Amerasia Consulting Group, Inc.

A significant portion of my MBA admissions consulting applicants come to be with little to no extracurricular experience since their undergraduate days.  While this is a problem that can be addressed, it can show a lack of proper planning over the long term.  A lot of applicants don’t think about the impact of their actions on their applicant competitiveness when the graduate from undergrad.  To a certain extent, even I was the same way.

What I like most about some of my clients is the the way some of them are way ahead of the game we call the MBA application process.  Those that have been planning since day 1 to go back to b-school tend to be distinguishing yourself from your peers out of the gate and these habits show when constructing the business school application.

This is what I tell those who have graduated and are planning to apply to business school in a few years:

• Make sure you find a mentor at your employer.  This does not have to be formal but it always helps when someone can show you the ropes.  This person should be senior and be respected in the office.
• This mentor will also be able to make introductions for you around the org.  This will help when it comes to recommendation time.
• Adcoms will consider your tenure and the ratio of leadership experience to overall experience at your work.  Work to maximize this so that you can write about it eventually in your essays.
• Make sure you are asking for leadership responsibility.  It does not matter if it is leading the charge with organizing the company holiday party or asking for more work when on a project.  It’s called managing your manager and it works wonders when its time for a promotion.   Do this and more opportunities will arise.  You may get to pick and chose your project work…..
• Stepping up also helps with respect to your eventual recommendation when your manager is asked for how well you rank against your peer group.
• Seek out those in the organization who have MBAs.  Get to know them.  Eventually, ask them to lunch and get to know how they liked their MBA experience.
• Get involved with extracurriculars at work.  Assume a leadership role as well as I have alluded to above.
• See what pre-MBA mentoring programs are available to you.  I know UCLA Anderson has the Riordan programs.  This is a great way to gain exposure.
• Join several other organization types:
• Toastmasters International –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toastmasters_International
• A young professionals organization in your city – these orgs have social and business elements that will help you network.
• Meetup.com – look for groups on meetup that have business or philanthropic goals that align with your interests.
• As you get within a year of applying, go to open houses and MBA tours.  Get your name and face out there.  Adcoms have an uncanny way of remembering who you are.

Respectfully,

Paul Lanzillotti

For international experience to be significant it has to be something that you can write about at length and appropriately in a b-school essay.

1. Can you articulate how you lead a team in a multi-national or cross border environment?  This is what the adcom would want to see if you were writing an essay.  A lot of applicants have worked occasionally overseas.  More important is what you learned, how it changed your perspective, how you overcame an obstacle and how you produced a positive team outcome.
2. That is, what you got out of it and what you can put down on paper is what will set your experience apart from other applicants.  That is where I consider the line drawn with respect to whether or not an experience is significant.
3. With respect to any extracurricular international experience (start-up, professional volunteerism, etc.), if you can write about it effectively as part of your positioning then it’s significant and should be considered for an essay topic.  So yes, this could fall under international experience as you interacted with others with perhaps different operating norms and value sets.
4. Remember, I always tell my clients “WWACD” or “What Would the Adcom Do?”  Keeping that perspective help put a reality check on a lot of questions that pop up during the admissions process.

Respectfully,

Paul Lanzillotti

So you’ve had the axe swung on you during your initial attempt at business school applications.  While it’s tough, you need to get back on your MBA application horse and solicit feedback from the admissions committee.  This is the first step in successfully getting in the subsequent year.

Assess your feedback efforts through this questioning framework:

1. What programs did you apply to and for what rounds?  How well did you fit the median profile?
2. What schools were you accepted?  Rejected by all?  Admitted by some?
3. Were you waitlisted and the rejected?  How did you follow up after you were rejected?  Did you try and appeal any of the decisions?  Had you applied to the program in years prior?
4. Do you seek out advice from each of the schools that rejected you?  What did they say?  How long was the feedback session?  In phone, email or in person?  Did you know the person giving you the feedback?  What questions did you ask?  Did you have the questions handy and essays reread?  Was the person generally positive or negative sounding?  Did they neglect to give you any feedback?
5. In what month did you solicit the feedback?  After May and before September? Timing is everything as adcoms will be swamped.
6. Did you implement their specific advice into this year’s application?  What was the specific advice?  What does each website
7. Was there a consistent theme among the schools?  What was the theme?
8. Did you work with an admissions consultant?  For all schools?  What company?
9. Gut check: What do you think are the reasons for your rejection are?

