Calling all US Military Fall 2013 Applicants!

I didn't include anything other than personal awards in my application or resume.

Is the HBS Military Prospective Student Day scheduled for this September the only one this year? I went to the first one a year ago and I recall it was scheduled for late February/March I believe. I am currently stationed in Korea so I was planning to take my leave during that time to attend again.

Yep, as of now we're only planning on hosting the one in September.

If you've already come to one my opinion is that it would be a waste of time and money to come again....you're not going to see anything substantially different, and it's not going to have an increased impact on adcom or anything.

hi,

This question I think will be of use to a lot of Infantry company commanders and may be also to others.

As Infantry company commanders, we organize a lot of sports teams with the company commander usually the team captain. The teams participate in a the inter-company competition and some companies win. How does one show this ?? The battalion gives no award. Unlike the corporate world where even a pat on the back is recorded by certificates in awards and where team leaders distribute awards around to keep the morale high, the awards in the army are quite difficult to come by. You might have led a company to come first in all competitions in battalion, won the inter company annual championship making your company the champion and what you get is a flag that you can hoist in front of your company for a year that you have to pass on to the next company and no certificate for the same.

Let me enumerate by one more example. Say you are a great firer. you went to the division level firing competition did well and got selected for corps level firing competition. Now everyone who has been in military would agree that getting selected in division as only officer to represent in corps level firing is a huge achievement. Say you didn't do well in corps and then returned back to unit. You get no certificates. So years later when the sharpshooter applies for B-school he cant site this in awards and achievements while something much smaller scle with a shiny name is projected by applicants from the corporate world.

So in spite of leading companies in an array of competitions and excelling in them what one projects in B-school apps is only their service medals which I think is the highest form of underselling. As military officers we do a lot of things and just because certificate are not distributed in military like polio vaccination, we lose out on awards and activities section of the application. once any adcom sees a list of 15-20 awards in a 5 year stint of a corporate employee and 5-6 in a military applicant the opinion starts going against the military applicant. More so in top-10 schools since they get a lot of shooting star applicants who can produce a laundry list of awards which if one goes into depth mean actually nothing.
Any experienced veteran has any idea how to address the issue??

I am sorry if people feel I have been rambling but i wanted anybody who reads this to understand what exactly I mean to convey.

If this has been addressed before I am sorry to repost and this post maybe deleted and I may be directed to the appropriate post.

NOTE: all above examples are purely generic and have no resemblance to any officer's profile( or slight resemblance to everybody's profile)

Maybe this is simplistic but couldn't you just list it an an achievement? Something to the effect of "Selected as division representative for Corp level competition, #1 of 30 officers" to piggy-back off of your example. Might not work in every school but sometimes I think you just have to be a little more creative as a military applicant. Even if you did get a certificate you still have to be creative. Let's say you got a nice award you can't just put in the Awards section "Division Shooting Competition Winner" or "Corp level shooting competitor." I'm in the military but being Air Force I have a vague idea of the competition at a Division level event but I couldn't tell you the numbers you would have been competing against. So if a fellow military member doesn't know you can be almost certain that an Ad Comm member won't know either. So make sure however you do manage to work it into the application that you are very clear exactly what your accomplishment means and the scope of the achievement.

hi,
You are quite right about your take on accomplishment. However the whole discussion was about the awards part of the application form.

Let me draw another example. You are from Air Force. say 1 year into being a pilot your boss thought you were a really exceptional pilot with skills that promise to make you best pilot in the world. What would he do?? he would endorse it in your confidential report and recommend you for some great course to give u opportunity to improve your skills.

parallel to that take a guy in say IT industry or consulting. his boss thought he is a promising guy. the boss gets him a shooting start award or some other award made named like that.

Fast forward 5 years both of you apply to same B-school and under awards section for that period of time he notes shooting star award (which actually has no meaning since everybody has been getting it) and you list that your CO thought you are going to be a great pilot in achievements section which I am sure will be overflowing with 5-6 years of active service. So the basic thing is what do u enter in awards section of the application form apart from service medals which are quite few and far between.

Most if not all of my applications had a "key accomplishments" section under each period of employment, then had an "awards and recognitions" spot following the education/experience portion.

I don't think I'd put an intramural or marksmanship achievement on my resume--I think that space could be used much better--but it would be appropriate for one of those two sections I listed above.

Hi emont,

After reading through the forum, I think I should commend the kind of support you are providing to this forum given the busy schedule of HBS.

I see that you are a USMC infantry officer who got selected to the most prestigious school-HBS. If you could give us tips about what all you entered under awards and recognition column it would prove as a good baseline to start for all the brother officers from similar background.

About the sniper example I was just trying to draw parallel between corporate world and military world and the no. of awards and recognition that are distributed. I don't think any officer would have space in a one page resume to include such items as marksmanship competitions. Atleast I couldn't fit it in.

Not going to give specifics, and here's why:

1. There's no single way to get into HBS or any other school, and I don't want to give anyone the impression that I have some special blueprint for getting admitted. Besides, for all I know I got into HBS in spite of my professional accomplishments and not because of them.

