Archive : MBA Admissions

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management recently released its admissions essays and application deadlines for the Class of 2014. We dig into them below.

Note that Kellogg has an unusual two-part application process: Part I includes your data sheets, resume, self-reported GMAT and TOEFL scores, and stated preference for whether you would like an on-campus or off-campus interview. (They also ask for your $250 application fee in Part I!) Part II includes your letters of recommendation, your essays, and your official GMAT and TOEFL scores. For each admissions round, be sure that you hit both deadlines!

We love to work with applicants who want to apply to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. The school’s close-knit culture and rigorous curriculum make it a school that everyone should look at closely, particularly those who are interested in pursuing careers in the Northeast. But, besides knowing that it’s a top-ranked school with a strong community, how well do you really know Tuck? How do you know if it’s a good fit for you? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you know if the admissions committee will decide you’re a good fit for Tuck?

If you plan on enrolling in a Veritas Prep GMAT course or MBA admissions consulting service, there are only a couple of days left to lock in our old prices! This Friday (July 1), prices will go up on most GMAT prep classes and on all admissions consulting packages.

Summer is always the most popular time of year for our GMAT prep and admissions consulting services. Starting now puts you in a great position to apply in the fall. Now, as if you didn’t need more reason to get started now, enrolling in June will save you some money!

Wondering how you can maximize the benefit of your MBA investment? Prospective and current MBA students are increasingly concerned with how they can distinguish themselves among their peers in an increasingly competitive post-MBA job market. According to a recent survey of over 250 current MBA students and graduates, the overwhelming majority of respondents noted that “networking” was the number one way that they could improve their job prospects and career search success. While it is certainly important for prospective MBAs to choose a program that fits their learning objectives and professional interests, current MBAs advise prospective students to take into consideration the strength of each program’s networking opportunities.

Stanford GSB recently released its MBA admissions essays and deadlines for the 2011-2012 application season. You may notice some changes to the essays since last year; we’ll dig into those changes below.

Note that, as it has done for the past several years, Stanford’s admissions committee provides some high-level advice right on its own website. While we think this advice is generally good, we do think that most applicants can benefit from a more in-depth look at these essays. But, of course, any advice that comes straight from the horse’s mouth deserves your attention!

Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business gets its fair share if applicants every year. In fact, not a week goes by when we don’t see Fuqua on an applicant’s short list of MBA programs to consider. Given the school’s tight-knit community and knack for producing good grads, it’s not surprising that so many applicants think about spending two years there. What does surprise us, though, is that so few of those applicants really know the school beyond its obvious strengths. We always urge these applicants to go back and do their homework a bit more before they start crafting their Fuqua applications.

Enjoy making people happy? We do, too, and we’re looking for someone to brighten our students’ days as a Client Experience Coordinator.  Veritas Prep is a global leader in graduate admissions preparation, which means that we work with hundreds of anxious graduate school applicants each day.  With the knowledge that smiling relieves anxiety and promotes a successful, proactive mindset, we aim to put smiles on our students’ faces as often as possible as we guide them through the admissions process.

You know yourself better than anyone, but in the eyes of MBA admissions officers, the best experts on you are often those who have worked with you. Every one of your business school applications will contain at least one letter of recommendation, and most top schools ask for at least two. These letters build on your admissions story, providing additional evidence of the leadership skills, analytical abilities, teamwork skills, and maturity that you have highlighted in the rest of your application.

Ideally your direct supervisor will provide at least one of your recommendations, but what if you can’t (or don’t want to) tell your boss yet that you’re applying to business school?

The Harvard Business School admissions committee has just released its admissions essays for the HBS 2+2 Program for the coming year. Today we’ll dig into the program’s application deadlines and those essays.

Regarding deadlines, note that the big change since last year is that there are now four deadlines, vs. one single summer deadline for the program. Even though the window in which you can apply is now more wide open, note that the program is still designed with current college juniors in mind. (HBS phrases it as anyone who will “be graduating from your college or university between October 1, 2011 and September 30, 2012,” which mostly applies to those who are just wrapping up their junior year in college.)

Last week we introduced our idea for how traditional hiring firms at top business schools could upend the whole system and recruit those high-potential young professionals directly. In Part I, we raised the idea of these firms could go so far as to create their own admissions offices, which would screen applicants in much the same way that MBA admissions officers do today. Why let these young superstars spend two years out of the workforce?

