Please help: quick Poll: How long did you spend per app?

its hard to factor in the learning curve......plus I did some apps concurrently and revisited others

2-3 weeks sounds about right. Obviously, this doesn't include the months before I spent just thinking about each question and how to address it before I actually got down to writing.

I started working on 2 apps concurrently for about a month and a half (Kellogg/Booth). I know everyone says you should work on one school at a time, but I actually felt it helped me to take a break from one application to concentrate on the other every couple of days. Also, when I revisted an app after a couple of days, I always seemed to have some "eureka" moments since I hadn't thought about it in so long.

After getting done with the first two, I think the others were much quicker, specially since the Kellogg app overlaps with many other schools and the Chicago app made me think about the entire application package and what I wanted to project myself as (the powerpoint). Thus, I felt I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to write and how.

Another thing that helped me after school selection was setting myself hard deadlines and applying to school with different deadlines. Since I was a reapp, I sure as hell did not want to be applying for a third year so I chose to apply to 7-8 schools. I had 5 applications in before the R2 deadlines because I ended up applying to Chicago/Kellogg (both mid Oct), Tuck/Cornell (both mid Nov) and Columbia (mid-Dec). I think spreading the apps out was much easier to do than getting 4 apps done in R1/R2. This is certainly not possible for schools which only have October/January deadlines, but if you are applying to schools which have deadlines in Nov/Dec, it might make sense to do these in the 3 months you have between R1 and R2.

I've still not started the application process, but wanted to find out - going by the consencus, 2-3 weeks per application, sounds good.

How much time does that take (# of hrs)? Did you work on applications - at work, too? I'm guessing your weekends were devoted towards the appl (may be, 12-18hrs, combined).

I'd say between 2-3 weeks, depending on how hard I found the essay questions for that school. This includes time spent brainstorming and planning essays, but doesn't include time spent waiting for essay reviewers to get me their feedback. Probably started out closer to 3 weeks at the beginning then moved closer to 2 weeks for my later applications as I got the hang of it and started being able to reuse some material.

Out of 7 applications I did, I spent:

1) Tuck - 4 weeks
2) Kellogg - 2 weeks
3) NYU - 2 weeks
4) Yale - 1.5 week
5) LBS - 3 days
6) Booth - 2 weeks
7) Haas - 1 week

Obviously, spending 4 weeks on Tuck application didn't help since it's the only school that WL'ed me.....

"For in three days nink made his LBS application, and rested the fourth day: wherefore the nink blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it."

This kinda reminds me of the Verizon FIOS commercial between the FIOs guy and the cable guy....(Raabend being the cable guy here)

Were you watching me that week or something? You nailed it.

About 3.5 weeks per school was my average (I voted 3)...probably something like this (in order of completion):

Wharton: 5 weeks
Kellogg: 4 weeks
Tuck: 3.5 weeks
Booth: 3 weeks
HBS: 2 weeks

HBS took the longest, six weeks, for me.
Stanford was next with three weeks.
I used similar material (i.e. stories) for Kellogg and Wharton so I was able to do both in three weeks.
MIT took two days, my heart wasn't really into it, and the results show.
LBS took a week, but it was because the essays had such tight word limits.
Chicago took a week.

Obviously time is not a good indicator of results. I do think two weeks is a good rule of thumb.

If you're doing R1 and R2 apps, you will realize that R2 apps can be done much faster (in half the time IMO) without a drop in quality. At least that's my experience.