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Harvard say yes? Harvard say no? Harvard say maybe? What to do next: A decision tree

by EssaySnark - Discusses Leave a Comment

As many of you are well aware, at 12noon Eastern time today, October 6th, Harvard Business School will be deciding your fate: Do they want to meet you for an interview? Are they cutting you loose as an “early release”? Or are they hanging onto you for Further Consideration?

What should you do in each case?

Well obviously, if the former: You will dance around your living room and celebrate!!! Yes, BSer, if you get the news out of Boston that the HBS Admissions Board wants to meet you for an interview, you will be excited — deservedly so!

 

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
 

Hopefully you will also remember EssaySnark in your celebrations and you will pop into your SnarkCenter portal and update your school targets with news of the interview also, so that we can share in your happiness today.

 
 
 

What if today you get a “Thanks but sorry” out of Harvard?

🙁

 
Well, we also invite those with more depressing news to circle back to SnarkCenter and update your School Targets — and we can take a look at your plans, and what your status is at these schools, and possibly offer some input or reactions, based on where things stand for you so far into the season and what you’ve shared with us about your profile.

No matter what: It’s gonna be a blow. Rejection always is. We tried to caution BSers about the unfortunateness of the timing of the Harvard admissions cycle, that the Harvard decision is near-meaningless. You can do a bang-up job at your Harvard application and still not even move to the interview stage. It’s just how the competitiveness works at a school in the stratosphere of selectivity as this one is.

That does not have any bearing whatsoever on how the rest of your applications will fare.

It can be MASSIVELY discouraging though, particularly because it’s exactly those well-qualified candidates who would have their hopes us, justifiably so — and then if the invite does not come through, it can feel like a truly significant loss.

The disbelief can be real. You may go through the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression — all in an instant.

If you’re already feeling overwrought, under-resourced, wrung out and exhausted from just LIFE and all the drama since 2020, then getting that negative news today might be really difficult to take. (The schools honestly should provide some form of free counseling to candidates who are rejected like this — it can be quite the blow.)

If after you’ve recovered from the shock of the “no”, after some screaming or sobbing or sadness or whatever emotional depths you may initially plunge, you feel you could use some support, you can come back here to EssaySnark and we’ll try to help think through rationally what your next steps should be.

Because, if you aren’t moving forward at Harvard, there are a few options:

1. You probably have other apps in play — and if you did as good a job on them as we know you did, then there’s plenty more opportunities for you to still make it in somewhere great. Today will feel crappy, but the game is absolutely not over for you.

2. If you are now feeling nervous and worried, you could hustle to try for a school like NYU or maybe UNC or INSEAD that still has a deadline coming up in the next few weeks. Those would be early-season apps and you’d get an answer in the December or January timeframe. Might be worth looking into? Depending on the rest of your strategy that’s already in place.

3. We have a Post-Mortem Rejection Analysis service that will examine what you submitted to Harvard to let you know an objective third-party perspective on possible reasons it did not turn out — though we’d mostly be concerned if your HBS app and an app to another school like Columbia has turned out as a “no” already. (Darden Early Action decisions will be out LESS THAN TWO WEEKS!! Very exciting if you put your hat in the ring for them, you will know very soon if you’re in!)

If you get cut loose from Harvard today, please remember: The Round 1 cycle has only just begun!! We’re still at the very beginning. Most schools have not been releasing any interview invites yet, though they will start to hit from here, and hopefully you’ll be receiving some! We’ve heard reports of early invites from schools like Ross, and of course Columbia has been issuing them for months due to how the do a rolling cycle there, and other schools like Yale, and of course Darden, Duke, and Tuck with their early-interview windows, and if you’ve submitted to Kellogg…. so lots of interviewing may be happening already. However, for most of the schools that do invite-only interviews, those have only just started, and those are the most nerve-wracking of all, because all you can do is sit in your powerlessness and wait.

 
 

What if you get Further Consideration’d at Harvard?