In that piece, we discussed some of the pros and cons for the hiring companies. Today we look at pros and cons for the other big constituency that would need to buy into this idea: Those young professionals who normally apply to the world’s top MBA programs two to five years after graduating from college.

At Veritas Prep, we’re always on the lookout for new ways to connect with applicants and help them succeed. Evisors can connect you with savvy former employees and interviewers at top firms who will help you land your dream job. If you are still planning on applying to graduate school, you can also find Veritas Prep admissions consultants on Evisors who will help you gain acceptance to the world’s top graduate programs.

Evisors was created to provide a menu of the best career and admissions consultants out there (they’re called “evisors”) and let the customer pick and choose who they want to talk to. Veritas Prep and Evisors have teamed up to make some of our best GMAT and MBA admissions experts available through the Evisors website. These experts can easily be identified by the “Veritas Prep Certified” seal next to their profiles.

With higher-education costs continuing to climb as fast as a barrel of crude oil, some have rightly begun to question how much a college education is worth. Just this past week Peter Thiel of PayPal fame made waves when he was quoted in TechCrunch saying that an Ivy League degree shouldn’t necessarily be the aim for all of our nation’s best and brightest high school students. What those students get from such a degree isn’t necessarily what every one of them needs, and Thiel has proposed an alternate path that may be better suited to the nest Bill Gates or Steve Jobs coming up through today’s high schools.

This reminded us of an idea that has been discussed around Veritas Prep HQ before. What if blue-chip firms such as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs opened their own admissions departments, admitted a select number of young men and women into their associate programs each year? What if those young professionals could skip MBA programs entirely, and jump right into the jobs that they hope to get after two years of business school? Why not just cut business schools out of the equation and go get the talent directly?

Veritas Prep is proud to be a member of the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC), a non-profit organization dedicated to upholding the highest ethical standards for grad school admissions consultants. Each year AIGAC conducts a survey to help it better understand applicant’s goals and needs, and the 2011 survey is already upon us! We’d like to invite you to share you school selection priorities and views on the MBA application process.

Before you know it the 2011-2012 MBA admissions season will be upon us, meaning that you should already start thinking about what schools you’re targeting. The QS World MBA Tour is coming to North America, bringing representatives from the world’s top business schools to a city near you. There are only a few days left to register for your chance to meet with admissions officers, apply for over $1.6 million worth of exclusive scholarships, attend an open GMAT Seminar, and take part in alumni panel discussions with representatives from Harvard, Wharton, Columbia and Stanford.

No matter where you are in your research of MBA programs, we always strongly recommend that you visit the schools you’re considering. If you can’t do that (or simply haven’t done it yet), meeting with admissions officers in your own home town is the next best thing!

The QS World MBA Tour is coming to North America, bringing representatives from the world’s top business schools to a city near you. You’ll have the opportunity to meet with admissions officers, apply for over $1.6 million worth of exclusive scholarships, attend an open GMAT Seminar, and take part in alumni panel discussions with representatives from Harvard, Wharton, Columbia and Stanford.

Put your questions directly to admissions staff, alumni and members of the world’s leading MBA programs and get your questions answered at the world’s biggest MBA fairs!

Getting rejected is hard stuff. What makes it even more painful is that few MBA programs (or law schools or medical schools) give rejected applicants specific feedback on why they didn’t get in. Applicants just want to know what they “did wrong” to not get in, but, even when schools do provide feedback, the applicants normally end up confused and still guessing about what to do next.

What’s the deal? Are admissions officers trying to obfuscate the process, keeping you in the dark so that you can’t “game” the system? Are they just cold hearted, not caring about you, especially once they’ve decided they don’t want you? No and no. The truth is that, when someone gets rejected, it’s often because the school just couldn’t find any great reason to admit them over thousands of other applicants.

MBA admissions committees seem difficult to read.  Applicants agonize over their essays and dread their interviews, all the while wondering what the committee wants to hear.  At Veritas Prep headquarters, we regularly receive calls and emails with questions such as:

Perhaps the most typical mistake applicants make on their early drafts is polishing their achievements so that the link between their decisions and the successful results fits like a custom made glove. Dan Ariely wrote a great piece in December 2010′s HBS called “Good Decisions. Bad Outcomes.” The article is worth reading but essentially boils down to this: you should be more concerned with explaining your decision process than with the results — because results may have many contributing causes over which you have no control. This applies equally to success and to failure. You may have had a great idea for a viable restaurant concept — and opened your first few outlets on the Louisiana & Mississippi in spring 2010. The BP spill was bad luck — you still might make a good MBA candidate.