Now integrate this feedback into the subsequent applications:

1. How are you a stronger candidate? What has substantially changed year over year?  Professionally and personally?  Tough for R3 and then next year’s R1.
2. Why did you reapply and why to this school?  What have you learned from the rejection experience?  How did it make you more determined to succeed?
3. How much overlap is there between essays?  Have they substantially changed? In what ways?
4. Did the school offer you the chance to only re-write on essay?  You should rewrite them all.
5. Did you use new recommenders or recommendations that can address to your recent strengths?
6. Did you emphasize the new project work on the resume?
7. Did you take additional classes if you have academic deficiencies?  Re-take GMAT?
8. What is your story during the interviews as to what has improved year over year?  What specific reasons do you have to tell about being a stronger candidate?

Good luck.

Pay paticular attention to the question that every b-school application asks:

• What Other Programs Are You Applying To?

The reason is this:

• B-schools are keen to know who they are competing against.  They want to know how applicants view the correlation between programs but also if you are using the school as a backup or safe school.
• For instance, on the UCLA Anderson application, if you list that you are applying to Stanford and Haas, in addition to Anderson, the admissions committee will pretty much know you are using them as a backup.

Why is this an issue?

• If you do not make compelling reasons for “Why Anderson?”, then the effect is magnified.  It becomes even more apparent that you are using UCLA Anderson as a backup.
• A good test is this; if you can unplug the UCLA Anderson name from the essays and plug back in any other business school, the adcom knows and can see right through it.
• Programs with “pull through” issues or low acceptance rates of extended offers know that they are going to get dinged in the rankings.  They are keen to see that you are serious.

What should you do?

• You have to have clear reasons why you need an MBA, your short and longer term goals and why you need to get that MBA now as opposed to a year from now.
• If you do not have clear reasons, the adcom will see through it.  They review thousands of applications, they have a BS detector.  You will sound as if you have not clearly thought through your future career.  It’s certain death to your application.

With respect to visiting the programs to which you are applying:

• Make sure you schedule a classroom visit through the admissions office. A student will lead you around and make introductions for you.
• Make sure you stop by the admissions office to introduce yourself.
• Have a couple of canned questions ready.
• Make sure you have the name(s) of the person(s) you want to speak to.  Most likely there is a receptionist in the office directing traffic.
• Make the convo brief (as you just dropped by), just make sure they put your face with your app.
• Just say some stuff like “just wanted to stop by and tell you how much I have enjoyed my class visit with Joe Blow and in Prof. Bobby Sue’s Organizational Behavior class” or “I am actively following your posts on the Bweek forums (for example)”.
• Tell them that you are applying R1/R2/R3 and that you applying because of X, Y and Z.  This is your chance to drop some indepth knowledge about their program in order to impress them while briefly stating how it pertains to your experiences.
• You are basically setting up a 2nd encounter if they come out to your home city for a tour event.  Then you go to the tour event again and reintroduce yourself and say you met them before in their respective admissions office.
• Do not try and plan 2 school visits in one day.
• Wear business casual, no excessive jewelry (dark pants and a blue or white shirt for males).

A significant portion of my MBA admissions consulting applicants come to be with little to no extracurricular experience since their undergraduate days.  While this is a problem that can be addressed, it can show a lack of proper planning over the long term.  A lot of applicants don’t think about the impact of their actions on their applicant competitiveness when the graduate from undergrad.  To a certain extent, even I was the same way.

What I like most about some of my clients is the the way some of them are way ahead of the game we call the MBA application process.  Those that have been planning since day 1 to go back to b-school tend to be distinguishing yourself from your peers out of the gate and these habits show when constructing the business school application.

This is what I tell those who have graduated and are planning to apply to business school in a few years:

• Make sure you find a mentor at your employer.  This does not have to be formal but it always helps when someone can show you the ropes.  This person should be senior and be respected in the office.
• This mentor will also be able to make introductions for you around the org.  This will help when it comes to recommendation time.
• Adcoms will consider your tenure and the ratio of leadership experience to overall experience at your work.  Work to maximize this so that you can write about it eventually in your essays.
• Make sure you are asking for leadership responsibility.  It does not matter if it is leading the charge with organizing the company holiday party or asking for more work when on a project.  It’s called managing your manager and it works wonders when its time for a promotion.   Do this and more opportunities will arise.  You may get to pick and chose your project work…..
• Stepping up also helps with respect to your eventual recommendation when your manager is asked for how well you rank against your peer group.
• Seek out those in the organization who have MBAs.  Get to know them.  Eventually, ask them to lunch and get to know how they liked their MBA experience.
• Get involved with extracurriculars at work.  Assume a leadership role as well as I have alluded to above.
• See what pre-MBA mentoring programs are available to you.  I know UCLA Anderson has the Riordan programs.  This is a great way to gain exposure.
• Join several other organization types:
• Toastmasters International – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toastmasters_International
• A young professionals organization in your city – these orgs have social and business elements that will help you network.
• Meetup.com – look for groups on meetup that have business or philanthropic goals that align with your interests.
• As you get within a year of applying, go to open houses and MBA tours.  Get your name and face out there.  Adcoms have an uncanny way of remembering who you are.