😕

 
 
Often these Further Consideration applicants have a quite negative reaction to that proclamation — understandably so, as it can feel like a “WTF? I’m so close but not quite?!! What do I do with this?? I’m not interviewing, but I’m not rejected? What does that MEAN?? Aaargh!!” kind of limbo. It often deteriorates into an emotional spin-out of second-guessing and self-berating, of “If only I’d done X, Y, and Z” where you try to figure out what could you have done differently to have an actual interview instead of this purgatory state. It can be pretty negative for some people.

Others who may be more prone to a “glass half full” reaction to the world could take it in stride — but our experience is that this can be nearly as depressing to hear as getting outright rejected, which seems odd, but it’s often how the human brain reacts.

All we can say to a Further Consideration is Dude you’re in a good spot don’t despair!!!!! And, we’ll refer you back up to the list of steps you could consider taking right now, just like the rejected not-gonna-be-a-HBSers might do.

That’s because it’s smart to keep working on apps until you’re actually admitted — which is advice even for those who’ve been invited to interview should heed! Making it to the next stage is obviously majorly important but it’s not yet an invite, and as we often caution around this time of year, this process is likely to be drawn-out and lengthy for a lot of BSers.

 

For those who do get the golden ticket today at Harvard:

When you come back to Earth and start looking around for ways to get ready, we’ve got a special-built service for custom-designed HBS Interview Prep Questions, developed specific to you and your profile. Our MBA Interview Guide might also be worth checking into.

And finally, we beseech you: If you get invited to interview at HBS today, please be sensitive to the feelings of any of your friends who may also be going through this, or even just the strangers you interact with on the MBA forums. Applicants you don’t know, but who are your peers, colleagues, comrades, experiencing the same experiences, but from a sadder side of the situation today.

Try your hardest to keep your excitement muted or moderated.

Yes others will be happy for you — but when others are also trying for the big prize, and who learn today that one significant door has been shut to them…. They’re gonna be feeling crappy. They don’t need you to be gloating your glee their direction. It’s not that you don’t deserve to be ecstatic in the news of your advancement to the next stage. Just try to be sensitive to the sting of disappointment that lots others will be experiencing today.

Once you’re done celebrating, please recognize that you have real work ahead of you with interview prep, too! Even though what the Harvard Admissions Board member will be asking will be focused exclusively on YOU, you need to PRACTICE how to answer common questions. You may be the expert in you, but you’re not yet proficient in talking eloquently about yourself in a way that will come across coherent, convincing, confident, and not cocky. Practice is mandatory for the Harvard interview experience, for everyone.

 
 

* * *

For those of you feeling stung and dejected:

We get it.

It sucks.

Maybe today you can take the day off the hamster wheel. Maybe your boss will let you sign off of Zoom for awhile, and you can go take a walk in the fall sunshine. Breathe some fresh air. Sit by a body of water, if you have one in your area — beach, lake, river.

Rejection is really hard.

We’re betting you put everything into that Harvard app. If it’s not turned out to be a path-forward for you, we’re sorry. We’re feeling it, right alongside you. It’s okay to be sad. This year has been so hard for so many. It’s not the end of the road, but it’s OK to be feeling down in the dumps for awhile, to mourn the loss of a dream you had held. Hard work doesn’t always pay off the way we want it to. That doesn’t mean you’re not deserving.

 
 

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: All MBA decisions are independent events.

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

Now that the craziness of the first round deadlines is pretty much behind you (and some decisions may have already hit you hard), we wanted to make an important point clear:

All school decisions are independent events.

It matters most to remember this once decisions start coming out and people start getting rejected.

Just because one school rejects you does not mean you’re doomed for all of them to do so.

(Well, that’s true if you’ve done your homework and submitted a strong application to each of the schools. If all your apps are crap then please don’t expect any of them to work out differently.)

Assuming you are a) qualified, and b) presented well and c) did your research to show the school why they’re a fit (not mandatory at all schools, but high priority at most) — then just remember that each school has its own idiosyncrasies and priorities and will be screening your candidacy through at least a slightly different lens.

Typically, if someone makes it into Stanford, they’re also highly likely to get into Harvard. Or at least Wharton.

Or if someone gets into Columbia, then perhaps Booth could be leaning towards saying ‘yes’ as well.

