cheetarah1980 wrote:
This is just my two cents, and you can take it or leave it. There is NO other candidate identical to you. NONE! It's your job to make the adcom see that. So whether you're the first application that's viewed or the 900th, they will NOT have seen you until they see YOU. You are way more than your stats. Sure there could be 500 White males with 720-740 GMAT scores, 3.5 GPAs, and a consulting background. But that's basic. Maybe you worked on a project that people at your level RARELY get access to? Maybe you're the oldest in a family of 12 and basically helped raise your siblings. Maybe you self-funded your entire undergrad education through part-time work and scholarships. Maybe you're a marathon runner or an avid hang glider. Maybe you're a 3rd degree black belt in tae kwon do. You might be a Big Brother who has had the same Little for 5 years and were instrumental in that child's growth. Maybe you organized a trip down to New Orleans right after Hurrican Katrina. Maybe you want to move from consulting into clean tech investing. Who the heck knows? My point is that itching to press send on the application probably won't give you the advantage you think it will. And the last person to submit may be the first person read. Remember apps are divided out by pools and then divided amongst readers within that pool. They could read them in alphabetical order for all you know. In the immortal words of Dwayne Wayne, "Relax, Relate, RELEASE!!"
You make an extremely strong point here. I absolutely agree with you that an applicant is WAY more than his or her stats. And you're right, I don't know what order the applications will be read in--the answer to which could completely throw my earlier theory out the window. (And I
should probably take your advice to 'Relax, Relate, RELEASE!!'
)
However, I do know that despite every applicant being unique and having a completely different story, a lot (although not all) of applicants are still going to get lumped into a broad group of peers who share a
similar professional background.
These schools have quotas to fill! For instance, if the school has 500 spots to fill, and the most qualified, unique, outstanding 500 applicants all come from a management consulting background, they'll feel obligated to reject a lot of those candidates, possibly for less accomplished ones, in order to achieve diversity within the class. They certainly don't want a class filled entirely with ex-management consultants, even if each of those consultants are extremely unique and different from each other on a more personal level. And furthermore, I believe that this desire to create a diverse class extends to applicants' ethnicity, gender, and post-grad goals among other things.
I think this is what really makes the top MBA programs so unique. It allows them to place students in incredibly diverse atmospheres where a student with an engineering background might be assigned to work on a case with a team consisting of a marine, a pro-athlete, an investment banker, and an entrepreneur. How cool is that!
So that said, I still think you are at an advantage if you're application is reviewed earlier rather than later for a couple reasons: 1) If you have a common pre-MBA professional background, you're background has a better chance to not be overrepresented yet, and 2) I think that adcoms are in a happier, and possibly more generous, mood at the beginning of the application cycle, before their mind has gone numb from reading hundreds, if not thousands, of essays!
24 Jul 2011, 11:48
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