If you had to apply again next year, how would you prepare?

Personally, the whole process for me was rushed!!!
Initial research, study for GMAT, sitting exams through to completion of all applications came hand in hand with the global release of the product i was working on and the whole process took 2 months for me. Not enough time. (At my age, applying soon was important, so it had to be done quickly)

So I would say, preperation is key! Most people here probably had around 6 months or more to get things done.

1) Make sure you know why you want or need an MBA and give a quick research into schools
2) Study and practise more for GMAT.. (This was my main time compressed area, therefore i did not do as well as i could have)
3) Create your list of schools .. Fit Fit Fit... No point applying to a Elite school if the curriculum, students and teaching style means you won't get the most out of it. After the MBA is over, the skills you have acquired coupled with your previous experience is what will push you on, so regardless of the institution, if you haven't maximised your potential due to bad fit, you won't get where you want to.
4) It's good to have some people who are good at English and NOT involved in your industry or profession to review your essays after you have written them, They can tell you which areas make no sense, where grammar has gone badly wrong and spelling mistakes. If it's understandable to them, then you know you haven't thrown in some technical jargon which an adcom may not understand.
In my case, my wife is a teacher, so has no technical background whatsover, so any 'tech' talk in my essays had to be written in a way that she could understand.
5) Thesaurus... try not to overuse the same words.
6) Take your time over the essays. Mine were all rushed. I banged out the first 12 essays within 1 week to meet my first deadline!!! I only had time to make 1 draft for all the schools I applied to. Definitely give yourself time to plan the essay, but don't agonise over it. I certainly believe that some essays, if re-written too many times, can appear over-engineered. A few style 'flaws' are not a bad thing imo, it may even reveal more about your personality. That's why there are writing analysts in certain institutions.
7) After you submit, don't worry. There not much else you can do. Panicking won't help you any.


For me, I just wished i realised i needed an MBA earlier than mid-October

Belonging to an common demographic, I think it is important to demonstrate your diversity and interest with the school. There are number of things I would want to do.

1. Learn a language. Although I know basic Mandarin, it is not proficient enough to say I can do business in China.
2. Get an unusual international experience. Places like USA, Singapore etc are too common. I know a guy in my company,who although is from a common demographic, got into 3 top schools because he was posted to Saudi Arabia for a project.
3. Community Service is important but I think its much more important to have leadership experience. Its just not enough to say you did story reading to kids in the local school or carried bricks for a Habitat project. You need to show that you made a demonstrable difference in the community you were involved in.
4. Write essays and get it reviewed by folks who are actually in business school. Even though you might write great essays and have it reviewed by someone with a strong command of English, the content may not be what the admissions committee is looking for( I know there might be some debate on this fact that do not try to write what the adcom wants to hear. But I still believe it is important to put your essay forward in a format that ticks the important check boxes in the adcom's mind without trying to appear as if you are).

Whilst i do not completley disagree, the main issue is people trying to find a 'formula'. This can be easily smelled by adcoms, as they are reading 1000's of essays.

Not only that but just cause someone got in doesnt mean their essays are any good and someone who got dinged may actually have had amazing essays. There are people who get admitted despite their crappy essays. If you have the most amazing profile but write garbage every school except maybe Stanford and HBS will admit you.

I agree with everything above!

To touch on a point I don't think anyone has mentioned, I wish I had done more research into some of the finer points of application do's and don'ts. Things like:

- You shouldn't get a recommendation from an old professor
- A GMAT score, as long as it's above XXX, won't really make a difference. So, work on strengthening your profile in other aspects.
- Work on your least favorite school's application first. Don't make the mistake of getting excited, working on your favorite school's application, and then figuring out all the things you should've done better on the first one that now looks like a crapfest.
- Coach your recommenders early, and often. From what I've heard, these can sometimes be more important than the essays.
- Weave differentiating factors into your life, not necessarily just community service. I'm lucky (?) enough that I had a bunch of unusual hobbies and interests which were fun to write about and (I think) set me apart from the thousands of other consultants applying.

That's all I can think of for now. Hope that helps!

That part was very hard for one of my Recommenders, he's a very busy man, and I suffered big time for some applications, MIT he sent 1 hour before deadline. Columbia I needed to change my "personal deadline" 2 weeks because of his reco. For Stanford it also was a nightmare, but I could handle.

If you are international, start with TOEFL, the iBT version is problematic for some test takers, especially the speaking part. Then do the GMAT, I'd take at least 4 months to study, I know there are many histories of guys who took some weeks or 1 month and aced it, but I'd say that unless you're one of these guys, really put some effort here. Then, around August, early September, work hard on your essays.

Try to visit schools, or at least go at their Info Sessions, get in touch with alumni, research the schools you want, etc.

That's a good one! I recall someone posting advice a few days ago that included something to the effect of, "don't visit schools, you can find everything about them online." While the conclusion of the statement is arguably true, I STRONGLY DISAGREE with this statement. You should absolutely visit schools to show your interest. Almost all of these places (save 2-3) are very concerned with their yield, and I get the impression they'd be much more willing to admit someone who's visited and made a personal impression on faculty/staff (apart from the interview) than someone who 1. Doesn't visit, period, or 2. Visits and makes a bad/no impression on anyone during said visit.

As a caveat, I don't think this process has the same amount of usefulness for every school; for example, I visited Kellogg, and the admissions people really didn't seem to give a crap that people had made the effort either way.

Oh yeah, and visiting these places gives you the chance to meet interesting people, like Rhyme. Ironically, I met him long before I became aware of this or any other online forum.

I've now heard multiple people say this about Kellogg. Why did you get this feeling that the adcom couldn't care less about your making the effort to visit the school?