That’s just because those particular school pairings are more similar than different.

But if NYU rejects you … that does not mean you’re necessarily going to have any luck at Kellogg.

One season we had a BSer admitted to Duke who was turned away from Ross. That was a surprise. But there are often surprises.

We’ve had plenty of people get the interview at Stanford and not at Harvard.

Or make it into LBS but not INSEAD.

These are the same people, with the same profile, and generally similar essay-writing skills, applying to schools that are more similar than different – yet they are able to convert at one place and not another.

See? Independent events.

Happens all the time.

So before you read too much into any one school’s decision on your application – either for or against – just remember that they’re all different. Which is what you’ve already gained an appreciation for, based on all the work you’ve put in in researching them. Well, those differences extend to how they will be interpreting your pitch and the decisions that they make on your candidacy.

Of course, all this is predicated on the presumption that you did a good job on the apps.

If we’ve never reviewed your work before, then you can always hit us up for a Post-Mortem Analysis if you start getting those rejects and don’t know why. Or better yet, have us do a Sanity Check on the apps before you submit. We are in the best position possible of answering the “What are my chances?” question through that service. We also always tell people going through the Essay Decimator essay review process if the drafts that they’ve submitted are so far off the mark that they won’t likely work out. We’re big on dealing straight with people.

We also know that this whole thing becomes this massive emotional roller coaster torture chamber experience. So we are trying to help you manage expectations – and better interpret the input that you’re going to be receiving in the coming weeks and months.

Sometimes, a reject is a fluke, and every other app turns into an admit.

Sometimes, the rejects stack up – in which case it’s likely that there’s an unrecoverable flaw in the pitch. Which means, you need to change course before submitting additional applications.

When these rejects are coming TO YOU then understandably, it can be hard to interpret them accurately. That’s what we’re here for. We’re happy to help out if we can!

($) Can you take the GMAT or GRE too many times?

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tl;dr: Yes.

When going through the MBA admissions process, can you take the GMAT or GRE too many times? Is there a chance you can jeopardize your admissions potential based on re-testing frequently?

If so: How many tests is too many?


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What Harvard says to you on Thursday is near-meaningless

by EssaySnark - Discusses Leave a Comment

Well, unless of course, if Harvard says they want to meet you to interview!!

For the loads of other candidates who are going to be told, “sorry” and given the so-called Early Release from Harvard’s Round 1, this Thursday is going to massively suck.

A very large percentage of those people are actually TOTALLY QUALIFIED and will UNDOUBTEDLY (if they play their cards right) MAKE IT IN TO ANOTHER REALLY GOOD SCHOOL. One without the word “Harvard” in its name, but a good school nonetheless.

Yet on the “release” day, all these well-qualified and capable Brave Supplicants turn into the most self-doubting and dejected group of people on the planet.

In fact, if you got all of them together in one room on that release day that will happen next week, you’d probably see the world tilt off its axis due to the weight of the depression and despair.

To try and be at least a little useful and not totally sad in our post today, here’s what you can expect (all on 12-hour time not 24-hour):

  1. Thursday, October 6th at noon Eastern time: Round 1 interviews and “release” news to come(go here to convert to your local time ):
    • Boston (U.S.A. – Massachusetts) Boston (USA – Massachusetts) Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 11:55 am EDT UTC-4 hours
    • San Francisco (USA – California) Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 8:55 am PDT UTC-7 hours
    • Delhi (India – Delhi) Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 9:25 pm IST UTC+5:30 hours
    • Paris (France – Île-de-France) Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 5:55 pm CEST UTC+2 hours
    • Moscow (Russia – Moscow) Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 6:55 pm MSK UTC+3 hours
    • Buenos Aires (Argentina) Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 12:55 pm ART UTC-3 hours
    • UTC (GMT) Thursday, October 6, 2022 at 15:55

     

    You should get notification via email — and check your spam folder. The email should arrive by 12:05pm or so Eastern time, just after noon in Boston — barring a cruel internet outage or some other poorly timed delay in delivery. You can also log on to your Harvard application and frantically click the “refresh” to see if status changes.

