Tag Archives : Video

Imagine the business school application of the future: Rather than spending weeks on dozens of revisions of multiple essays, you sit down at a computer and give short verbal responses to questions, which are recorded via a webcam and uploaded to your target business school’s online application system. Sound crazy? It’s not necessarily as far away as you might think.

MBA Podcaster’s MBA PodTV team has just launched a new video titled “Getting Into The Wharton School,” featuring our own Director of MBA Admissions, Scott Shrum. In addition to some great advice from Scott, the episode also features admissions insights from Wharton admissions officers, current students, and recent alumni:

Continuing our admissions video series, this week we hear a Veritas Prep MBA admissions expert discuss how you can determine how well you fit with a business school, and how you can demonstrate this in your business school applications.

Continuing our admissions video series, this week we hear Veritas Prep co-founder Chad Troutwine give a brief overview of how Veritas Prep’s admissions consulting works.

Forgive us for indulging ourselves with a more self-promotional video this week. We normally use this space to share news and analysis that helps applicants get into the world’s most competitive graduate schools. However, at this time of year we get so many questions about admissions consulting — what it is, how it works, how to tell apart a legitimate and illegitimate consultant — that we thought this would be a good time to share this video:

Continuing our admissions video series, this week we continue to explore the idea of how an applicant with a unique background is at an advantage over applicants who come from more typical backgrounds.

Continuing our admissions video series, this week we explore the unique challenge (and advantage) of applying to an MBA program without traditional business experience. We often get questions from applicants who work for non-profit organizations, are musicians, or have worked in another field that doesn’t have much to do with “real” business. More often than not, these applicants’ experiences are much more relevant to their candidacies, and their weaknesses are much less formidable, than they expect!

Many MBA applicants ask us, “How soon should I start working on my business school applications?” When they ask that, they’re usually thinking about their essay and their letters or recommendation (and even their GMAT, if they haven’t yet taken it). We think this narrow definition gets a lot of applicants in trouble, however. Ideally you will start working on your application a couple of years before you ever submit it! The application itself is just a single snapshot of who you are, and you should start working on your candidacy log before you write your first essay.

Continuing our new MBA admissions video series, this week we investigate how some of our admissions experts attack the process to help their applicants write knockout admissions essays. This clip covers two important steps that every applicant should take — one tactical step at the beginning, and one strategic step closer to the end of the process.

Continuing our new MBA admissions video series, this week we ask how personal someone should get in their admissions essays, and how much personal information is too much. One thing that we always tell our clients — and admissions officers frequently tell their applicants — is that they shouldn’t be afraid to get personal in their essays. Admissions officers don’t want to only read about your accomplishments; they want to get to know the real you, and that means sharing a piece of yourself, even if it means revealing some vulnerability.

Continuing our new MBA admissions video series, this week we look at the importance of hirability in the MBA admissions process. This has been a hot topic this year, given the sagging economy and the message we’ve heard from multiple top business schools about how they expect job placement to continue to be a challenge for at least one more year. This topic came up at a recent discussion among some of Veritas Prep’s MBA admissions experts, and we all agreed that admissions officers are unlikely to take a chance on an applicant if they believe it will be difficult to place that applicant with an employer down the road.

We’ve been helping business school applicants for a long time now, so long that it’s easy to forget that we didn’t start out in that business. After Veritas Prep co-founders Markus Moberg and Chad Troutwine launched our GMAT prep service in 2002, it quickly became apparent that our students not only needed GMAT help, but they also needed help in pulling together their entire business school applications. How did we know? Because they came back to us time and time again, asking us to help them with their applications just as we helped them with their GMAT prep.

In our ongoing quest to provide you with the best MBA admissions resources available anywhere, we present the second video in our MBA admissions series: How MBA Applicants Can Demonstrate Leadership.

So many applicants come to us every year with concerns about a lack of leadership experiences. When we dig a little deeper, we often find they they do in fact have great leadership experiences to talk about, although they may not come from traditional leadership roles, such as a big job title at work, military rank, team captain, etc. It’s an applicant’s ability to identify and clearly communicate these less obvious leadership stories that can make the difference between admissions to or rejection from a competitive MBA program.

In Veritas Prep’s ongoing quest to provide business school applicants with the best GMAT prep and MBA admissions resources, we will roll out a series of video tips in the coming weeks. Rather than shooting a lot of “talking head” videos, we decided it would be fun to bring together some of our admissions experts for a day of shooting the breeze and sharing some of our own experiences in working with applicants. The result is a series of short, informative videos that should give you food for thought as you start to plan your application.