Calling all US Military Fall 2010 Applicants!

Thanks for the support gregarious.

can you post an after action or debrief regarding the interview interview experience? i've had only one "official" job interview my entire life and thus, not a very familiar territory. i'd like to know how the whole process worked and what types of questions were asked. did you meet at the interviewer's house? at a coffee shop? at a designated interview office location? how long did it last? what did he ask about? what surprised you? what did you learn from the process that you wish you could have done differently if you could do it again? standard questions so that i can mentally prepare for the interview.

but also:

as a military candidate, was there any particular type of angle or questioning that you felt could give us an edge and how do you feel we can take advantage of that?

thanks.

i would appreciate anyone else who can chime in on their interview experiences, and especially if they have tidbits of wisdom regarding particular ways vets can posture or frame their experience effectively.

No problem, once I sort out the remaining recs over the next day or two then I'll post more about how the Kellogg interview went. In the meantime, hope everyone here keeps chipping away at those apps, don't let the deadline sneak up on you!

Just found this forum. Have been trolling the businessweek forum for a while.

Any US military hear back about HBS R1 interview invites? All hope has been lost from all the candidates on the HBS board but I haven't seen any military post any results. Just curious. Thanks.

leatherneck,

welcome to the forum. i have found it extremely helpful in my gmat studies as well as general school application information.

i'm not sure if i saw any round one HBS guys here. i know RonMexico was, but he shifted to R2, as did i.

great to see more mil applicants here. hope to see you post some more soon.

Thanks. I am actually in Chicago today. I flew in from DC yesterday and visited Kellogg. Great visit, different from other visits. Not sure how to explain that but will try to articulate it later. Today I'm at Booth. Tonight I fly out to Austin to visit McCombs and then catch a flight Wed night to LA to check out UCLA. Looking forward to my future visits. All total I am applying to: HBS (round 1), Wharton (round 1), MIT (round 1), McCombs (round 1 equivalent), SMU (round 1 equivalent), Kellogg (round 2),
Booth (round 2), UCLA (round 2). A lot of apps you say... Yes indeed, but I am going to bschool somewhere just need to convince my top choices to admit me. Good luck to you all.

Posted from my mobile device

i am really interested in your experience at Kellogg. I posted, on the previous page, my experience with one of their info sessions in silicon valley, and RonMexico seemed to back up my impression with some of his experiences. I wanted to know if you got a distinctly different vibe from Kellogg than we did because you went to their actual campus, and what your thoughts were.

fyi, i'm from LA, so if you need someone to show you around town or something, feel free to let me know. a devil dog never lets one of his own, involuntarily drink alone.

Nice quality spread there - much like you, I've got a plate of 7 schools myself. Good luck - I'm sure somebody will bite.

I wanted to put in a plug for Tuck - they have been AWESOME to veteran applicants this year and offer a real impressive GI Bill package if you are eligible. They are looking to increase their veteran presence, the enrollment manager is a service academy grad, and there are a few vets there you can talk to if you need. I visited this past summer, they really rolled out the red carpet for my family and I, and interviewed me on the spot. No other school came close to their helpfullness.

Defintiely visit Hanover to see if it is for you, but looking at your school list, I would give Tuck a lot of thought as an addition.

Here's a recap that some of you may find useful:

My Kellogg interview was on campus with an adcom. It was a blind interview so based just on the resume I brought with me. The general flow was:
- Intro
- Tell me about your education, why this school?
- Went through resume, talking about each position with some standard questions about what did you learn, what was especially challenging, etc.
- Discussed short and long term goals (Kellogg has you write these down on a form when you arrive)
- Why MBA, Why now, and Why Kellogg (I also discussed MMM since I applied to it)

As you can tell, all these questions are pretty typical for an adcom interview and consistent with what you can find here and on the ClearAdmit wiki page. That being said, it was my first business related interview ever and I was pretty nervous. Due to madness of finishing apps I also had not done any mock interviews or really had time to rehearse in my mind either. Here's what I took away from it:

- Being nervous is ok but the more practice you get the less you'll be likely to either draw blanks or ramble on. There weren't any questions that I had no idea what to do say but I did ramble on too much.
- Putting military work experience into understandable terms is really hard. It was challenging for a resume and it's equally hard in person. Avoid too much jargon and assume the person may have no idea what you're talking about. At the same time it still needs to be concise!
- Most military types (whatever branch, officer or enlisted) have some pretty impressive and unique things to talk about. Once you get that across, the real challenge is to show that that the skills that developed are useful in business. Obviously that's different for everyone, but be able to talk about something broad like leadership then give a specific example of how you will use it in the future. I also think it's a positive to show that you understand that the transition will be challenging and that there are many aspects of bschool that can make it a successful crossover.
- To sum it up, reinforce your strengths as a military applicant while easing any concerns they might have about your background.

Wanted to post a Kellogg impression:
Campus Visit seems to be very student and prospective driven. The only reason I had a personal experience was because of previous email contacts and scheduling with former Marines at the school. I had arranged to visit two afternoon classes with Marines that are first years. I also had lunch with them. If it weren't for that I would have had a horrible experience. This lends to the idea that the school itself is not necessarily administration-driven but student-driven. This was a fact that my hosts brought up while I was there. The ability of the student body to influence change in the curriculum and the school is phenomenal. They mentioned a recent change that was brought up as a problem and corrected within two weeks.
I think the campus visit hiccups really test a prospective's desire to get a great experience. Either they intend that or the admissions office doesn't care. I hope it's not the latter. The only form of structure with my visit was the requirement to wear a purple lanyard with a "Visitor" tag. Not a name tag... a anonymous "Visitor" tag. Again, not a great taste from that but overall from my interaction with current students it was positive.
To the information session subject though I thought Kellogg's info session in D.C. was great. Enjoyed it and there were great questions and great conversations with the alumni that put Kellogg into a positive light.

