EssaySnark

News from the Trenches! A former BSer sends a first-term report with astute observations on NYU Stern

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Just in case you were starting to wonder why you put in all this effort only to have to sit on your hands for what seems an interminable amount of time while the schools figure out if they even want to meet you to interview… Today we have a fun update to share! This person sent in a happy update once they started their first semester at their Dream School last Fall. We are sharing it with permission so that it hopefully can infect you with excitement for what you are working towards.

B-school has pretty much lived up to the hype. And all the things I heard about the first semester are actually true – recruiting hits you earlier than you thought it would, there are some tough courses, and it’s easy to sometimes get blown away by the diversity you see in your class. This last point, more than anything else, has been what I’ve enjoyed most at NYU Stern in the two months I’ve been here. And by the way, the EQ thing seems to be true too. My classmates are highly accomplished in multiple ways, but they are mostly nice and helpful human beings as well.

As you had suggested, this was the right choice for me – I love the people, the exposure to media that I have here, and yes, New York!

But when I was randomly going through some of your latest posts, I find one very interesting comparison between Columbia and Stern (not the first time you’ve pitted those two against each other). I entirely agree with you – Stern is still seen as an ‘inferior’ school by many, even some of my current classmates! There are some who have remarked that they decided to attend Stern only because either they got a sizeable scholarship or that it happened to be the highest ranked school they could get into. This is rather perplexing to me, and even disheartening. Stern was one of my top choices, as you know, and I have been more than impressed by the quality of the student body, professors and the access that I have to all top companies across industries so early in my MBA. What else were these people looking for? This ‘status anxiety’ is rather disappointing.

That being said, I do wish we had some time for career exploration before recruiting began. It starts too early in my opinion, and the process is even more stressful because of the increasing conversion rates for summer internships into full-time offers. Most students see getting a big summer internship as their primary goal, after which the second year promises to be more relaxed. This is not entirely surprising for international students though, as the number of companies ready to sponsor them have reduced significantly in the last two years.

Anyway, I have to get back to work. I promise to be back again for another update in a few months.

All the best for the admissions season!

 
And all the best to you, too, former BSer! And all we can say is: When trying for an MBA, it’s very easy to get caught up in the hype and FOMO and get confused around what an MBA will actually bestow. Going to a “top” school becomes paramount, and there’s a good chunk of Sternies who end up there only because everywhere else that they tried turned them down. Stern remains one of those sleeper schools that flies under the radar, but which in our eyes is an underappreciated gem! But if someone wants an MBA because of the prestige they think it’ll bestow, then an admit to NYU and NYU only is gunna be a letdown. It’s not an ego-enhancing school. Maybe that’s why we appreciate them so much, because they are high quality and innovative and they have been strong carriers of culture and values since the beginning of time. That’s one reason it was so enjoyable to work with this BSer when they were applying to bschools, because it seemed that they were choosing their targets intelligently, for personal and professional reasons that went beyond the shine, to the substance. Always gratifying to see a candidate like that make it in to their top choice institution!! And always fun to get reports like this from the field when they start in on the adventure. All of you now applying: Don’t forget about the ‘Snark, ya hear? We’d love to post updates like this from your experiences, too, when the time comes next Fall. Fingers are crossed for all of your successes to come!! 🙂

The dejection of rejection

by EssaySnark 2 Comments

Amidst all the high-fives and congratulations flying around lately, there have also been some very sad Brave Supplicants.

If you haven’t made it into bschool this round, you’re probably feeling pretty darned bad about things.

You’re probably beating yourself up. Feeling plenty of regret. Replaying the sequence of events and kicking yourself over one thing or another. It may even be on repeat, drumming into your head with the cruelty that only you know how to inflict on yourself that you’re a worthless loser.

None of that is true.

The despair that can set in when you’ve had your hopes up that something big and happy was going to happen, and it doesn’t, can really do a number on you. That’s especially true if you got invited to interview at a top school, and it might even be worse for those of you who are now on the waitlist instead of getting a clean straight-in admit. Sometimes, we hear from BSers who are waitlisted that it feels worse than if they’d been rejected.

Being waitlisted is kind of like the phenomenon of the Silver Medal Winner at the Olympics.

There’s this thing when a competitor gets second place where they often become REALLY unhappy about it.

You wouldn’t think that would happen. From the outside, you’d assume, “Dang, they’re good, they made it in second place!!!!” Like, no, they didn’t hit first, but they are the second best in the whole wide world! How awesome is that!

