The Secrets of MBA Admissions

AT LEAST 50% OF THE POOL IS WORTHY OF ADMISSION

At this stage, we have five thousand candidates left on the table—all of whom have proven their worth. Let that sink in: 50 percent of the pool is worthy of admission. (Sometimes the percentage is even higher: MIT Sloan Admissions Director Rod Garcia told me it’s not unusual for his committee to judge 70 percent of applicants as worthy of a seat at Sloan.) Our hypothetical committee now has five thousand applicants they’d love to accept, but only a thousand seats available to offer. By what criteria do they cut 80 percent of the remaining applicants? It seems awfully subjective, right?

Yes, it is. That’s why story—the most subjective of the three elements— plays such an important role in your candidacy. And hence the “reality check”: Your essays are not about proving your worth; they are about creating a lasting impression on the committee by painting an evocative picture of how you think, what you care about, how you make decisions, your personal leadership style, and what you look like in action.

Using the essays to prove your worth is the single biggest mistake you can make. Since the essays don’t play a huge role in your candidacy until after you’ve already proven your worth based on stats and experience, you’re just spinning your wheels to continue to focus on proving your worth in the essays. Instead, you should focus on being memorable by choosing interesting topics and analyzing your experiences in a compelling, evolved, evocative, sophisticated way. How to actually achieve that vague and abstract goal is what Part 2 of this book, “Zen and the Art of MBA Admissions Essays,” is all about.

THE UNREMARKABLE ARE EASY REJECTS REGARDLESS OF THEIR RAW SCORES

So, back to our hypothetical admissions committee. Another three thousand applicants just got cut because the committee couldn’t find anything remarkable about them subjectively. Now, at the tail end of this process, comes the interview—two thousand lucky souls get invited to sit down with an actual real-life representative of the admissions committee and close the deal. (Some schools have “open interviews” that anyone can sign up for, even before submitting their application—see Chapter 19 for more information on how to use the interview to close the deal.)

These final two thousand candidates are narrowed down to a final one thousand (plus two hundred are given a spot on the waitlist) based on a careful calibration of their entire candidacies. At this point, our hypothetical committee also includes some data completely beyond your control—primarily diversity/demographic issues like gender, industry, geography, ethnicity, etc.—to create a beautifully balanced class.

AS I said, this is an oversimplification. Real admissions committees don’t operate in this highly linear style; all of these factors are actually being considered and balanced simultaneously. That’s how HBS, for example, ends up accepting some applicants who have low-600 GMAT scores and rejecting quite a few applicants with high-700 GMAT scores. I’ve turned down many a potential client with 3.8 GPAs and 780 GMAT scores because they were deathly boring, had no self-awareness, never did anything without figuring out what they were getting in return, and/or insisted on emulating the exact same essay topics as their friends who got in last year.

WHAT YOUR GPA AND GMAT TELL AN ADMISSIONS COMMITTEE

At the opposite end of the spectrum are candidates like Randy. Randy had a 3.8 GPA from a top-tier college—but he majored in classics and placed out of the only math class he needed to earn his degree. So he didn’t have a single quantitative class in his transcript by which to judge those abilities. However, his super-high GPA from such a competitive school clearly demonstrated he’s both smart and a disciplined student.

A great GMAT quant percentile can easily offset any concerns the committee has about one’s math abilities, but Randy’s best GMAT score after five attempts was a 640—including a 63 quant percentile. Yet the rest of Randy’s candidacy was extraordinarily compelling. His recommendations touted the initiative and interpersonal skills that won him a top 5 percent analyst ranking at his investment bank. His essays were as insightful and witty as he was (I forced him to let go of the dry, business memo style he initially thought was appropriate), his career vision bold and inventive, and his extracurriculars integrated into his passions rather than randomly selected to pad his résumé. Randy was memorable in every way but his quant ability—and Wharton accepted him on the condition that he take a calculus class and make an A or a B.

Evan Forster and David Thomas are the founders of admissions consulting firm Forster-Thomas Inc. and the authors of The MBA Reality Check.