prabshan wrote:
@cwhs: Thanks for offering to support. Any tips/techniques please do share.
Could you please share your background information? Schools applied? what made you choose Stern?
-Cheers
You're welcome prabshan. I have a background in IT consulting, and though I'm originally from Europe I've been living in the States for a long time. I had a decent GMAT score (see to the left), strong extra-curriculars, and apparently good essays. I went to an average school for undergrad... I was admitted to Stern and Tuck in the end, and withdrew from Booth's waitlist.
As to why I chose Stern... I'm looking to get into finance after graduation, and Stern is just one of those schools that absolutely shine at finance. They are just a subway ride away from the Wall Street so they have extremely good connections with the people that matter. Also, I found them to be true to their down-to-earth down-to-business motto. People here are great communicators and they are all very outgoing. They also happen to be very accomplished, which helps with being down-to-business. Tuck is also great with being down-to-earth but it's location doesn't even compare to Stern's if you want to be in the middle of the action.
Tips/techniques... Remember that the eyes that will be reviewing your application are very highly trained. Stern's admissions department is full of very dedicated individuals who read thousands of applications each year. Many of the schools use current students to do the first scan-through, but that's not the case with Stern. So an application that makes it to an interview in one school may fail at Stern because they notice something with your app that only a trained eye can catch (an inconsistency between the dates on your resume and the employment dates on your application, for example). Read and re-read the application. Then have someone else read and re-read it. My girlfriend caught so many mistakes of mine that I would never catch because I looked at the same document maybe 20 times and small mistakes become invisible after a certain point.
Also the creative essay is very important. Keep it original but short. Tell a story of who you are, and not what you think they want to hear. Once you write it, ask it to yourselves "could someone else have written this?" If the answer is yes, you probably didn't catch the most important aspect of the essay... It has to be unique to YOU.