Turns out, it doesn’t feel awesome. Because the second-place winner gets tormented with all of the second-guessing in the world. They don’t get to feel proud of the fact that they are really really really good; they only get to feel the woulda-coulda-shouldas and if-onlys and other forms of regret and self-hatred and cursing of fates. Because if they’d just done THIS or THAT or THIS OTHER THING then it could’ve turned out differently. Instead of being proud of the performance, they have all these crappy thoughts about how they should’ve been able to do more to knock the winner off their perch.

Apparently this doesn’t happen with the Bronze Medal Winner. Apparently if you come in third place, you’re just thrilled to be on the winners’ podium at all. You feel grateful for making it in the top three. You see the reality of the two other competitors who did better than you and you know that you put in all that you could have, and you’re glad you came out with the bronze.

If you’re sitting here with no admits and only one (or more) waitlist offers at the end of Round 2, then please remember what we say all over the place: IT’S NOT OVER YET! You still have many months ahead where this could tip in your favor. The schools are using the waitlist quite liberally these days because there’s significant uncertainty in how their class rosters will be shaping up. (You can read through our Waitlist category to learn more of our analysis and advice for those in your shoes.)

If you’re sitting here with only strikeouts and no chances for any of your Class of 2021 apps at all, then we really do understand how disappointing that can be. If you know in your heart that you put in everything you could in all aspects of each app, from tests through to essays and resume and everything, and you still came up empty-handed, then the very basic assessment is that it was the profile or the pitch. That boils down to either a mismatch in your profile to the school you were targeting, and/or that the positioning of your message in the essays especially wasn’t done effectively. The fix for that in the coming season will be to either adjust your sights so that you’re aiming to an appropriate level of school (our Comprehensive Profile Review can help you determine the right match) and/or starting over with learning the skills of presenting you on the page in the essays you’ll develop (our Complete Essay Package is ideal for taking you through that learning curve).

Alternatively, if you’re sitting here with no options for the fall, and you know in your heart that you cut corners and rushed things and didn’t start early enough or for whatever reason could not prioritize the work needed on your apps, and ran out of time and slammed in some apps in a panic, then you’re likely to be beating yourself up the most.

You may expect us to be telling you now that yeah, that’s the outcome you should’ve seen coming. You may assume we’re going to chide you for being sloppy or doing all that procrastination, and that we’re going to add more reasons for why you should be beating yourself up at this point.

But we’re not going to do that.

Whatever decisions you made that got you to this point, those are over and done. You made the most of what you were operating with at the time.

If you had great intentions of putting together really strong apps last summer, and then work and family or maybe a blown-up relationships or whatever interfered with your ability to focus, and it didn’t happen the way you had planned, then fine. That’s what happened. You made the choices that you could in the moment that you had to make them. Even if you spent all of last summer playing video games instead of writing the essays you knew you had to write, please don’t hate yourself for doing that.

The person you are today is not the one who made those decisions; the person you are today does not deserve the suffering you are instilling on yourself. The person you are today is the victim of those unfortunate choices made before, but the person who made them does not exist. That person lives only in a past time that is no longer here. So don’t let that person continue to f_ck with you. They already did plenty of that. Don’t let them continue doing it now that their time is over and done.

You live here now.

You are the one who gets to live your life today.

Sometimes it takes a royal screw-up or some overly optimistic assumptions or playing a gambling game that doesn’t pan out in order for us to learn lessons.

If that’s what happened, fine. Now choose to learn them, and move on.

Beating yourself up about it is counterproductive and hurts no one but yourself.

It’s probably way easier for us to sit here telling you not to do it, than it is for you to actually redirect all that negativity, but we’re offering you the possibility of looking at things differently. If you feel bad about yourself, just ask yourself WHY you do. What is the thought that’s running nonstop through your head?

Identify that.

Is it: “I am a failure”?

Take that thought out of your head and look at it.

“I am a failure.”

Is that true? Look at everything in your life. Do the facts add up to support that assertion of failing?

Or maybe you’re thinking, “I am a loser” or maybe it’s “I’m never going to be anybody” or “I’m going to be stuck here and everyone is passing me by.”

Look at what’s underneath these feelings of dread or doom that is weighing on you like a blanket.

Write it down. What is the thought that’s fueling this horrible feeling?

Clearly articulate it — and then examine it.

Is that thought representing reality?

Is what you’re thinking something that’s honestly accurate, when you step back and look at it?

