Now that most Round 2 deadlines are behind us and the frenzy of another MBA admissions season is winding down, we wanted to step back and catch our breath and acknowledge some of those hard working admissions teams out there. We’ve done this before, with a few posts in the “adcoms that we love” series that we started five years ago, where we talked about sometimes overlooked schools like IESE and INSEAD. In 2014, we posted our Five Faves which at the time were Darden, Tuck, Yale, Columbia and our #1 favorite, NYU Stern.
This year we’re christening The Radcom Award which we’re going to bestow on the adcom that’s the raddest.
In the ‘Snark’s opinion, of course.
So, who will it be???
We wanted to give it to Ross because they’ve got the coolest videos!! But then they went and put their Round 2 deadline on January 2. C’mon guys! That’s not playing nice! Yeah yeah yeah, that early deadline meant that they’ve already started issuing interview invitations way ahead of most everyone else, which is definitely exciting. But sorry, that doesn’t make up for the pain inflicted on so many a few weeks ago and it’s also, from our perspective, shortsighted.
We simply can’t give it to Haas based on how mean they are with international applicants over the TOEFL. It seems that they’re more and more restrictive on this policy every single year (you can see evidence of that in the comments from BSers on that post).
Coincidentally or not, the adcom that we’ve chosen for our 2016 Radcom Award has policies on the exact opposite side of both of those issues:
- Their Round 2 deadline is the latest of all the top schools
- They don’t even require the TOEFL at all – not for nobody
Yep, you guessed it, we’re giving the Radcom Award to MIT Sloan!
Those aren’t the only reasons for why we like MIT right now.
While their cover letter requirement has proven difficult for many BSers, they are remarkably open and flexible in allowing you to submit almost anything else in support of your candidacy, through their Optional Essay (which is totally different from any other school’s optional essay, just FYI). For MIT, you have free rein on what you want to tell them about or how you want to present the best of your bad self to them. You can cover the traditional “optional essay” topics of low GPA or why you’ve chosen the recommenders that you did, and you can do that in a written essay. OR — or hopefully, AND — you can choose to share something about who you are as a person, through a PowerPoint or a video or anything else you can transmit through the Internet.
They’re not the first school to have such an opportunity (NYU and Booth have both done so for ages) but we like the combination of one very structured yet still fairly free-form submission with the cover letter, plus the do-what-you-will-with-it additional submission alongside.
That’s not the reason we’re giving them this honor of the Radcom Award, though.
It’s also because of how accessible they are to their applicants. It seems like practically every other week there’s been a chat with the Sloan adcom where they’ll let you people hit them up with questions. Other schools do these chats too so again, it’s not like Sloan is blazing a new trail or anything. It’s just that they’re offering them often, and they’re also longer (last one was 1.5 hours; some schools cut you off at half an hour) which is a significant investment of time from the admissions folks. Good stuff.
There’s one more reason why MIT has gotten the highest honor in Snarkville, which we will present along with its significance to all of you tomorrow here.
For now, you can learn all about Sloan on our dedicated MIT Sloan MBA info page or check out all our previous posts about MIT’s business school.
Tell us what you think.