Dinged By HBS? Find Out Why

You made it past the first hurdle and gained an interview with a Harvard Business School admissions officer. Tomorrow (Dec. 12) at exactly noon EST, you’ll find out whether you passed the interview test. Or whether you will be among the 40% to 50% of the interviewed round one candidates who will be dinged or moved to the dreaded wait list which still preserves some hope of an admit.

If you get rejected today, at least you can say you weren’t among the nearly 3,000 applicants in round one who didn’t even get an interview. And as good as most of those dinged candidates were, if there’s any solace in receiving bad news now it’s that you just missed getting in by the skin of your teeth.

Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com

Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com

If you’re like most dinged candidates, you are probably perplexed by the turn down. Often times, prospective students who have great stats and careers are turned down for subtle and not easily understood reasons. Last year, for example, several dinged candidates boasted GMAT scores as high as 780 or GPAs as high as 4.0 from the very best Ivy League schools. They worked for Fortune 100 companies and major global consulting firms, investment banks, and startups. We’re talking Goldman Sachs, Google, Procter & Gamble, and McKinsey, Bain or BCG.

So, as we have in the past, we’ve asked Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com, a leading MBA admissions consultant and an astute reader of all HBS tea leaves, to take a look at the profiles of “released” applicants and explain why they didn’t make the first cut.

If you would like Sandy to explain your HBS ding, just post below in the comment section your profile, your GPA, GMAT, company information, and any other facts you think made your application different. The more detail you provide, including what you wrote in your essay to HBS, the easier it will be for Sandy to determine why HBS turned you down.

To give you an idea of how this plays out, here is our of round one ding report from October’s round of turndowns: Rejected By Harvard Business School? You’ve Got To Be Kidding!  

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