Try this process with the scripts that are running in your head. It often allows for an opening, a crack in the darkness where a beam of light can break in, and help soothe the worry and bring a modicum of peace.

If you haven’t gotten where you are trying to go, that only means it’s not yet your time.

Maybe this coming admissions season will be different, if you choose to make another go at bschools then.

Or maybe Life will take you in a whole new direction, if you let go of the attachment to this MBA thing that hasn’t materialized in your life.

No matter what, one thing is certain: You’re going to be just fine.

Anyone who’s ever in a position to try for a high-end MBA program is by definition a success story.

You’ve already got yourself to this point, through your smarts and determination and willingness to work. You have already achieved something, right where you’re sitting today.

Don’t lose sight of that.

Because of those skills and abilities that we know you already have, we also know you will continue on to a life full of good things. It’s inevitable.

It may not look like you thought it was supposed to.

But everything is taken care of, and you’re going to be okay.

($) “What about an accelerated MBA like Columbia?”

by EssaySnark - Discusses

Note: Just because we’re blahgging about this today is not meant as a signal that you should try submitting a Columbia full-time MBA app right now! The rolling admissions means that they’re really far along with their admits and it’s got low probability of a win at this stage of the cycle. However, the Columbia…

While much of the blahg is available completely for free, the content here is reserved for members with full blahg access only ($9.95/month for six months, cancel anytime). Please login to view this content or purchase a membership.

What goes into the MBA rankings and why should you care?

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Well shoot. We have literally been intending to talk about this for 1-1/2 years.

We had posted a question for all y’all way back in November 2017, looking for input on why Duke was ranked at a certain spot on the BusinessWeek list of best business schools. We got just one response at the time (hi rwelch9439!), and then another BSer popped in and gave additional insights a couple weeks later (hey buffalo!), and we had planned at the time to do a follow-up post of our own, to mostly agree with what was already said and hopefully continue the conversation about rankings.

But that didn’t happen.

Round 2 2017 took over. And then summer 2018. And then Round 1 2018. And, well, you know. Life.

But rankings are really something we want to discuss.

We would tweet stuff like:

BW ranked @NYUStern P/T MBA #35, after U of Louisville? (U of who??)

or

Here’s a question about the methodology used to gather some of the US News data
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/trying-understand-us-news-rankings-best-undergraduate-teaching#.WV-iY8Y-Kv9.linkedin

And we would remember the many posts in the ‘snarchives where we called out different publications, like this long-ago post about BusinessWeek’s data being unreliable.

And we would privately be scoffing and throwing things and rolling eyes and all sorts of aghastedness when we saw that School X was ranked higher than School Y on such-and-such a listing.

We really wanted to do the deep dive for you, to demystify rankings and help you understand them, so that you’re a more informed consumer of them as you go about your school research tasks.

(Because in case you’re not already aware, EssaySnark is not so much a fan of these rankings thingies.)

We planned to go into detail on points like this:

One factor of The Economist’s ranking is the percentage of students finding jobs through the school’s career services. What are the implications of this when a school decides to tailor its admissions practices in order to score better on a ranking methodology? Does it discourage schools from admitting family business or sponsored students? What if your goals are off the mainstream, so that you’ll by definition be on your own for recruiting? In some respects that could be seen as a positive factor in a profile, as it could convey to the adcom that you’re self-sufficient and ready to carve your own path in life. But could that also be a headwind against you, if a school cares about maximizing their points in the context of how this publication is scoring them? The Economist also used years of pre-MBA work experience as part of their “student quality” measure, which is just really tough to get the head around. Why is years of experience a quality factor? Not getting it.

These methodologies are obviously a very complex topic, and rather than continue to punt it down the road and reschedule it into some never-to-arrive future slot in our editorial calendar, we’re going to offer a very much condensed version today, mostly comprised of links to a few other resources that we encourage you to explore.

Then if you want to come back with your discussion points or questions or observations or theories of how a particular publication’s rankings methodology might have unintended consequences in the business school marketplace, we’re all ears.

You can start here: From a now-dead link, the GMAT people break down the rankings with a useful interactive chart — originally at http://www.mba.com/us/plan-for-business-school/choose-a-school/evaluate-schools/users-guide-to-mba-rankings and thankfully preserved at wayback

Or for a very simple overview, here’s a description of how to use the rankings from a now-defunct admissions directors’ blog targeted to military candidates.

