Sometimes tossing out an application where you have very little chance of getting in can work in your favor.
OK so you accepted your partial fellowship offer and lined up your student loans. Think you’re on easy street with financing your MBA education? Make sure you’re thinking like a business professional before you dive in.
Cornell’s early admission decisions for their one-year MBA will be released in a few days, so even if you did not apply to this program, it’s essentially the starting gun for this year’s results. Since over the next several weeks and months applicants the world over will be getting good and bad news from their target schools, it’s a great time to prepare yourself to receive the responses. Will you be getting a “yes” from your top choice?
So many applicants these days look alike on paper in terms of experience and education, test scores and outside involvement that even highly qualified candidates get lost in the shuffle. We all think we’re pretty unique until we find out that the next guy also volunteered at a similar NGO, or was promoted to VP before his colleagues. Particularly if you come from a feeder industry such as banking, finance or technology/engineering, it gets harder every year to stand out.
This time of year is replete with many young candidates who want to apply to business school directly out of undergrad. Is this possible? In some cases, yes it is.
If you are an international applicant, you must have more than just a good GMAT score to differentiate yourself. If you are an American applicant, you need to do whatever you can to press out a decent GMAT score in order to be competitive.
With the trend towards shorter essays, There has been a phenomenon in the applications which can only be described as “redundancy.” Shortening the essays has resulted in more questions and even mini-essays or micro-essays within the application itself, where often applicants end up repeating information about themselves that is found elsewhere in the application.
