Vster541 wrote:
Hi,
I just had a few questions about work experience essays and school transcripts.
1) Some of the applications like Harvard's as for you to explain in 250 words what your biggest accomplishments are and what your biggest challenges are and some of your responsibilities. These questions are under your work experience and not under the essays. Should I be treating these exactly as essays? (ie well written, non bullet point?)
2) I have attended many schools. I took 4.5 years to get my undergraduate degree, spending 2 years at my first undergraduate institution, and my 2.5 years at my degree granting institution. Along the way, I also took courses, which I received credit for towards my degree at a third institution. Post undergraduate, I spent time at a lesser name school, technically as a graduate student, but I only have taken a few sciences classes (5 classes) as a part timer.
My question is should I name all the schools I have attended post/during undergraduate? Or should I elect to only report schools that counted towards my undergraduate degree. The reason I ask is because I feel that my graduate courses veer away and make my application look bad, even though I did well. Do schools have a means of checking all schools which a
student has attended?
3) Should I reporting my true salary/bonus? Does this matter?
Thanks.
You'll see in HBS's application form that you actually cannot use bullet points and most applications don't even allow you to insert a line between sentences in the application forms. Be concise and clear in your answers, and note that at least for HBS it isn't 250 words; it's 200 characters (ie., each letter or space is counted. For some perspective on what that means, my first sentence here was 182 characters).
All courses that counted toward your undergraduate degree require a transcript, I believe. Your graduate courses in your spare time don't need to be submitted since you don't need to justify what you were doing during that time (since you were working). However, if you are disappointed in your undergraduate GPA or if the quant section of your GMAT is a bit lower than you would have liked, you may want to submit the transcripts for the part-time graduate science courses to demonstrate your quant/academic abilities. HBS's instructions on this actually say that you only need to list courses that contributed to a degree, which makes it sound to me like you do not need to list them if you didn't earn a degree from those courses.
Every single thing you submit in your applications should be 100% true. You should not hide or embellish your salary information - or any other information for that matter. Offers are rescinded if the school finds out that you lied about anything, so I highly urge you to just stick to the truth.