crackfire2003 wrote:
One more nugget. They do NOT read all of your application. Yes Sir, you heard it first here. I say this as I uploaded a ppt for an essay (the school asked the applicants to use any method they wanted. Guess which one it is) and they never even viewed the god damn thing and proceeded to send a ding letter.
I did ask them about this pecularity and was greeted with the "we take a holistic approach towards profile evaluation". Evasive much. Any ways my two cents are that if you are from India and have an average GMAT (read 720) then don't bother applying to at least the one school I mentioned here.
That's probably true that they stop reading some applications early on. What is unknown is whether that point is after your basic stats (Age, GMAT, GPA, etc.), or after reading a couple of your high profile essays (ie. career goals essay). I tend to think that the statistics definitely give them a basic understanding of which pile they just place you in, but then you can still blow them away with that first essay. I'll give the example of what a Columbia adcom told us during an information session. I'm paraphrasing here but it was something like:
"I was looking through this applicant who had a terrible GMAT score. I was flipping through the pages, and noticed that the person made over $1 Million last year. This grabbed my attention, then I read his goals essay and found out that the person was an ex-NFL player who later became an entrepreneur. I wanted him in my class. Plus he had a very high GPA."
This sounds like the application was on its way to the "reject" pile until the adcom saw something unusual (applicant's salary in this case). He then proceeded to read the goals essay, and made up his mind to admit the person. He was looking for the "wow" factor and found it early on in the application. In my honest opinion, the wow could have come in the first essay too. But it's a gamble when you leave the wow to the third essay. You need to showcase yourself enough to grab the attention of the adcom way before that so the third essay can be the icing on the top.
One exception to this would be if you submit a third essay that is completely out of the ordinary, and delivered to the office. If you send them a beautiful painting (or whatever unique) that you made, I'm sure that you'll catch their attention. If all you bring to the table is a link to youtube, you need to make them want to click that link in the first place.