    What will happen then:

    You’ll either get:

    That coveted invite (low probability but not impossible);

    or, an invitation for “Further Consideration” which is a holding bin they place you on, that’s somewhat like the “deferred” status that Columbia uses for their Early Decision candidates — kind of a waitlist, but not really, since at HBS you haven’t even been interviewed yet (see our HBS guide for more on this)…

    Or you’ll be “released” which sounds like you’re a fish that they caught and threw back because you’re too small. 🙁 🙁 🙁

    You can read up on these details elsewhere throughout the blahg, the HBS interview info on our Harvard Essay Questions page being a great place to start.

    But wait.

    Why are we saying that this will be “near-meaningless”???

    It’s because the decision that Harvard issues on your application bears next to no relationship to the decision any other school will eventually issue.

    If Harvard invites you to interview: Yes. Strong signals. Highly correlated with positive outcomes, whether eventually at Harvard or at some other school.

    Not invited to interview? Released at first opportunity?

    Literally no insight can be gleaned from that.

    It’s incredibly unfortunate that, for many very competent, very qualified, even reasonably differentiated applicants, the first time you get feedback on any of your applications for bschool this year will be a rejection.

    And you know what? THAT SUCKS.

    It ends up sending a very wrong message.

    Getting “released” from Harvard does not necessarily mean that you will have no chance at all, or that all of your apps are doomed to failure.

    But, for lots of folks, it’ll be the first decision rendered, and it will send many of you into a tailspin.

    So, we’ll be warning you as you move through this first big milestone: Yes of course there’s a chance you’ll get invited to the next stage. If you get invited to interview at any school, it’s obviously an amazing compliment and a very strong sign indeed.

    AND: There will be many, many well qualified candidates who will get the “Thanks but no thanks” on Thursday, and it’ll be very easy to let that take all the wind out of your sails, and make you assume the worst. It’s particularly tough timing because there won’t be opportunity for a rebound to many other Round 1 applications at that stage. Pretty much all the rest of the top schools have a Round 1 that’s already closed. Yes you will have plenty of opportunity to rebound for Round 2 — but that’s all the way off in January.

    If the “release” from Harvard makes you wonder if you screwed up strategy on all of your apps, then it could cause sinking feelings of dread and despair. (Note: We do have a Post-Mortem Reject Analysis — but we don’t often suggest BSers go through that on Harvard, for the same reason we’re talking about today: Getting rejected from Harvard is more a reflection on the realities of competition at Harvard than it might be on your chances anywhere else. Getting a Reject Analysis on an app that was rejected from, say, Columbia would be way more instructive and useful.)

    Maybe you’re still working on apps that are being submitted this week. (The Sanity Check is also available if we can help on any of those!) We know that we’re often the Doom-and-Gloom Snark when it comes to chances for Harvard — mostly because we want to help you manage expectations and understand the situation with this school. It’s not that we don’t believe in you. It’s just that — at least in the past — Harvard has been, what’s the word for it? oh yeah, a wee bit snobby on the kind of candidate that they typically consider.

    Maybe things will be different this year. We can hope for it. We will wait and see right alongside you for what destiny awaits this week for the current crop of amazing candidates that we know all of you to be.

     
     

If you tell the adcom you’re going to do something…

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…you’d better do it!

Yeah this is coming at you from the Department of the Obvious, but you’d be surprised.

Every year, we get some intrepid BSer with some type of flaw in the profile – not-great GMAT or GRE, blemish-prone GPA – and they decide that they’re going to compensate for that flaw and overcome all weaknesses at some point IN THE FUTURE. And they include in their optional essay their plans to a) take a class, b) retake the GMAT/GRE, c) solve world hunger.

Maybe they’re totally well-meaning and sincere when the write that essay (though sometimes we wonder …) yet what happens so often is, they submit the app, including what is essentially a promise or commitment to the adcom contained in that optional essay. And then they turn their attentions to the next app, and the next one – probably including this same promise in each of them. And then the deadlines are over and MAN THAT WAS HARD! I’M EXHAUSTED! and they take a little break from it, and then lo and behold, time passes, and sure enough, it ends up being months later and did they manage to actually do the thing they said they were gonna do?