The wisdom in Ariely’s argument is that causality is tricky stuff.

Next week yours truly will deliver a speech at a wedding. I have known the groom for nearly two decades, and I consider him to be one of my closest friends, even though distance unfortunately keeps us apart most of the time (I live in California and he lives in Beijing). While I don’t consider myself to be an expert toastmaster, I’m not too worried, since I know that what makes for a great admissions essay or personal statement also makes for a terrific wedding speech.

Think back for a minute and consider the last few weddings you’ve been to. If you’re lucky, you only have witnessed great wedding speeches and toasts, but odds are that you’ve sat through at least one or two bombs. What accounts for the difference?

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that the MIT Sloan admissions office has purchased 15 iPads, which its admissions officers will use to review applications in a 100% paper-free environment. Sloan, which was one of the first business schools to require applicants to submit their applications online back in the 1990s, estimates that the move will save the school $10,000 per year in paper costs.

The way many schools work now is fairly inefficient. Virtually every school now accepts (or even requires) online applications, but often the first thing that admissions officers do with a newly received application is print it out. From there, the paper application goes through a process that has barely changed in decades: It moves from one pile to the next, from one admissions officers’ hands to the next, until it has been reviewed at least a couple of times. While the online application systems make for better tracking, today schools rarely take advantage of this. Now, however, if Sloan can keep every application entirely online, it can make for much more efficient reviewing and tracking of each application.

This is the time of year when we get multiple calls per day from applicants who wonder whether they should do whatever it takes to finish their applications in time for most business schools’ Round 2 admissions deadlines in early January, or wait and take their chances in Round 3. As usual, the answer we give them is, “It depends,” although we do have some very strong opinions on the matter.

No two applicants are in the same situation, so the answer we give is never quite the same. One applicant might call us because he recently lost his job. He hadn’t been planning on applying to business school this year, but his sudden unemployment now makes MBA programs look that much more appealing. Another might call us because she just took the GMAT again and still can’t get above a 650. She had been planning on nailing the GMAT this month and spending a couple of weeks on her essays and letters of recommendation, but now she wonders if she’d be better served by taking the GMAT yet again and applying in Round 3 in March or April. Still another applicant just rolled out of bed last week and decided that he absolutely must have a Harvard MBA. We get all types at Veritas Prep!

Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece written by an anonymous “hired gun” who writes admissions essays, term papers, and even doctoral theses for paying students, who in turn pass these off as their own. Not long after that, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a similar article that profiled a couple of similar services that write essays for business school applicants. (Veritas Prep was actually mentioned as an ethical alternative to these services in the latter article.)

Two things really bother us about the existence of these services. Is one of them the fact that they’re unethical and shady? Well, yes, we do think that, but that’s so obvious that we won’t devote any more words to it here. (If you’re the type to consider buying your essays from someone, then maybe becoming a business leader or a lawyer or a doctor isn’t the best path for you.)

With Harvard Business School releasing its Round 1 admissions decisions yesterday, we thought it would be fun to post the following question: How much would you pay for a seat in the HBS Class of 2013?

Of course, Harvard doesn’t sell seats in its class (unless you get a building named after you; we’d have to think that wouldn’t hurt your admissions chances). But what if you could write a check to guarantee yourself a spot in next year’s entering class? $100? $1,000? $1,000,000?

If you applied to one or more MBA programs in Round 1, by now you may already have a feel for how it’s going. Perhaps you got an interview invitation with at least one school (great!), or you haven’t heard anything yet (don’t worry!), or perhaps you’ve already gotten the dreaded “No thanks” message from one of your target schools (oh no!). In any scenario, you may already look at Round 2 differently than you did just a month ago.

If things are going well, then you probably don’t need much help (although you maybe do need some interview preparation). If you’re starting to get bad news, though, you may have started thinking different about Round 2. That’s not a bad thing to do — any smart manager always incorporates new information as it comes in, after all — but don’t let one or two rejection letters completely throw you off of your game.

On Sunday the Financial Times ran an article by Stanford GSB professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who argues that today’s business schools are producing increasingly self-focused grads who shy away from tough challenges and are incapable of the empathy that makes great leaders. While we mostly agree with his diagnosis, we think his cure comes up short.

