Hello,
I am a long time lurker, first time poster on this forum. Now that I consider how much it helped me, I feel like doing the same for future generations
Profile: F/French/770/Engineer/5 WE in Cleantechs
I applied to INSEAD in round 1 for the September 2012 intake and was waitlisted. I didn’t send any information material and didn’t do anything apart from answering quickly to the mail offering me a waitlist seat. I was taken off the waitlist the 1st of February, much to my relief, and I would like to share some thoughts about the process.
I don’t think, for instance, that the waitlisted on Round 1 are offered a seat only if one of the Round 1 admitted drops out: to me it feels like they want to benchmark us against Round 2 and 3 candidates. If a R1 or R2 waitlisted is best than its “equivalent candidate” in R2 or R3, he/she gets the seat, independently of the fact that R1 is already full. It should be especially true for non-standard profiles. For instance, they know that they are going to admit 50 (or whatever big number
) American strategy consultants, so if you are an American strategy consultant you are very likely to have a Yes/No answer. If they don’t take you they will have 200 other candidates to choose from. They will waitlist 2 people with this profile in order to have the number they want if one of the admitted decide to go elsewhere.
On the contrary, if you are a less widespread profile, they are somewhat embarrassed because they would like to admit you, but since they have only 3 spots for your kind of profile, they want to make sure they will not have an application from a “better” you. When I see the profile of the people on this thread, I really see many original profiles. It is also the feeling that I had for myself: during the interviews, my two alumni stressed out that there were few applicants like me, so when I was waitlisted I had a hard time believing it was for diversity’s sake. Now I see that they were hoping for a person with the same profile but, for instance, more management experience (my weakest point). Pfffffuuu, I am lucky that this super-smart gal chose to apply to Stanford instead
. To sum up, I do think that if you are waitlisted with an original profile you still can have some reasonable hope.
Another advantage for us is that the INSEAD waitlist is quite small. Schools like Harvard/Stanford routinely have 100-200 people on the waitlist (this is what they say themselves), whereas from what we can see in various forums, INSEAD appears to include max. 50-60 people in the waitlist at all times.
I don’t have the MBA Connect details yet, but I will be happy to keep you updated about the number/nationality/gender of admits!