2. Everyone's accomplishments are going to be different, even if you have two people with relatively similar backgrounds and MOSs and duty stations and whatnot. So the things I listed will have little or no bearing on what you all will list.

3. It's personal information, and I don't feel like sharing it over the interwebs.

Your accomplishments are whatever you think makes your service unique or distinguished you relative to your peers, and they may be qualitative or quantitative. They're the same kind of bullet points you'd see on your fitness reports or on any award citations you've received.

Hi emont,
This is my usual problem. I don't make myself very clear( gotta point to write in weakness column).

What I had asked was not your accomplishments. everybody has different accomplishments and accomplishments are too personal to be asked in a forum.

What I had asked was awards and recognition. say if you got a congressional medal of honor. you would enter that under awards and recognition. same would be done by any officer who gets the same medal.

since you are a HBS student and a picture is worth a thousand words so I have attached a snapshot of the part of HBS application(rest assured not my application) that I am talking about.
In the part shown you just cant put accomplishments or achievements. you have to enter awards and awards are generally standard. Hence if you can guide us regarding what all is pertinent to this part of application, It should be really beneficial.

Thanks for the effort!!!

Don't overthink things....here's a few examples I can think of off the top of my head:

-Personal awards or decorations....Army Commendation Medal, Navy Achievement Medal, Bronze Star, Outstanding Volunteer Award, Certificate of Commendation, etc. Will obviously vary based on nationality and branch of service. If you don't have any, don't worry about it....I didn't at the time I applied.
-Meritorious promotion, early augmentation/career designation, or earning warfare qualification ahead of schedule, etc.
-"Ranked number X out of YY captains in peer group"...
-"Honor graduate of XYZ Course with an XYZ GPA"

And so forth.

Hi emont,

There comes my point exactly. Apart from the awards listed in point 1 all others do not have any certificates. So once you write them although your CO at that time knows your ranking among your peers you don't have any documentary proof. Should one list awards for which there is to certification?? Like my division sniper firing example-- if one doesn't have certificate should one list it among awards????
Thanks for patience!!!
Arun

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Somebody complimenting your skills is not an award. If you don't have an official award, don't list it there. Those are things you can talk about in your essays or your recommenders can bring up.

To clarify for something you wrote earlier, you can list if you were selected for a prestigious position. e.g. Selected for xyz squad/mission/etc. (top x% of 1000 members/applicants/etc)

I don't know how it is in other branches but in the Air Force your ranking is always listed on your annual performance report so there is documentation. That being said, I didn't list it in Awards/Recognition but I did put it on my resume.

Honor graduate, ranking relative to peers, and meritorious promotion/augmentation would all be documented somewhere. As long as it's a legitimate achievement or recognition that you're not lying about, it could be listed.

If you don't have anything to list it's not a death sentence. Don't throw something in there just to take up space. As I said, I didn't have anything to list at the time I applied aside from a merit scholarship I received following undergrad.

I have a few questions about the resume. I have been told to stay away from military jargon in resume. I am currently in the process of updating my resume and come across a few issues I'm not sure of. I have been a BN Assitant S-3 Planner (Operations) for 18 months I don't know how to properly list that so an admission director would be able to fully understand what that means. I have been told it is the civilian equivalent of Assistant Chief of Operations. I have been in the Army 5+ years now and have held more positions then I can list on a one page resume, so should I just start from current and work my way back until I run out of room or go with two pages. Additionally, I am trying to translate my responsibilities as a Tank Company Commander into something the an adcom might understand. Are they any vets with combat arms background that could give me some tips.

Resumes are 1 page--that part is not up for debate unless you have 20+ years of work experience. Remember a resume isn't supposed to tell the adcom or hiring guys everything you've ever done, it's supposed to give them just enough information about you to make them want to ask you more in an interview. Consolidate positions if necessary...for instance I combined my time as a rifle platoon commander and rifle company XO under the same heading because they were within the same company. Obviously those of us in the military know that a platoon commander and XO do very different things, but to adcom there's a much smaller distinction. Same deal with my time as a series commander and company commander at a recruit training command...I was doing basically the same thing in both billets, the difference was mainly a matter of how many DIs and recruits I had under me.

And yes, you absolutely need to civilian-ize the terms and descriptions in your resume given that the person who reads it may know nothing about the military. Be specific, but talk in terms like:

"led # soldiers on # training/real-world operations, resulting in _______"
"managed XY millions of dollars in equipment, maintaining XY% readiness and operational efficiency"
"mentored # of soldiers selected for meritorious promotion or commissioning programs"
"led patrols that located # tons of homemade explosives and detained # insurgents who were turned over to Iraqi court system" (don't talk about how many bad guys you killed, though)
"trained # Iraqi/Afghani police and soldiers, boosting security and transition timetable and reducing insurgent attacks by XY%."
"ranked #2 out of 15 1stLts in my peer group by my battalion commander"
"held XYZ billet as a 1stLt, a job normally held by a senior Capt"
"awarded XYZ Medal for _______"

You get the idea.