Calling all Wharton Applicants: (2016 Intake) Class of 2018!!

Is anyone in the NYC area interested in practicing together?

Here's my thought:

Date: Sunday, February 21
Place: Think Coffee, 248 Mercer St.
Time: Afternoon or evening? TBD depending on people's schedules
Structure:
-Introductions (10 mins)
-Mock TBD (35 mins)
-Debrief and feedback (20 mins)
-Tips and developing day-of gameplan (15 mins)

Sign me up please! Afternoon.

Great! How about 4pm?

I'll leave this up and hopefully more people will chime in and join throughout the week. We can confirm as we approach Sunday.

4pm works for me. I've added it to my calendar. Thanks for setting this up.

My pleasure. Thanks for being up for practicing. I've heard from another person via PM, so there will at least be the three of us. I'm not sure how many participants are in the real thing, but whoever else is out there and interested, please join!

Please do not start a new thread. Use the PM function or post it in the main thread. Merged the topics.
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NYC TBD practice today (Feb 16) or tomorrow (Feb 17)?

I know it's late notice, but wondering if anyone's open to doing a practice run today or tomorrow? I'm flexible with timing, so just PM me and I'll let you know if we have enough (3 or more).

Hi YumBeeA, I'm interviewing in Bombay on March 2. Would love to do a mock TBD but not based in Bombay and not sure when I get in yet. Let's stay in touch? Perhaps on March 1 if I'm there early enough?

Anyone in Bangalore interested in doing a mock TBD?

All: Please do remember to update your applicant statuses once you are done with your interviews. If you dont know how to do it, PM me and I will do that for you. This is important to reflect correct stats on the 1st page of this thread.
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Good luck everyone! Keep in mind that the topic you come up with is not the most important part of the process. Focus on the way you interact with the other team members more and build off other ideas.

For many applicants, a team interview is easier and more natural than a tradition one-on-one interview. Relax, be yourself and ignore the observers in the room. If you want more specific advice on preparing for the interview, see below:

https://bit.ly/1NIiiiq

Best,
Scott
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Anyone in Dublin, Ireland interested in the TBD?

What are applicant statuses?

I would have loved to do something on the 16th or 17th, but unfortunately can only do the 21st. So far I've got two takers. Anyone else around in NYC on Sunday and interested in joining?

We received several requests to add a session for candidates located in Asia. Done:
https://www.mbaadmissionsadvisors.com/re ... imulation/

Anyone wants to practice for team beased discussion on skype?

So by now I've read all TBD advice and reports I could find. Looks like in many cases the whole team does well, everyone is friendly and collaborative and provides decent comments etc. It's not clear to me how admissions officers ding 50-60% of applicants in these cases. Even if there is some small difference in performance between candidates, it is obviously often marginal compared to difference in experience etc.

So (IMHO) either there is simply a lot of randomness as much weight is put on a noisy low resolution data of performance on TBD (or opinion of admissions officer about this performance)

Or admissions officer is looking at something more subtle, that people who write reports or advice don't really understand.

Or, not much weight is put on the TBD as long as some minimum threshold performance is demonstrated, and success is determined by other factors.

You raise very valid points. As someone who was invited to the TBD and PI but dinged later, I felt that my TBD was good, I participated, brought my ideas forward, summarized a part of it at the end (to give everyone some speaking time) and PI was a short 10 minute conversation (was able to answer all questions properly). I dont think TBD+PI is used as a marker to select people. It is more of a filtering mechanism to eliminate candidates who can not play well in a team based setting. PI was too short to have much of a value. I wasnt asked any TBD based reflection question, which was weird IMO.So the final decision does rest with the adcom member who has reviewed your application to invite you for the TBD/PI and who will again review your application one final time with TBD+PI feedback received from the admission officers.

There always will be some sort of subjective analysis of any application. 2 different admission officers might have a different take on the same application. So you need to play your cards correctly and hope that your application stands out to any reader who reads it. There is no set formula or subtleness that adcoms are looking for but apart from

1. Academic excellence
2. Extra curriculars
3. Community involvement
4. TBD+PI
5. Diversity of the class (ethnicity, industry, function, country etc). This last factor is heavily linked to the pre-application cycle decision of the admissions committee on how many students from a particular pool (lets say Indian engineers or US investment bankers) to accommodate based on past data of their school. Also, this is a factor that you can not do anything about but to make sure that you put in your best application forward.

Good luck with the TBD+PI.
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good luck everyone

Anybody in Dallas want to do a dry run? Would be down for Skype as well