Advice Column: Don’t Sabotage Yourself

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 and make good decisions.

Are you putting the finishing touches on your round 2 MBA applications? Don’t sabotage yourself – avoid these mistakes.

• Rewriting Everything

Ideally, your essays were thoughtfully planned, as part of a broader strategy, and have been done for weeks. One of the most common mistakes that I see arises as the result of last-minute panic that leads applicants to rewrite everything. Don’t do it – these late changes almost always make your materials worse.

• Asking For Too Much Feedback

Often, these damaging last-minute revisions happen after you ask too many people to weigh in on your materials. At a certain point, you need to trust yourself! After your essays make sense, answer the question, and are typo-free, everyone will have a different, subjective opinion. Although usually well-intentioned, these opinions are often ill-informed. Don’t dilute your own voice.

• Procrastinating

In addition to the essays, you know that the application form itself takes time, right? With lots of additional small questions to answer? And that you might need to send test scores and/or transcripts from the official sources, which also takes time? Your recommenders need to submit on time as well, which they can’t do if you haven’t entered their email addresses into the application form. (And asked them, well in advance!) All of this is super manageable if you plan ahead. If you don’t, you risk missing the deadline completely. 

• Overdoing It

I frequently read truly awful advice telling applicants to talk to 15 current students per school, stalk the admissions officers, attend multiple admissions events, etc. Please don’t. It’s too much – and while judicious interaction with the school is advisable, this level of engagement can seem deranged. Schools are trying to figure out whether they want you in their community, and part of that evaluation includes consideration of your judgment. Less is more, and you should also use restraint when deciding whether to answer the additional information prompt.

The good news is that you are in the home stretch – and these mistakes are easy to avoid! Plan ahead, use good judgement, and trust yourself.

Karen has more than 15 years of experience evaluating candidates for admission to Dartmouth College and to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In addition, 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 $91 million dollars in scholarships, and more than 98% have gotten into one of their top choice schools.

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