You Won’t Believe Who Harvard Business School Rejected This Month

Mr. Investment Manager

• 780 GMAT (50Q, 42V)
• 4.2/5.0 GPA
• Undergraduate degree from a top university in Singapore

  Work experiences includes one year at Deloitte Consulting, then three years as a credit analyst at an European bank, and two years as investment manager at the proprietary desk of a global financial institution, helping to manage a few billions of assets with a focus on infrastructure financing

• Extracurricular involvement leading the bass section of the university ensemble, currently mentor a domestic worker in Singapore
• Goal: To move toward an active/PE style infrastructure investment
• “Essay talks about story of my life, how I decided to pursue business education vs. family background in arts and how I learnt through the experience of others in my professional life”
• 29-year-old Southeast Asian male at matriculation

Sandy’s Analysis: You were probably dinged because of your six years of work experience and three jobs with the last being your two years “as investment manager at the proprietary desk of a global financial institution.” I have a hard time reading that but if that was some off-the-grid, not super selective job at common feeder firm, well, that is DINGSVILLE. Finance is an ultra-competitive cohort and you probably suffered a variant of the “middle-market PE curse” see below, but self-explanatory.

For finance types, selective is real easy to define: Do kids who have that job often get admitted to HBS? Do kids from your bank and function apply to B-school and what are their typical outcomes? The answers to these questions are the best metric in the world, obviously.

If there no HBS admits, you still got a chance, but man, it is hard. Another way to look at selective is how many kids were interviewed for the job you have, from where, and how many were given the job? That is the way that MBB and bulge bracket (is that still a term?) investment banking are selective.

If your job was mostly trading, which it sounds like, hello, you and everyone else, WAKE UP!, HBS does not like traders. That is usually the kiss of death except in very narrow circumstances –usually a deeply classy resume — with an IVY school and a Goldman work history, along with solid stats.

Nothing else in your above profile was going to overcome that. You say your post MBA goal is to move toward “active/PE style infrastructure investment.” Exactly, if active in goal statement means you are not an active investor now, but rather a trader, that is not good from an HBS point of view. The fact that you can spin up some likable HBS goals does not make the bad go away.

You also say that your essay “talks about the story of my life, how I decided to pursue business education vs. family background in arts and how I learnt through the experience of others in my professional life…”

YIKES. It’s probably a non-issue, but this was not doing you any good, and adcom members actually prefer arts to business in some weird, self-hating way. That could have been a story they read with clenched teeth. Your real “bad,” however, were the facts on your resume and not so much how you executed. You were basically Dead On Arrival.