Maybe they don’t even think about it again … until the adcom comes calling.

And then, panicked, they ask us what to do.

And we’re like “DUDE!!!”

(Or “DUDETTE!!” in case you don’t consider “dude” to be as gender-neutral as we do.)
 

So here we are NOW, telling you that if you commit to retaking the GMAT or enrolling in whatever class we advised that you enroll in, that you actually follow through with it and complete the thing you’re saying you’re going to complete.

Just be full-fledged adults who manage their commitments in the Real World. Follow-through is what character is made of.

In other words:

Don’t be a flake!

You’ll only be cheating yourself.

“If I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I wouldn’t need an MBA”

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Why do schools ask you about career goals?

Not all of them do, but some of them do — and those that do often tend to care a lot about how you respond.

No you don’t really need to know what you will do in three years when you (hopefully!) will be graduating with that shiny new degree.

But actually yes you do.

The whole point of going to get an MBA is to either advance your skillset significantly to accelerate your progress in your current career path — say, someone in finance who wants to study much more advanced topics in finance, and specialize further. Or, the MBA is to help you switch paths completely.

Almost everyone these days is trying for an MBA for that latter option.

There’s something about your current career you’re not satisfied with, either feeling like you’re in a dead end, or you’re in a technical role when you want to move into management, or you’re in an analyst role and you want to move into tech, or whatever it is.

Or — hopefully not the case but for some of you — you’ve been laid off recently, lost your job as fallout from the crisis hitting the world.

Or maybe you’ve got that holy grail idea that you’re going to be the next Zuckerberg. You’re gonna blaze a trail to California and strike it rich in the Valley. launching the Next Big Thing, sweeping the world by storm. Or at least get a job at Facebook.

It’s true that sitting here right now, you likely have no frickin clue what exactly your life will look like in three years. Honestly, that’s true for every single one of us.

But the things that are worth working towards in life tend to take time and effort to actualize, and like the sage Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

So there’s this weird dichotomy, where you know you want to do something different, you’re pretty clueless what that might be, and yet the business schools want you to have answers you don’t have in order to jump through their hoops of admission.

Heck, you probably don’t even need the MBA to go do it.

Actually, that’s an 100% accurate statement: You do not need the MBA at all.

You’re smart. You’re already accomplished. You’re likely already in the top 10% of whatever measure you might want to use to judge yourself against your peer group. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t even be in a position to be considering higher education and advancing your career.

If the bottom line is that you want to make more money, and you know that those spit out the other end of an MBA program tend to command very sexy salaries, then that alone might be sufficient motivation for you to apply.

Yet you still need to figure out why you’re doing this and how you’re going to navigate your life.

It’s totally true, the immersive experience of two years in bschool is designed to help you figure yourself out. You’re surrounded by smart people, coming from all sorts of paths, and you’re exposed to massive amounts of new ideas and opportunities. You’re forced to take classes in subjects you never would’ve volunteered to learn about otherwise. The entirety of that experience will change you, and you’ll uncover new talents and interests, and (probably) realize what new path you want to explore.

Or, you’ll do it like so many others do, and you’ll just follow the herd into the career du jour, which these days is tech and product management (even though there’s actually a gazillion other jobs available in tech beyond that), or default to consulting if you can’t settle on anything else. In which case, you’ll still not really know what you want to do with your life, but at least you’ll be getting paid more to do it.

What we’re talking about today is not just figuring out the right thing to say in an MBA application when you’re asked to describe your short-term career goals. Yes, you can take the short-sighted view and try and finesse your answer so that it “sounds good” to the admissions committee (Pro Tip: This rarely works in reality. Read up on the entirety of this blahg to understand why. Or go here.)

What we’re talking about is figuring out at least a little bit what makes you tick, what you have learned that you’re good at — what you perhaps already know that you really don’t like. And researching the world of work to understand where you might apply those gifts that you’ve been given.

We’re all born with a certain set of skills that may need practice and training to sharpen, yet once they’re revealed, become so obvious in informing a path-forward in life that it almost is laughable. You likely don’t know fully what those innate abilities are yet, and absolutely, the MBA will be totally valuable in helping you to discern them.

