Woah, complete redesign of the HBS website! Threw me for a minute.

You know, I was thinking about the mechanics of reviewing every application HBS receives.

Consider deadline was 24 September and most interview decisions go out October 17. That's 23 days (including weekends!) to review c.9,000 applications. Roughly, 400 applications per day. Dee Leopold reckons she spends 10 minutes minimum per application. That's 65 hours of application reading per day... a large task indeed!
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My Debrief

Slight error there. 9000 applications are for the entire year. First round would more likely receive around 4000 applications. This is still a mammoth task and very impressive for HBS folks if they indeed read all applications.

Hi, you are not quite right - 9000 is the total number of applications, not just round 1.

Good luck to everyone,
A.

Not really... In round 1 the number of applications should be roughly ~3000: which is roughly 130/day if you add weekends.. Now if an application gets two reviews multiply that by a factor of 2... So you have 260 apps to read/day.. Assuming an adcom strength of around 5.. Every ad-com member will read roughly 52 applications a day... If they spend 10 minutes on each app... 520 minutes or 8 hours and 40 minutes of reading per person per day....

Has anyone broken out "engineers" into disciplines or industries? i.e. software, IT, aerospace, energy, electrical, chemical, industrial, etc? Simply saying "engineer" seems woefully inadequate to me, a mechanical engineer (but working business development in cleantech).

Sorry, I was not meaning to imply you could with the data available. My question was more generic in wondering if anyone had seen the data broken out to that level of detail.

To many engineers, this would be offensive (though I dont think you intended it that way, so pardon my upcoming rant).

It is like saying finance degrees are the same as the business and economics degrees, so we should just lump them together as well. Unless the job simply needs someone who can handle math, you would never hire a software engineer for a mechanical engineer job or an industrial engineer for an electrical engineer job. The vast majority of engineering jobs are not so vague. Plus, the difficulty of these degrees are significantly different, so to those who obtained the harder degrees this simplification is ignoring the extra work we had to do.

Also, I never said my work does not pertain to engineering. I work a business development role at an energy startup, where I have to know the technical details inside and out for the systems in order to be able to speak intelligibly to it. Everyone working BD here, as well as those in other highly technical companies I have worked, have engineering or otherwise technical backgrounds.

However, I will agree that this level of granularity is not necessary…but then again, no breakout is necessary at all. Does knowing this information change your willingness to apply? No. You will apply to your school choices either way. It doesn’t mean I’m not curious, though.

*sigh* I’m in the minority on this one - I know the vast majority of applicants and adcoms would never need this breakout, but I still think knowing the spread of the type of engineers concentrated at different schools would lend some insight into the school’s industry strengths or areas of focus...but continuing the debate in this thread is getting off topic.

Getting back on topic, how well are fellow R1 applicants doing with NOT thinking about the next three weeks while waiting for interviews??? I’m failing at it...

A little late to the party here, but applied in R1!

Whenever I started feeling anxious about the interview, I either did practice questions and prepped or I worked out. That helped a bit.. But it's rough.

My general strategy was to turn my anxiety into productivity. Hope this helps.