More recently, a cheat sheet to the rankings from Darden

Obviously whenever a school is touting its appearance on a particular rankings, that’s part of its marketing and promotional effort. You know that the schools study this stuff closely. Ranking matters to ALL of them and sometimes a school will bring in a new dean with an explicit mandate to improve their standing in the rankings. It’s a rigged system — not rigged by any one party, but overall, not serving any particular constituent to any true degree of value. The only entity who profits from rankings is the publications who produce them, because it drives sales of their guidebooks and traffic to their site. That’s it. The consumer — you — the student — the supposed audience of this — does not benefit, except from a very gross value level of putting a line in the sand between schools like Michigan Ross and “U of Who?” Many schools are catering to their own colleagues in some of their policies and promotions.

The fact that some publications use the opinions of other deans as a ranking factor is just ridiculous. How could a dean at one school know what’s going on at another school? How could Dean Wharton evaluate Dean Stanford? Sure, they are professional peers, they likely interact in a variety of professional settings, and hopefully they’re following what their competition is doing in the marketplace, in terms of big new programs or initiatives being launched — but don’t hold your breath. Most deans have trouble staying on top of what’s going on at their school much less following the changes at all the other five-ish schools they consider to e direct competitors to, much less the 15-ish schools that are broadly considered to be “the best.” (Pro Tip: If you ever hear an admissions person claim that their school is “the only one who” has such-and-such a program, they’re almost always wrong.) How can a ranking put ANY weight on what the deans thinks of the other schools? It’s all just who’s got a puffed-out chest and is making noise and attracting attention. A school like NYU who has in the recent past had more low-key deans who don’t go out there strutting their stuff, yet who are very busy making all sorts of improvements to their programs and expanding to new geographies and focusing on their culture, those schools don’t get noticed. They don’t have the “reputation” — yet these are incredible schools that offer a high-value and high-impact educational experience. But you wouldn’t know it based on many of these rankings systems.

So, the main message today is, caveat emptor as far as rankings go. When a school is touting how they are #1 on this scale or #3 on that one, take it with a grain of salt. There are now so many different rankings and categories of rankings and subrankings that every good school is bound to end up in a respectable position on at least one of them. Heck, EssaySnark even posted our own rankings before!! Based on how easy it is to get into one school versus another. If you’re really focused on rankings, seems like that would be the most important one of all, no?

 
 
You may also be interested in:

Shopping.

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

Are you just starting to kick the tires on the idea of going to bschool?

Hopefully you’ll put into it at least as much effort as you would if you were buying a new car.

We don’t mean “effort” like hanging out in applicant forums. Reading all the posts in the Harvard Business School thread is highly unlikely to be a useful expenditure of your time. You may as well be hanging out in a fanforum on the latest Real Housewives segment. There is hardly anything of concrete value to be had if you’re there.

Obviously we’re biased. 😀

That doesn’t mean you can’t hang out on those boards if you like to, but often they’re filled with half-truths and falsehoods along with one or two kernels of data you can use. Sifting through all of that is fine but recognize that it’s entertainment. You’re there because your brain enjoys reading about other people’s trials and tribulations and opinions. You’re not there to learn how to get into Harvard.

Really, the process of school research should be approached at this early stage like you’re shopping.

If you’re in the market for a big-ticket item, then likely you start by reading up on the thing. Whether you want to buy a house and you’re spending all your time scouring the real estate sites, or you’re looking at cars and you’re immersed in makes and models and options packages, or you want to buy a new surfboard or the latest iPhone or some gadget, you’re probably doing it by reading the web.

You can do that with bschool too. It’ll at least help you get acclimated to the whole process, and perhaps get an appreciation of the challenges of breaking in to a school like Harvard or Wharton or Kellogg or wherever.

But if you really want to understand what the options are, you need to experience them in person. We have already suggested that you plan a road trip to get on campus and see these schools for yourself. If you can do that, we highly recommend it.

That’s not the only thing you can do, though. At this early stage, you can be nurturing a mindset. You’re in “shopping mode” where you’re researching and investigating and finding out what’s available. You’re taking inventories of all the options and filing them away in the brain. You’re being a buyer where you’re looking to see what the market offers, and finding out what’s important to you.

Before you start shopping for a new car, for example, you are vaguely aware that there are cars, and trucks, and SUVs, and gas, and hybrid, and all-electric. But you probably don’t really know what you personally care about. Your priorities are not yet fully formed.

The only way to discover what matters to you in a business school is to learn about business schools. Saying “I want an MBA!” is only the beginning. Most people have very little appreciation for what an MBA is about.

