This post has been marked as OLD. EssaySnark's advice and strategies for winning MBA applications don't change from year to year, but some of the school-specific admissions policies, essay questions, or other information covered in this article may be outdated.
In the next installment of our on-again off-again series about MBA admission committees that seem to have candidates’ interests at heart, we’re going to briefly talk about Chicago Booth. (Or we’ll “talk aboot” them, more like.) Way back in 2010 before you even had the first thought of bschool, we had a summary post in this series that included Booth, named at the time “adcoms that we trust.” It covered Booth, and Tuck, and Stanford — yes Stanford, even though their processes are not quite as well revealed as some of these others.
Today let’s circle back to Booth, namely to call attention to the resources that they themselves offer up. Of all the schools that have a blog (not all do), and all the ones that post to their blogs regularly (not all do), Booth is one that actually offers useful advice in that forum. There’s one or two others that actually do even more — we’ll get to them too, but they actually deserve a post unto themselves.
What motivated today’s post is the Booth distributed some very excellent interview advice on their blog last week , and we don’t want anyone to miss them.1 We almost feel like our whole interviewing guide is not needed, once you see this simple set of tips. Kurt Ahlm’s post applies to many of the schools – even for those that have ‘open’ interviews, where the interviewer will have read your application, this guidance is useful.
So that’s one big reason why we love Booth: They’re candid and open about trying to help you. We told you that they’re not trying to trick anybody! They also have offered similar tips on getting letters of recommendation and other nuggets of useful wisdom.
Another reason we like Booth is because they’re flexible — you have interesting options available this year in terms of how you choose to construct your application. “The content is completely up to you” is a pretty cool thing to read in essay instructions, is it not? And we heard about this video essay option for waitlisted candidates before… not sure if that’s still part of the picture or not. But we like it.
Granted, that much flexibility can make BSers freeze like a deer in headlights — What do I do what do I do what do I do??? — but it’s also liberating once you embrace it!
Plus there’s that whole “flexible curriculum” thing once you get accepted (pros and cons of that discussed here).
We’ve said before that you should not choose a bschool based on its adcom — sometimes the experience people have through the admissions process is not optimal, and that has little to no bearing on what their MBA education will be like. Still, when there’s a dynamite adcom that’s out there trying to help its candidates like this, you have to assume that the school behind them is equally rad.
To help you out with your MBA application to Chicago — yes, for the essays! — we recently announced the SnarkStrategies Guide for Booth. Check it out for a jumpstart on your strategy and pitch!
1 Update 1-15-17: EssaySnark’s touting of those Booth interview tips from 2012 as something special needs to be considered in context. At the time, many schools gave very little information to applicants. That list of interview guidance from Booth is pretty basic by today’s standards of what the better adcoms provide. We still like Booth, but that post is not rocking our world on behalf of BSers any longer (and we definitely believe that you would benefit from our interviewing guide!)
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