We started out our first post of April talking about the GMAT, and a reality check on scheduling in order to accommodate your Round 1 application plans.
You are planning on applying in Round 1, aren’t you, Brave Supplicant? ‘Cuz there’s a MASSIVE advantage if you do.
If you have the GMAT tucked away, then does that mean you get to loll around in vacation-mode all spring and summer?
No no no, Brave Supplicant. Next up in order of importance – perhaps even MORE important – is school research.
This one is a very time-intensive topic. Here’s the deal:
Second tip: You need to visit the schools if you possibly can. This is HIGHLY recommended. It’s for your own benefit, as a way to learn which schools are the best fit for you (and, often, which are not).
Plus, visiting campus can offer some advantages in admissions: If in your essays you talk about what you learned about the school while you were sitting in on a class, it can help reinforce your pitch and underscore the points you’re making about why you want to go there.
None of the adcoms give an advantage to someone who’s visited over someone who has not, but it definitely can help you score some virtual points with your adcom reader when you’re able to impress upon them how much you know their school and really really want to go there, based on the effort you put out and the knowledge you’ve acquired for what they’re about.
BUT!! These school visit opportunities are happening NOW and only now.
The schools typically offer campus visits in the summertime, but guess what? There won’t be many students around then. If you want the whole school visit experience, then you need to make that happen sometime this month, in April. Towards the end of the month, most schools will be moving into final exams (no class visits then), and then they’ll be having graduations and parties and all the first years will be flying off around the world to embark on their summer internships, and the schools will be very empty and quiet with hardly anybody to talk to.
School visits are super important. And if you’re planning for a Round 1 application, then this is the time to be scheduling them.
Get on a plane. Use up some vacation time. Go visit some new part of the world where you’re thinking about possibly spending two years of your life. See if you, uh, like it there. Make this happen now and it can have real payoffs for you in the coming months of this long and drawn-out process.
Don’t believe us? Check out some of the Success Stories from past Brave Supplicants who were in your shoes and decided to put forth the effort to visit some MBA programs… and realized how valuable it was.
A quick note to the enthusiastic Brave Supplicant who sent in a couple questions over the weekend (which you can do, too, if you want!):
Yes, the expiration dates for all services, including the 60-day subscription for the Essay Decimator essay review service, still apply now – in fact, they especially apply now.
The reason for our 60-day window within which essay review services must be completed (meaning, essays submitted for review after purchase) is because without that, we’d be logjammed with essay submissions at the end of September, right before deadlines hit, and we wouldn’t have any chance of making it through the backlog in a reasonable fashion in order to actually help people with useful feedback. It’s just a fact of life that Brave Supplicants procrastinate. Also, the Essay Decimators are cheapest at this time of year, so we’d end up with people purchasing at the cheap time and then not submitting their work until the busy period, which would kinda defeat the purpose of our incentive pricing.
HOWEVER: We have a good option instead! For anyone eager to get started on developing their application strategy, we’ve got the Foundations package, which is basically the Complete Essay Package just without the Essay Decimator. If you purchase Foundations, you then qualify for a discount on a future Essay Decimator review service provided you purchase before the Foundations package expires.
Talk about really getting started on your MBA apps!
We have more advice about getting started in this next post.
Djilas says
Thank you for answering some of my questions, EssaySnark!
essaysnark says
You bet! We have more answers forthcoming for you soon, too. Thanks for asking the questions!