Maybe you know that you’ll learn finance and accounting and stuff (or at least, we HOPE you know that!). But what else is there?

What does bschool even teach you? What does the MBA involve?

Then, you need to go to the next level. In college, you declared a major. Does it work that way in business school too? Will you major in some specific topic or discipline like you did in undergrad?

Well you might, at some schools — but not most. Some allow you to declare a concentration or an area of focus, but most only require their standard core curriculum and then you get to determine the rest of your education, based on electives. Every school does this part differently. Some even require you to apply to a specific concentration or program within the curriculum, like the Columbia Value Investing Program which is very selective and not everyone makes it in. These are the details that you need to be conversant in if you’re going to be applying there as a finance person (just to use that as an example).

So, knowing what’s common to all MBA programs, and what are specific to the school that you’re interested in, is very important.

None of this even is touching on the other very important aspect of culture. A school’s culture is developed through any number of forces, including school size, location, physical placement of the bschool on the overall university campus, and most especially its leadership and where the administration places its attention. A school like Haas was one of the early adopters of culture as an important element of their school; other schools have also surfaced culture more directly as part of their pitch to the marketplace of MBA applicants. Most recently Tuck embedded their values into their essay questions, telling candidates that “Tuck students are nice, aware, accomplished, and smart” or some such, and asking applicants to write about themselves in those dimensions as well. (Not an easy essay question to do!! We hope and pray that Tuck modifies its approach at least somewhat this season.)

So at this early stage of your MBA journey, you need to go into shopping mode. Be a sponge (but have a filter). Soak it all up, and take lots of notes. Talk to everyone you can. Figure out all the ways that an MBA can be done, by learning about how these different schools do it.

Later in the process, you’ll move from “shopping” mode as a buyer, to “selling” mode as an applicant, where you need to package yourself up and present yourself effectively in the essays to pitch the adcom on why they should select you. That’s the essence of this “school fit” thing that you may be hearing about. The dynamics will be different then, when you go from the fun part of all this researching and excitement of hearing about the adventures of bschool, to the stressful part of identifying the elements that the schools care about in your own profile, and figuring out how to tell the best stories in those essays, in response to the school’s essay questions, in a way that lets you highlight those qualities well. Writing essays is to some extent a marketing exercise, and your approach there needs to have your audience in mind. You’ll be in a position of wanting the adcom to pick you so that’s a seller’s mindset, where you need to be attractive to the one who is choosing.

Then — hopefully!! — later on, after you have done all the hard work of convincing these adoms, you will switch back into buyer mode again, when you (again, hopefully!!) will be in a position of choosing between two or more great offers of acceptance. You will be amazed at how much the tone of the admissions process changes once the schools have said “yes” to you and they are actively courting you as an accepted candidate who they hope will matriculate. For the Class of 2022 candidates, that’s way far off in the future, so let’s not get too ahead of ourselves with the optimism.

For now, leveraging the buyer’s mindset as you gather information and learn learn learn about what options are available is the fun part. Doing this type of on-the-ground firsthand research is the very best way to discover what you want out of an MBA experience, and to find the school and the school community that can give that to you in a way that fits your personality, priorities, and style.

When we say “do research on the schools” then that may be a turn-off, as it can sound like work, like we’re giving you a task to complete. But really this is where you can do some exploring and future-self dreaming. You may also want to pop for the Comprehensive Profile Review at some stage along the way, to make sure that your dreams are lining up with the realities of your profile, and gain even more fuel for the research effort at hand. Either way, enjoy this part; being a shopper and learning about options can be exciting and fun, and now is the time to be tackling that.

An abundance of riches!! OMG Yay!! …….. eeek now what?!?

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There is much celebration happening in Snarkville this week – so many admits!

And so many of you with multiple admits!! WOO-HOO!!

This week that’s only exciting.

Next week and the week after….. well, that’s when it may start to become a little overwhelming.

If you’ve made it into more than one MBA program, the first thing to say is CONGRATULATIONS!! You are in elite company. (Not crazy about that term but, well, you know, it’s a valid one to describe your situation!!)

We know from your acceptance that you are not a slacker! At least, not one who lets your procrastination habit totally derail you from executing on life’s plans. Woo-hoo for that!

This has been one of the most liberal and generous Round 2 cycles in recent memory; lots and lots of wonderful BSers have gotten into lots and lots of their programs.