For international experience to be significant it has to be something that you can write about at length and appropriately in a b-school essay.

1. Can you articulate how you lead a team in a multi-national or cross border environment?  This is what the adcom would want to see if you were writing an essay.  A lot of applicants have worked occasionally overseas.  More important is what you learned, how it changed your perspective, how you overcame an obstacle and how you produced a positive team outcome.
2. That is, what you got out of it and what you can put down on paper is what will set your experience apart from other applicants.  That is where I consider the line drawn with respect to whether or not an experience is significant.
3. With respect to any extracurricular international experience (start-up, professional volunteerism, etc.), if you can write about it effectively as part of your positioning then it’s significant and should be considered for an essay topic.  So yes, this could fall under international experience as you interacted with others with perhaps different operating norms and value sets.
4. Remember, I always tell my clients “WWACD” or “What Would the Adcom Do?”  Keeping that perspective help put a reality check on a lot of questions that pop up during the admissions process.

I tell my clients up front that they have to waive their right and that it is not really an option to not do so.

Not waiving your right could tell the adcom that you don’t trust your recommenders.  It  could tell them that you are paranoid or overly anxious.

It could tell them that this applicant is a liability.  What happens if he doesn’t get in?  Is he going to go after his recommenders for throwing him under the bus?  Is he going to create more headaches for all involved?  Is the applicant going to create reputational risk for the school?

The adcom would rather just not deal with it.

Specifically, when an applicant waives their right to see the rec in legal terms it bascially means that you voluntarily and intentionally relinquish their known right, claim or privilege to view the rec at any time.  Also, with this and when an applicant is admitted, they will still not be able to see this rec if they waived their rec.
I have never heard of a student actually viewing their rec once they got it (waived or not waived).  They got in and most are satisfied with that.
Keep in mind, I do not consider not waiving to be a deal breaker.  It looks bad to the adcom but it only part of the whole applicantion package.  An applicant can have compensating factors that made up for your “non-waive”.
At a high level it is important to remember that an applicant is competing against a subset of applicants when they apply to b-school.  If you do anything to differentiate yourself in a negative way from these demographics (like not waiving), the adcom will notice the red flag.

As an MBA admissions consultant, I have worked with a number of clients over the past 5 years.  Invariably, the most common question I receive is “What are my chances of getting in?”

Answering this question qualitatively requires years of admissions consulting experience with dozens and dozens of clients.  Doing the question justice and providing the client with meaning insight requires several hours of examination.  Even then, as the applicant matures and the application process begins, the applicant’s “chances” can change remarkably.

However, there has to be some way of getting into the analytics of how MBA admissions committees view their applicant pool.  I mean, Wharton is not going to take an applicant with a 480 GMAT, there is just no way.  There has to be a range, cut-offs and some way to statistically examine applicant pools.

I searched high and low on the WWW for such a tool.  I could find none in the GMAT/MBA space.  What I found were mostly models that analyzed a few criteria from an applicant’s POV.   That is, these models looked at things like:

1. In what type of setting should the school reside?  Urban, Suburban, Rural?
2. What time of female or international representation should be present?
3. What climate should the school reside in?

While these factors are important in the decision-making process, they do not necessarily view things from the admissions committee perspective.

With this in mind, I when out and created a model that analyzes an applicant’s prospects of entering the top 25 U.S. business school programs from an admissions committee view.  I developed this tool for Veritas Prep as part of my MBA admissions consulting responsibilities.

The explanation from the Veritas Prep website does a great job of explaining what function the tool serves:

“This tool was created to generate an optimal range of business schools for you. By “optimal,” we mean that these are the highest-ranked schools to which you have a reasonable chance of getting accepted. While no model is perfect, especially in beta, you can use the range of schools at the bottom of this page as a way to start narrowing your choice of MBA programs.”

“Please don’t take the model too seriously. Since it only utilizes a subset of data, it cannot be considered a comprehensive tool for all situations and applicant profiles. The admissions process is highly subjective, and no one model can serve as an “oracle” or “magic eight ball.””

Click here to access the Veritas Prep Business School Selector.