Dondarrion wrote:
Thought i'd post in here to join in the discussion! My target is Fall 2017 but I've learned a lot from reading through the past threads.
Marine Officer (artillery) with 4 years active duty service. Left USMC in February 2015. Target schools are Booth, Darden, Yale, Fuqua, Owen, McDonough (dual degree MSFS/MBA). Undergrad GPA 3.5
Currently studying for the GMAT and I plan on taking it in spring 2016. Depending on how I score, I may apply to all the top 10 schools because why not.
Well, I can take a stab at that...
Applications are time-consuming, not cheap (expect to pay $250 each for the schools that don't give military waivers), and stressful. You're much better off submitting 5 or 6 very focused applications to the schools you really care about, rather than submitting 10 applications that amount to 80% efforts because you didn't anticipate how much work they would be. And you've also gotta factor in recommendations -- most schools ask for 2 of them so you'd need 4-5 recommenders at the ready since it would be pretty rude to ask the same 2 people to write 10 recommendations each. Wrangling your recommenders and ensuring that they submit everything on time is another hassle that you probably haven't considered. It was hard enough for me when I applied to 5 schools, so multiply that by a factor of 3 or 4 once you include the fact that deadlines for schools in a particular round are typically in pretty tight window.
Then you have to raise the question of why you actually want to apply to a given school..."because it's a top 10 school" isn't a very good answer. Where some magazine or blog says a school is ranked isn't a good indicator of whether that school is a good for for you personally, professionally, or culturally. Though I ended up going to HBS, I can think of several #20ish schools that would have been better fits for me than a few of the #10ish schools that I also considered.