Oddly, Round 2 is apparently becoming an easier round — which it never has been before. It’s traditionally been much much harder to get in during Round 2, since the app volumes tend to be way higher at this second half of the season. However, what we’re seeing these days is some schools are holding off on Round 1 and not admitting all the well-qualified candidates that they might, because they don’t know what they’ll get in Round 2. So they’re using the waitlist a lot, or some candidates are unfortunately being rejected outright in Round 1. Round 1 was kinda grueling this season, and many were disappointed.

And then Round 2 came around and the schools sorted through all the apps and while they may have gotten oodles and oddles of candidates submitting (high volumes), they’re not seeing oodles and oodles of strong ones (lower quality), and so they’re more inclined to make acceptance offers to more and more of them than they had in Round 1. That’s also combined with the new reality that’s apparently here to stay, where many applicants are applying to 6+ schools in each round. That means that the schools have an impossible-to-predict outcome from their side; many of them have to admit way more than you would expect, because they know that most who they’re accepting are also going to be accepted at other schools, too, so the adcoms cannot count on all of their admits ending up as students.

Also they know that there are consultants like us warning candidates about Round 3 being really hard to get in, so their app volumes will be low in the final round of the season. (Hint: Because of all these factors, this year Round 3 might be viable for more of you who are considering it!!)

Basically all the past trends and rules of the road are out the window. There’s a new admissions environment happening and many of you are the beneficiaries.

That’s happy news indeed! Much to celebrate!! It’s not like the schools are admitting just any old Joe; instead, they’re finding spots for the very good candidates who are buttoned-up and prepared — whereas in the very recent past, you had to be even more than buttoned-up and prepared and very good, you had to be INCREDIBLE to make it in. At least for now, it appears that those days are over.

Huzzah!!! So exciting to see so many of you well-deserving BSers make it in to these amazing schools.

And now of course…..

You have to decide where to go!!

Eeek!

You’d think this would be the easy part, the fun part, the no-brainer part. Nope. This is where the sheer torment begins.

Once you’ve got the champagne glasses washed and put away after celebrating your many successes, then the reality sets in: What are you going to decide? Which will you choose?!?

Thankfully we’ve written on this quite a lot!

Check out the category on the EssaySnark blahg titled: “Deciding on a school (multiple offers)”

And if you have a special situation where you want our input: The Private Consult is perfect for that!

Or if you were a consulting client this year who we helped with essays or apps, lay your questions on us in the SnarkCenter School Targets notes field. Tell us what you’re thinking, which direction you’re leaning, what your rationale is. What are your priorities? What do you care about most from this whole MBA endeavor?

Articulating that clearly for yourself is an important step in making a good decision, and that’s likely going to take quite a bit of thinking and pondering and ugh-ing before you get there.

As you muddle through the seemingly impossible over the next few weeks and maybe even months: Don’t forget to be glad you’re in this position!

If you have “only” made it into one school: Nothing wrong with that! You deserve to be equally proud!! It’s no small feat to get such a win!

If you have not yet made it in: We’re here to help!!! We’ll be continuing with our “What can I do now?” series soon, for any of you who are either just starting your first apps in advance of a Round 1 app this summer, or who have come up short, and will need to consider either trying for Round 3 in a scramble in the next few weeks, or will be doing a longer game as a reapplicant for Round 1. Let us know how we can add value and assist in your process!!!!

 
 

Hopefully it’s time to pick up this guide now! finally!!

Dang, we’re doing it wrong. (Except no not really)

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No joke, those were the first words that CynicalSnark uttered here in the office when we saw the news about this bust with all the arrests of the admissions consulting bribery ring .

Get super-rich clients whose parents will donate big bucks to the athletic team in order for the coach to find a spot? Well that seems like an easy way to help a kid make it into college!!!

Obviously CynicalSnark doesn’t run the show here at EssaySnark and obviously we care way too much about ethics to try and pull off anything like this (64 posts and counting in our “ethics” category of posts here on the blahg; that’s more than we’ve written about Tuck or Haas!!).

But this scandal exposes an unfortunate reality in the world of elite universities: Yes you can pay to play.

This is much more common in college admissions but we’ve seen it happen in MBA programs too: A well-connected alumnus/a makes a call. A substantial donation is made to a scholarship fund. A well-connected alumnus/a’s child is suddenly accepted.

We’ve even advised some clients of means to go that route when they really, really, really wanted to get in to a specific school and their profile was just too crappy to make it in (why are so many super-wealthy applicants’ GMAT scores so low??? hmmmm.) And yes, they made it in.