Hope I shed some light. Hope all are well.

Thought this was a really interesting article.

Excerpt:
"In Israel, every employer knows what it means to have been a company commander in the infantry or tanks or to have served in certain tech-oriented intelligence units. In the US, many interviewers would not know what to do with someone like Brian Tice, a U.S. Marine Corps captain when he decided that he wanted to make the transition to business.

By that time Tice was thirty, he had completed five deployments--including assignments in Haiti and Afghanistan--and was in the middle of his sixth, in Iraq. He wrote his essays for his applications to Stanford's MBA program on a laptop in a burnt-out Iraqi building near the Al Asad Air Base, in the violent Al Anbar Province of western Iraq. He had to complete his application at odd hours because his missions always took place in the middle of the night.

Tice interviewed with Stanford between sniper operations and raids, and had to cut the interview short when mortars landed nearby."
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2 ... 024798.php

"The military is also much better than college for inculcating young leaders with a sense of what he calls social range: “The people you are serving with come from all walks of life; the military is this great purely merit-based institution in our society. Learning how to deal with anybody—wherever they come from—is something that I leverage today in business when dealing with my suppliers and customers."

"This gulf between business and the military is symptomatic of a wider divide between America’s military and civilian communities, which was identified by the leadership of West Point over a decade ago. In the summer of 1998, Lieutenant General Daniel Christman, the superintendent of West Point, and General John Abizaid, commandant at West Point, were driving on the New Jersey turnpike and pulled off at a roadside food and gas station mall for a quick meal at Denny’s. Despite the clearly visible stars on their Class B green army uniforms, the hostess smiled and enthusiastically expressed her gratitude to Generals Christman and Abizaid for the cleanliness of the public parks. She thought they were staff of the parks department."
https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33465046/ns ... ss/page/2/

here's the interview
https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp ... 5#33469615

Nice articles, I've read some similar ones that talk about the disconnect between society at large and the military. I'm finding out through this bschool admissions process though that while corporations may not necessarily understand what we do, there is a willingness to see potential value in it. Going along with what I posted about interviews before, I think this dichotomy is our greatest strength and weakness as a military applicant. Of course, I hope to be later judged on my own merits and what I do during my internship and full time employment, but right now the military is the dominant part of my profile. Eventually though, all those years of service might be condensed down into a single line on the resume . . .

I think one of the greatest misconceptions corporate America has about veterans is paraphrased by this statement, "We have a very flat organization that is not hierarchal. Tell me how you would function in this environment." The suggestion is that the military consists predominantly of transactional leadership and that solid organizational structure is needed for vets to perform. In my experience this is very far from the truth especially for those who spend most of their time outside the wire and/or conduct FID, UW, or other non-conventional operations.

Do military applicants invited to interview at schools that limits their invites (such as HBS) stand a better chance of being admitted than the traditional B-school applicant invite to the same school?

In other words, as a non-traditional candidate, are military applicants competing against fewer similar applicants and, hence, have a better shot at being admitted once invited to interview? Or, are MBA schools more critquing of a military applicant and weigh the interview even more than normal in the decision for admission?

Bottom line: is it a better sign for a military applicant to be invited to interview than that for a traditional applicant?

I understand that being invited to interview at a school that limits its invites is a good sign no matter what. However, I'm trying to read between the lines and determine whether a military applicant should view the invite as a more intense, highly scruntinized experience than normal or a more prefuntatory, don't-screw-it-up type of thing.

It's definitely a subjective, grey-area kind of question but I wanted to see what everybody else's opinion is on the topic.

- R

lakai777

You are not alone friend! I also thought I was the only enlisted one around here. I used to be an ATCer for the USAF-separated 3 years ago, and now I work in finance.

Taking the GMAT in a few weeks and finishing essays for the Jan round.

Rodge, welcome to the forum. You're right that it definitely a subjective question. If you read through all the various sites and commentary from admissions consultants, there's no real consensus. Looking at the interview and acceptances %'s isn't too useful because it's not broken down by industry. My advice would be to view in whatever way gives you the best mindset going into the interview. FWIW, I also think that most interviews just end up being another part of the application, so nothing short of disaster or brilliance will matter too much.

Hoping someone on this forum can lend some advice. I am planning on enrolling in some business courses at a local university to bone up on my business skills. I was a Comp Sci undergrad so I took calculus but would like to take Finance or Accounting or perhaps Statistics. Anybody have any suggestions which core business courses to take to prep me for MBA in the fall? Thanks.

i went to go visit HBS a few weeks ago and asked a similar question to a fellow devil dog student. his response was that GMAT and Application far exceed in priority than in brushing up on "business skills". HBS has a class held at the beginning of the program for those who do not come from the traditional fields, to bring them up to speed with various jargon and concepts and that alone should suffice in giving you the gist of biz knowledge to begin your 2 years.

he reiterated that on the list of priorities when dealing with how to spend your time, GMAT & the Apps were far and above more important than the business or accounting 101 you would take at the local community college. after you are done with your GMAT and Apps, and you have some free time to burn, it wouldn't hurt taking classes like that, but were in no way a necessity.