But so can many other educational programs, whether other master’s tracks or a doctoral path or just a Coursera certificate. And many other life paths also can teach you. Sure, the MBA is a fun two-year vacation full of excitement and Instagram-worthy travel and do-gooder tasks. The MBA will make your mom proud. The MBA can easily get you somewhere new. It’s a proven track to a new destination, that by definition will be different from where you began.

Spending time now, before you even have your first application written, to explore some of those options in the Big Bad World and understand what the MBA can do for you, and how, is a worthwhile investment. You’ll continue with those tasks and that research all the way until you’ve signed the acceptance letter for that first post-MBA job, so this is not a one-and-done assignment we’re giving you. All of this is about learning who you are and having an appreciation for why you’ve been put on this earth. Yes it’s that big — and no, your purpose in life does not have to be some massive altruistic charitable effort. You might have been put here to be a consultant. The world needs consultants. Nothing wrong with that at all. You being a consultant might totally fulfill your destiny. Or it might be a stepping stone, to build more of those skills and shape more of those abilities into full-blown utility, so that when you realize, many more years post-MBA, that you’re again in a dead end and needing to make a change, you have the foundation of strength to build from, and the confidence in knowing how to navigate to something entirely new all over again.

 
 
 

($) Most competitive season ever?

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Not to freak you out or anything, but, uh, the way we’re reading the tea leaves so far with Round 1 is making us wonder.

Maybe this year won’t be the most competitive… But most applications ever?


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($) Writing tip for authenticity: Handling memories accurately

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You’ve probably heard that storytelling is an important part of writing good MBA essays, and you’ve also probably been stumped by what that even means. Pretty much the entirety of our writing tips and show, don’t tell posts here on the EssaySnark blahg is devoted to helping you build this skill, and it’s core to what we offer when we go through the Essay Decimator essay review process with you.

Today is yet another seemingly small writing tip that actually can help a lot in building authenticity into your stories — or more accurately, we’re going to warn you about something that can degrade that authenticity and make the writing feel forced, fake, and even untrustworthy.

And, we’ll do so by showing you an example of how it’s done well.

Note: We see this issue show up A LOT in MBA essays for Stanford GSB and Harvard and also Yale SOM with their “biggest commitment” question, though it can occur in most any essay for any school.


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Storytelling is hard! And doing it well can be so impactful.
 
 

 
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Each of these elements adds up to a robust presentation of your subjective truth in your MBA applications. Tending to such details can definitely improve your writing and help the reader buy into the claims that you are making.

Want to find out if you have such issues in your MBA essays? Our Essay Decimator is a great way to get unbiased reactions to how you’re coming across and if your presentation is effective — not just in the construction of your stories, but even more importantly, if your content is on track for what your target school’s adcom is likely to respond to, in order to earn that interview invite and hopefully get in!

—
If anyone goes to read that full excerpt, please don’t come back here and argue with us about that author’s use of technique… We are selectively pulling out this passage to illustrate something about storytelling in your MBA essays, and we fully acknowledge that the entirety of that writing kinda does the opposite to what we are claiming here to be effective! Humor us, please, and let us use this snippet for the educational purpose it’s intended. 🙂

A valuable planning exercise: Imagine that you won’t get in.

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

The exercise we’re proposing today may strike fear into your heart.

And that’s OK.

Fear can be a valuable motivator! Fear is a big part of life. Fear is probably the only reason you floss your teeth; fear of the dentist, fear of your teeth falling out, fear of being a bad boy (or girl) or whatever worked as motivation to get you to start. (oh, you don’t floss? Well you SHOULD! don’t you know that your teeth might fall out??)

Applying to business school is like that.

Well, sort of.

You’re applying to bschool because you want to change your life. Because you think it’s expected of you. Because you feel stuck in your job. Because you want to pivot. Because you want to have an impact on the world. Because of a myriad of other reasons that have motivated you to go through all this time and hassle and trouble. And essays!! If you’d known about the essays you would never have started. But now you’re in the thick of things and you’ve told everyone you’re doing it, and you’ve got recommenders lined up and your family is expecting you to get in. So you’re sucking it up, and you’re writing those essays, and you’re praying more than you’ve ever prayed in your life.