That’s not necessarily illegal but is it unethical? Seems like it, doesn’t it? From the schools’ perspective, why are they willing to prostitute themselves in that way? Or is the applicant the prostitute? Not sure which way the unpleasant metaphor lands, but paying for something like this in America is seedy at best. And yet, it’s done all the time.

Really hate that the system works that way, but it does. Nothing we can do about it. Many experts and analysts in the education field (and other admissions consultant) who have been interviewed about this college admissions scandal have said that they don’t expect things to change. Not really.

What happened in specific in this case is, for example at Stanford, the coach of the sailing team was approached by this admissions consultant on behalf of the consultant’s clients. His clients were these wealthy parents who wanted their kids to go to Stanford. The consultant had set up a non-profit for the parents to donate to, and the consultant was offering to make a donation to the Stanford sailing team as a quid pro quo: Stanford sailing gets the money, and the coach somehow is able to find a spot for the kid on his team — even though the kid did not sail and did not even qualify as an athlete.

This happened in schools across the country with athletic teams who were not seen as stars of campus, the niche rich-kid sports like tennis, crew and water polo — to the tune of $25 million over the years.

And oh yeah: As of today, Stanford doesn’t have a sailing coach. The coach who facilitated these pay-for-play deals there was fired and he’s facing jail time. Other coaches have been placed on leave, and the schools are “investigating.” Yeah, maybe they should’ve investigated earlier? Isn’t it suspicious when so much money arrives out of nowhere like that, especially when it was sometimes tied to the admits of multiple kids from the same family? Not only were there people in the schools actively involved in this and justifying their actions, but there must’ve been many many others who suspected something foul and looked the other way.

And just ‘cuz it’s so damn juicy and brazen, we’ll crib this image of a transcript of the call courtesy of the WaPo:

The other part of the scandal of course is paying someone to take a test for your kid. And to that we say 😯

The most heartbreaking thing?

If you read through the transcripts of calls between actress Felicity Huffman and the “admissions consultant” dude who was orchestrating these scams, her second daughter wanted to get in on her own. The older daughter used the SAT test-center scam where her test results were “corrected” by someone on the inside of this ring, and presumably was able to use her artificially improved score to make it into a good school. The younger daughter was “academically driven” says Ms. Huffman on the call and wanted to take the test at least twice on her own. Yet her mom was meddling in it and arranging cheating on her behalf — when it sounds like the daughter didn’t want her to. 🙁

Dang, parents. WTF?

How do you think your kid’s gonna feel their whole life when they know that they only got in to fancy-pants college because their parents PAID for it? That’ll send you to therapy later on.

At least in this situation, the court docs say that the daughter did not use the test-cheater’s services. Good for you, second Huffman daughter!!

The way we see it, all of this boils down to the issue of wealthy people thinking the rules don’t apply to them, and the very slippery slimy lack of ethics that follows from that. There are hucksters and scammers in every part of life and everyone is trying to play the game. It may seem like there were no victims in this scheme; it would’ve been really easy for an individual parent to justify these actions. After all, for the sports-donation side, they could feel holy and righteous in making a big donation that they otherwise would not have done, that enabled the school to do more for that underappreciated sport. (Those poor water polo players, nobody gives them any love.)

Yeah. No. Nope nope not.

This is a case where that kid from the cheating family got a spot where some other kid who was working hard and trying to make it on her own merits did not.

That SUCKS.

Hate it hate it hate it all the way to the parade.

So no, we’re not doing it wrong. We believe in the perhaps naive-sounding American dream, where you work hard and you get places in life. Maybe that’s all a charade, a trick played on the lower and middle classes to trap them, with all those rich 1%ers laughing into their tea. Dunno. We’re not in that group. Plenty of former BSers are but you probably are not.

What we know is that hard work makes you happy, and EARNING your place in life lets you sleep at night.

So that’s where we end up on all of this.

Thoughts? Comments? Shock and horror that this is going on? Lay it on us in the comments if you want to share your opinions.

Will the system change? No, not fundamentally. It’s how capitalism works. The schools are selling elitism — not an education.

That’s why we’re so meh about rankings in the first place.

That problem is too big for us to solve.

So all we can do is say, values matter, and that’s how we choose to live.

You’ll make your own choices in life. When you’re in the rich 1% class, hopefully you’ll remember and keep that moral compass in good working order.

 
 
 

PS: USC seemingly cannot get a break. They have had scandal after scandal after scandal in the past few years. We do NOT currently recommend USC to any applicants for any program, whether MBA at Marshall or otherwise. There is something rotted there.