No, this is not a response in which we defend MBA programs and their graduates. We think that Pfeffer’s description of many young professionals is right on target: Millennials who have all had a chance to be valedictorian and have been shielded from any true academic or professional adversity until now. What was first a trickle back in 2006, as these young adults first started applying to graduate schools, is now a full-blown gusher. Unfortunately, our communities — starting with parents — have made many of today’s young professionals “softer” and virtually unable to face (much less act on) constructive criticism.

An article in last week’s Wall Street Journal wrote about a trend that we’ve seen unfold over the past year or so: After seeing years of seemingly unstoppable growth in the number of overseas applicants, many U.S. business schools now see increasing competition coming from MBA programs in other countries. For many U.S. schools — especially those outside of the top five or top ten — having a thriving contingent of international students is a sign of the school’s credibility worldwide, and these schools are working harder than ever to maintain a healthy international populations in its student body.

Two weeks ago we ran Part 1 of this feature, explaining how, like a team manager in fantasy sports, you need to be be able to react quickly to changes in your circumstances as you pull together your business school applications. That first article prompted a discussion here at Veritas Prep HQ that got us thinking about a whole different way in which admissions and fantasy sports are the same… Today we present Part 2!

As Harvard Business School and other top MBA programs start sending out interview invitations for the 2010-2011 admissions season, we’ve been getting more and more questions about how to prepare for these interviews. We’ve written before about how you don’t go into your MBA admissions interview with a blank slate. Even in the case of a “blind” admissions interview in which the interviewer may have nothing more than your resume, the admissions office already knows a great deal about you, and you can be sure that what the interviewer learns will be fed back into your file. Then, that whole file will be considered, meaning that the interview, while it comes later in the process, is not a final hurdle, but rather one more piece of the whole pie.

If you’re like half of us here at Veritas Prep HQ, this is the time of year when you suddenly care a great deal about NFL players and teams that you don’t normally follow. You’ve got the fantasy football bug, and have signed on for at least 14 weeks of ups and downs generated by the motley assortment of players on your fantasy football team.

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has announced that it will host an online admissions fair featuring admissions representatives from dozens of top MBA programs next month, on November 22 and 23. The GMATCH Virtual Fair, which will take place entirely online, is being billed as the “the first truly global virtual fair” for business school applicants and admissions officers.

We’ve written many times about the trend at some top business schools toward accepting younger applicants. In some cases, these schools have even created specific programs to attract these candidates. But, a big question still looms: Does it make sense for someone to enter an MBA program with little or not full-time professional experience?”

Continuing our “Admissions 101″ series, today we explore the question of whether you should apply to business school in Round 1 or Round 2, and whether this decision really matters at all. Every year we get a lot of questions from applicants in late September and early October along the lines of, “Here’s where my application stands today. Does it make sense to apply now, or [insert some way of improving one's application here] and apply in Round 2 instead?”

Are you applying to business school this fall? There’s still time to register for a QS World MBA Tour event in a city near you!

As reported in Bloomberg Businessweek this morning, we have just released the initial results from our 2010 MBA applicant survey. Some of the results are surprising.

Are you applying to business school this fall? The QS World MBA Tour gives MBA applicants the opportunity to meet admission officers from the world’s best business schools, attend GMAT seminars and participate in sample business school classes. This fall, the World MBA Tour will be visiting 72 cities on five continents including many North American cities.

MBA fair season is upon us, with multiple tours passing through the world’s major cities, along with local information sessions hosted by schools themselves. For many applicants, this will be the first time they ever come face-to-face with official representatives from their dream schools.

This post is the second installment in our new “Admissions 101″ series, devoted to teaching our readers the basics of admissions for business school, law school, or medical school. From time to time we’ll tackle popular questions and dispel some of the more common myths about the admissions process.

If you plan on applying to business school this fall, now is a great time to connect with representatives from the schools that you are interested in attending. The MBA Tour will be in Paris and London at the end of September and if you are in the area, we encourage you to attend. You’ll get the opportunity to meet with business school representatives from the world’s top MBA programs and sit in on informative panels about the admissions process.

We’re just two months away from the first Round 1 deadlines for the 2010-2011 MBA admissions season, and one question that we frequently receive at this time of year is, “I took the GMAT and scored X… Should I take it again before I apply?”

Today on the “Hire Education” blog on the Wall Street Journal, Veritas Prep co-founder and CEO Chad Troutwine questioned the conventional wisdom that business school is no place for aspiring entrepreneurs. Some would-be entrepreneurs see business school as an unnecessary (and costly) pit stop on their way to to startup success, while others actually think that sitting in a classroom and dissecting case studies could actually hurt them in their quest to start a successful company.