Or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’ve had this idea for ages that you’ll be applying in Round 1 of 2018, and you’re ready with GMAT and your recs have been chosen and yes, you’re writing those essays, but you’re assuming all of this is going to work out. After all, you made it into college reasonably easily. Your GMAT is in range. You’re doing everything right.

Go read this: To Reach Your Goals, Imagine You Already Tried and Failed

The practice that this article suggests, of doing a “premortem” where you cast your mind out to the future — say, December 15th or so of this year — and you imagine that you failed. Close your eyes and sit with it.

You submitted to all of these schools in Round 1.

Now it’s December, and the decisions have come in.

You’re sitting there empty-handed. All of that work, and all you have to show for it is a bunch of admissions letters saying, “We regret to inform you….”

From the article:

Going through this exercise not only helps to ensure that your optimism is at least somewhat grounded in reality, but it also helps you to uncover potential pitfalls on the path to your goal that might otherwise be overlooked. This way, you can prepare for them in advance.

The two most common causes of MBA application failure that we tend to see over and over are:

1. Aiming too high. The profile is not a match to the schools they were targeting. Read more

2. Craptastic essays. The schools chosen are in range for the profile but the execution is simply not there. Read more

However, those two causes of failure are actually results of something else.

1. Aiming too high is a result of not understanding how very, very competitive this process is. It’s a result of assuming that a certain GMAT score is “good enough.” It’s a result of fooling yourself about how good your own stats are or how differentiated you think your background is, or thinking that getting an alum from Harvard to put in a word will be enough to land a spot. Aiming too high is usually about a lack of education about the realities of this process, or a willful blindness to issues in your package. Aiming too high is usually a result of naivety or ignorance, or it could be caused by misinformation, like when some admissions consultant gushes about how strong your profile is and you’re sure to get into School X, but you asked the wrong person for their opinion and really that person was just trying to sell you something. Like an expensive admissions consulting package.

2. Craptastic essays is a result of thinking that you write well, so how hard can it be? It’s the result of not putting in enough time, or thinking that the essays aren’t the most important part, especially when you’re presenting a 750 GMAT and a 3.5 GPA. Craptastic essays stems from the reality that writing essays is really hard, and most people absolutely suck at it, and it’s a skill that needs to be learned, and you need to give yourself time to figure out how to do it. Craptastic essays are caused by the issue that many people apparently aren’t so good at analyzing the essay prompts — especially the really simple ones — and they end up writing about stuff that doesn’t fit the question.

This is just a starting point.

We could go on for days.

The value of doing this premortem exercise is you sit down with yourself and identify the things that YOU could do poorly, and where things might go sideways in YOUR applications.

You know your tendencies.

You know your patterns.

You know the habits of laziness, or overthinking, or how much you hate writing.

You can debug what might go wrong with your application process, before you’ve set it in stone.

So we invite you to spend some time with this, BSer.

If you started a journal like we’ve suggested before, go dig it out from that pile of magazines collecting on top of it on your nightstand and use it for this.

There could be plenty of other causes of the end result of you sitting there in December with no admit in hand.

Maybe you blow everything off and don’t even manage to submit.

Maybe you screw up with a recommender or you miss a deadline completely — even when you thought you had made it.

Maybe you don’t study the requirements and you don’t have a TOEFL when you need one.

Maybe your transcripts are not in English and you don’t have the right translation done on them.

All of those issues can be prevented if you plan for them now.

None of them can be fixed if you slouch off and don’t do the research and planning.

Do a premortem now. Then you will be (hopefully!) taking yourself out of the market for the EssaySnark Post-Mortem later on.

It’s much easier for our prayers to be answered when we’ve laid the groundwork effectively.

($) How do you talk about “the network” in your MBA essay?

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

Everybody does it. “I want to go to School X because of the network.”

But is that something that’s really true for you, in the actual meaning of the word?

Is it just another buzzword you’re including because you think that’s how you’re supposed to be writing in these essays?


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