 
 
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($) Cleaning up the vibe (cont’d)

by EssaySnark

To continue the “What can I do now?” conversation, we’ve got more to say on the social media front. If you don’t have anything negative to push down to the second page of search results, then you can turn your attention straightaway to the actual content. Do you have a strategy for what you are…

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($) “What can I do…?” continued

by EssaySnark

So yesterday we were all GOOD LUCK!! to the Class of 2021 applicants who are about to know their fate. And today we’ll jump forward again to the Class of 2022 BSers who are at the very beginning of the process. We spoke last week about how to get a true head start, even this…

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And….. the moment is near!!

by EssaySnark 2 Comments

Can you believe that Round 2 admit decisions are starting to happen?

Can you believe that Round 2 admit decisions still haven’t happened?!??

Some schools like Columbia, NYU and INSEAD have been issuing decisions for awhile now, but dang, if you’re in the Round 2 pool and have been invited to interview at one or more schools, you must feel like the clock has gotten stuck in molasses and are incredulous at how slow the calendar pages are turning.

When you apply in Round 1, everything seems to happen more quickly. Partly that’s because — in the US at least — there are a bunch of holidays in the fall that capture the nation’s collective attention. These keep you busy. There’s Halloween that offers the fun diversion of perhaps some dress-up or parties and candy in the office, and Thanksgiving where many people have a long weekend and significant travel. And planning for the December holidays, and, well, just all kinds of stuff going on. That makes it easier to stay distracted, and distracted means the time goes by quicker.

By comparison, the sequence and timing for Round 2 is experienced in a very different way.

After the flurry of apps getting submitted after the holidays, there’s a welcome breather where you get a break from all the app craziness, and you were likely grateful to be able to resume your regular life at least a little. Maybe you even got to watch some football on Sundays.

But once we get past the Superbowl in early February, then it seems like everything slows to a crawl. Yes you were getting invited to interview, and yes there was lots of excitement and stress and work preparing for that, and discovering that your suit doesn’t really fit you anymore and dealing with that, and traveling to the schools, and maybe some intense winter weather somewhere along the way. But then once those are over, the thumb-twiddling begins in true earnest.

And for most of you, the time just d-r-a-g-s on.

Part of this must be because of the very nature of the experience: You started the MBA process at least a year ago now (some of you, many many years ago!) and now that you’re finally at this stage where you’ve got apps in the hopper and those apps have been hopping! to the extent that at least one or two of them resulted in interview invites. It’s like being on the longest of road trips, where mostly you’re just crusing across the Great Plains of flat highways and bad truckstop coffee, and the time puts you in an alternate universe of working towards something that’s seemingly never going to get here. But then suddenly, you realize that the highway has changed and now you’re on the 405 in Los Angeles and there are Priuses all over and major traffic, and you’re almost at that destination that you’ve been aiming towards. Suddenly we’re in March, and all of this is becoming real — but it hasn’t actually happened yet. It does a number on the mental state. It feels like all of your adult life you’ve been working on GMAT application stuff and now suddenly it’s about to be over — hoping and praying that that means you’re actually going to get in. You go back and forth between utter confidence that yes you’re definitely going to get accepted, after all you got the interviews at these top schools and you didn’t totally embarass yourself in the interview. And alternating from the assumption that yes it must work out, to abject fear that oh sh1t after all this work and (re)app attempts, it’s gotta pan out this time…. but what if it doesn’t?!??

We’re often told that the waiting is the hardest part. Well, that’s why. You’re in this weird limbo-state and the brain doesn’t know what to do with itself.

So today’s post is only to say, yes, this feeling of neurotic manic-depressive-schizophrenia is absolutely normal, and don’t worry, you’re not going crazy! (at least, no more so than you were before you started)

Moodswings and utter depressive moments and really wild debilitating doubts are par for the course at this stage.

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, get through today, and you’ll have only a few more such days ahead of you before these actual results start popping in.

And we’re betting that yes indeed, this will be your year. 🙂

Keep us posted! Please fill us in when you get the news! Go to SnarkCenter and update your School Targets so we know where you get in!

And keep those cell phones charged up and turned on at all times starting this week! Many adcoms like beginning their congratulations you’ve been accepted calls early! If you don’t recognize the number or it’s from a ‘private’ number, jump on it! Answer anyway!

You may hear lots of robocall telemarketing recordings this week, but one of them will surely be an admissions person with exciting news to deliver.