Advice Column: Are You Crowdsourcing Your MBA Applications?

Hello P&Q readers, and welcome to my advice column! My name is Karen Marks, and I am the Founder and President of North Star Admissions Consulting. I have been helping people get into their dream schools since 2012, and prior to that I was the Associate Director of Admissions at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Today, my goal is to give applicants the accurate, insider information that they need in order to succeed. Want your question answered in a future column? Ask away, no topic is off limits!

So, I have recently been asked whether or not it’s a good idea to rely on friends and family to help with your essays and MBA strategy. 

I understand the temptation to seek advice. Applying to business school is a high-stakes proposition.

Nevertheless, crowdsourcing your MBA applications is almost always a mistake.

• It Can Dilute Your Voice.

The best essays sound like you. Not like your mom, ChatGPT, or your best friend. Even if he went to HBS. Even if your mom is a professional editor. DO NOT incorporate feedback from everyone you know, it invariably weakens your voice.

• You Risk Taking Bad Advice.

This is really the biggest risk. I cannot tell you how much breathtakingly bad and incorrect advice is circulating out there, even from people who should know better – like current students at your target schools. Just this week, I had potential applicants tell me, very definitively, that they KNOW that schools don’t admit students with GRE scores, only GMAT’s – which is obviously completely wrong. I also heard that it’s way easier to get in round 2 – again, completely false. Relying on this “information” could have truly damaged their candidacies.

Also, your friends don’t understand YOUR profile! Although they might have made a good decision to talk about their passion for cat rescue, given their background and goals, that doesn’t mean that you should do the same. Likewise, you might have areas of concern that need to be mitigated, such as low grades or test scores, or periods of unemployment, that they didn’t have to triage. Your strategy needs to reflect your strengths and weaknesses, not mimic theirs.

• You Risk Turning Into A Chameleon.

People who seek a ton of external guidance often wind up changing their persona from school to school, which is not a good plan. Don’t change your goals, origin story and hobbies to try to appeal differently to the admissions committees. The optimal plan is not to tell schools what you think they want to hear, or what your buddy thinks they want to hear. Tell them the strongest version of your truthful story. The most successful applicants have a sincere, well-defined, consistent narrative.

• It Can Shake Your Confidence.

The most successful candidates are also confident in who they are and what they are moving towards. It’s human nature to offer critiques, when asked for advice, so if you practice your elevator pitch and run your essays past 30 people, you will hear negative feedback from most of them. It’s what they think they’re supposed to do, in order to help. It doesn’t mean that they’re correct! Don’t let the noise undermine your confidence. Your ability to sell yourself is key.

• There Are A Few (Small) Exceptions To The Rule.

It’s fine to ask someone to proofread, since you have hopefully been over your materials a bunch of times, making it harder to catch small mistakes. You can also ask someone who knows you super well whether or not the essays sound like you. Finally, to make sure that you are answering the questions being asked, a good trick is to remove the prompt and then see if a reader can guess the question that you are responding to. 

The bottom line is that crowdsourcing your MBA applications is rarely a good idea, and has the potential to do a lot of harm. 

Karen has more than 15 years of experience evaluating candidates for admission to Dartmouth College and to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Since founding North Star Admissions Consulting in 2012, she has helped applicants gain admission to the nation’s top schools, including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Wharton, MIT, Tuck, Columbia, Kellogg, Booth, Haas, Duke, Johnson, Ross, NYU, UNC, UCLA, Georgetown and more. Clients have been awarded more than $90 million dollars in scholarships, and more than 98% have gotten into one of their top choice schools.

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