section. Just like in the recommendations the most important thing is to include the impact of what you did. Don't just write, "tasked to create new accounting system." Write, "created and implemented new accounting system as the leader of a 3 person team 3 months before schedule that resulted in a $5000 savings because of the reduced hours required to input necessary data resulting in my first promotion." Include all promotions and give the % of pay raise. Ex: Promoted to such and such position with a 12% pay raise. It's a judgment call but I would advise cutting out unimportant jobs and instead including more about your most important. For example if you waited tables throughout college but have had a full-time job for the last 3 years I would remove any reference to the waiter job and instead put more detail about the more important full time job. Under education if you get an award be sure to explain what it was for. Ex: Cum laude in college (required a minimum GPA of 3.75, faculty nomination, and significant community involvement).
Advice 7: Volunteer - If you have nothing to put on your resume about volunteering go and do something today so that you can include it in your application. The argument is that it comes off as pandering but I think this is significantly better than nothing, especially with all the schools bull shit line about educating students "holistically." There is no excuse for having nothing. If you're going to apply next fall start volunteering now.
The Interview: If you google the school's name and "mba interview questions," there are a few websites where students post the past interview questions. Be damn sure you have a rehearsed an answer for each question. I usually re-read all of the schools literature right before the interview so I could tout off a bunch of facts during the interview and say I'm excited about them. Ex: "why do you want to come here? Well, I'm super excited about your quarter system because I'll be able to take more classes and I'm super excited about your immersion program because I'll be able to hands on experience in what I will be doing in a couple years." Have a bunch of soft ball questions ready for the end of the interview. I would recommend questions that you know are going to get positive answers. For example, I wouldn't ask them to explain last year's poor employment statistics but instead opt for, "your school seems really great at integrating technology into the curriculum, could you go more in depth about that?" or "orientation seems like a great time to start the networking process, what kind of events are there to facilitate this?" After asking these questions the interviewer will probably smile because you're being engaging and because they will know the answer. From all my reading it is unacceptable to say you don't have questions. If you don't have questions you appear uninterested and unengaged. I never brought up scholarships during my interview - I would guess that's a bad route to take because you might come off sounding entitled. I also never brought up other schools during the interview unless I was asked about them (I was once at one interview and I was prepared because I had read the question already online and had prepared an answer).
The application itself: Interestingly, this is rarely mentioned on the forums but in my mind it can be as important as the essays. What I mean by that is that you should still plan out what you're writing and make sure you don't have silly errors. As I mentioned with the essays, in everything you write make sure you keep in mind the impact. For example, almost all applications ask for a description of your job. Frequently they give you enough room for a small paragraph. In my mind this was a small essay that perhaps could be more important than my real essays because all of the schools claim that work experience is one of their most important factors. Like the essays, this is another chance to brag about your impacts. Keep in mind, once again, that this should all make sense! You are telling the story of why you want to go to business school and why their school. When you write out your employment focus on the relevant parts for business school. For example, if you work in marketing, but want to go into finance perhaps you should write: "Marketed computers for two years and earned the opportunity to find the present value of our investment."
How to negotiate scholarships: Somehow, I was offered scholarships at 4 schools immediately upon being accepted - this all happened in December, except for one school that lost my application and didn't accept me until late January. All of these schools were ranked between 25 and 50. Somehow, every school offered me almost the exact same amount of money - approximately 70% of tuition. Of course the scholarship amounts were different, but if I started from the cost of the school and subtracted out the amounts they all came out to within a couple thousand of each other. In my mind this seems a little too coincidental - I think that these schools all have standard offers that they make to someone with my stats. I straight up asked an admissions person at one of these school if there was some sort of collusion on these offers and she told me there wasn't, but she was very new to the staff and probably has no idea how this works and probably wouldn't have told me anyways. Perhaps they all just know what the others offer. Anyways, that doesn't really matter. One of these 4 schools invited me to a scholarship weekend which I declined because I decided I didn't want to go there mostly based on the location (I had only applied because of a application fee waiver).
Another school, this one in the top 20, invited me to a scholarship weekend. So I packed my bags and spent around a grand and flew there. We were wined and dined all weekend and told we were the best 20 applicants from the first round and then the Tuesday after the weekend they called and offered me 10% of tuition. I was insulted. I couldn't believe what a low offer and it really changed the way I viewed the school - so I turned them down, even though after my complaint of them on the phone they upped it to 20%. I also think this decision was made a lot easier because this school is in the middle of nowhere and I really want to be in a city. As you can tell I'm not overly impressed by the ranking bullshit out there and I actually could care less about how nice a business school building is.
I took the other scholarship offers, scanned them, and made a very nice email up and mailed it to each of my 3 remaining schools asking them to up the offer. Two of them did without hesitation. They were small increases, but I can't complain (I think about $3k each). I ended up deciding on the school that didn't increase my scholarship based on location and a couple other factors.
Conclusion: So there you have it. I'm going to a school in the 30's rather than one in the teens because of the cost. I'm sure a lot of you think I'm crazy, but I think this is the best decision for me. One other factor I considered was that at the school I'm attending I am going to have a named scholarship that I can list on my resume. I think a lot of people are very impressed with scholarships so I'm hoping this makes up a little for the mystique of a much better school. Ooh yeah - I'm also waitlisted at two schools that are slightly better than the one that offered me the 20%. If one of them accepts me I might spend the money and go but I'm not sure yet. I might not. The latest rankings show about a $13k starting salary difference between schools in the 30's and those in the teens. Obviously, if this worked out I would make back the $70k difference in about 15 years (I'm assuming that I will be paying a loan with interest around 6% and making the minimum payments so I will be paying a TON of interest). Another way to look at it is that the difference is probably about 2 years worth of salary (after taxes). BUT right now I'm of the mindset that paying all that money would REQUIRE that I take a certain type of job - meaning a high paying one. What if I find that dream job and it only pays $90k and I find a job that I have no interest in that pays $120k? If I have the debt I will have to take the $120k a year job. I'm actually not sure if I'm playing it safe by not taking the debt or actually being much more risky by choosing a lower school - only time will tell.
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