I don't think that for M7 schools visits really matter for their yield, I think they matter more for fit. During my MIT interview I was aked: "Why do you think MIT is a fit for you and you are a fit for MIT?". You just can answer that if you know the school philosophy, and to know it either you know from Alumni you talked to or you saw yourself. For internationa students visit every schools is impossible. I was admitted at GSB and I've never been there or at info sessions - because the dates in Europe last year didn't fit for me; nevertheless, I can say I knew the school reasonably well from what I talked to MANY, and I repeat MANY, alumni.

This is healthy not only for the application process itself, but also for you to end up at a place you will "fell like home".

"1) This is everything from teaching style (case or everything else), location, specialties, companies that recruit, community feel, size, etc. Also dont forget to make yourself well rounded, I applied to MIT because as an engineer it is very well known and is something engineers aspire to. However, the more I thought about it and talked to people going to another top b-school actually has one huge advantage I didnt think about...it would round out my profile. As great a school as MIT is, as an engineer it will built up my image as an engineer."

river makes a great point here. unless you go into a really focused, niche sort of career, you will need a broad skillset that emcompasses qualitative and quantitative skills. it makes a lot of sense to me for a heavily quantitative person to go to harvard / stanford / darden -- "softer" schools that have less quant focus -- than it does for them to go to wharton / chicago / MIT. how much would an engineer really learn at the latter? they would still learn about business, but they would largely be able to rely on the skillset they already possess in spades, and, to some extent, continue to neglet the softer skills they would learn at a soft program. (these are generalities of course, but contain some truth.)

i have a "soft" background and personally think that reading, writing about and discussing cases in class would be vastly easier for me than would sitting in a room alone battling it out with my calculator trying to punch out numbers in a quant program (i know that's hyperbole but you get the point). i applied to a diverse set of schools, but really hope that i get into wharton / chicago / columbia so that i can improve my weakest skill - quant. ironically, i am probably less likely to get into the programs that would benefit me most because i don't currently have a strong quant background. i wrote about this pretty extensively in my essays, so hopefully a stated desire to focus on quant + some relevant, provable quant experience + otherwise interesting and unique background will = win come admissions time. surely even chicago and wharton will take one or two english majors

Specifically, they didn't have a sign-in sheet, the admissions person didn't have a specific contact number/email address that she gave out, her Q&A session was very dry and unpersonal, and the whole campus tour seemed very disjointed and informal.

Really, at the end of the whole visit, I left with a bad taste in my mouth. This isn't to say that Kellogg isn't anything but a great school, but the visit did absolutely nothing in terms of my gaining a feel for the culture and personal "fit" with the place. It was more of an "outside looking in" perspective than a "here's what our school is like" presentation.

Also, this experience may have been soured by the proportionally large ratio of d-bag to non-d-bag people in the tour group. My favorite question by some person: "I've already been accepted to Loyola's (Chicago) business school. Will this get me admitted to Kellogg, or do I still have to submit an application?"

1. Sleep more

Superb thread, so many knowledge jewels in here. Hats off, gentlemen!

Looking forward to how this evolves as the application rounds go by. Best of luck to those anticipating admissions.

interesting observation about Kellogg tours... I almost got on a tour there, but in the end, because of stupid "red line" issues (that El train is SOOOO slow) and trying to get from GSB to Evanston (takes 2.5 hours during non-rush hour), I missed the official tour, but had a group of friendly students I contacted beforehand take me around.

I did walk into the admissions office, and they were probably the rudest people I've encountered at my visits so far (UCLA is a close second). The lady told me I cannot visit the entrepreneurship center (Levy) because I was not a student. She didn't even know where it was (after I told her I was to meet someone at the Levy Institute). Then I saw a bunch of prospectives waiting in the waiting area, all kind of lost and ignored.

I sure am glad I missed that part of the tour, otherwise I might not have applied to Kellogg! (same with UCLA, thank goodness for contacting students outside of the "official" process).

Which brings me to one main point:

1. Contact students from clubs, websites, alums, any way you can. THEY will show you the school and answer your questions better than any official visit or admissions office people. I did that with all 4 of the schools I applied to, and the experience has been amazing (though Stanford and Haas had good admissions office tours).

One regret that I've had while applying this year is that I applied to my top choice schools too early. My essays have improved with time and I'd kill to apply again to my first two schools with my newer essay versions.

I will apply to more safe schools. I didnt have enough time (rather i didnt plan well, and had a huge learning curve as i had never written application essays in my life) so next time it wud be more schools

Kryzak's #2 rule (I'll do this piecewise, since I'm out of town this weekend): Give yourself a LOT of time. Start writing some "practice essays" early to answer the common questions of leadership, extracurriculars, innovation, challenges, uniqueness, and of course the Why MBA/Why Now/Why X School. If it's your first time applying, give yourself at least 1 month per school of essay time. You may not need it by the end, but you'll be glad to have it.

Start with a school that has a lot of essays that cover most of the questions, like Kellogg, Haas, and HBS. Once you can answer these and refine the essays a few times, go on to your least important school. Work on that, refine it until it's good, then move on to more important schools. Reiterate. By the time you get to your last school, you should have VERY polished essays. Now, GO BACK to the first school you worked on (Kellogg, Haas, or HBS) and you'll realize you can polish that up even more, even though when you first finished it, you thought it was gold (the "biryani" effect). This way, you don't sacrifice the quality of the schools you apply to first, and you still get the benefit of applying to your most important schools last. If you have time, go to your 2nd school (the least important one) and see if you can refine that again. Reiterate until you're sick of essays, then submit! I'm not sure if others tried this method, but after I went through my R1 schools this way, I swear by it! (maybe I should call it "Kryzak's Method?"