Calling Chicago (Booth) Applicants for 2009

Would a Saturday visit be helpful at all?
This is the only time I can squeeze out of my schedule...

No. No one, and I mean no one, will be here. Most rooms are locked. Classrooms are empty, lights off, locked. No one from admissions will be in. I think even the elevators require student keycards on a saturday. Not that it matters, there's nothing but professors on the upper floors.

You can see the Harper Center building from outside as rhyme stated, if you REALLY just have a Saturday available, I believe you can see classes at the Gleacher Center on Saturday (do professor allow on Gleacher too rhyme?).

Bus as rhyme mentioned, you won't get the "real full time MBA" one day experience.

I suppose they do, but I've actually found there's a pretty big difference between the two. The caliber of students isn't the same and the professors don't seem quite as energetic for some reason (maybe its cause its a fricking Saturday). I really wouldn't consider a Saturday visit at Gleacher a reasonable proxy for a visit to the full time program. The student body has a totally different feel .... In fact, I'm not sure I would have been as excited about the GSB as I was way way way back when if I'd just visited something on a Saturday.

I'd encourage you to see about coming on a Friday - in particular a GSB Live Friday. The value of that will so dramatically surpass the value of a Saturday visit.... You'll get a chance to hear Rose speak, go to a mock class (or come with me to the most amazing class ever, period), you'll see a mock application review, get to have breakfast and lunch with students, see the buzz in the atrium for yourself, have free food all day, go to LPF and have free beer... etc.

All -- Any thoughts on this one? I'm getting ready to submit and just want to see what thoughts are. My take is that the extracurricular section is more of a list and brief description, not a whole lot about involvement and what it means to me.

Matt

Thanks for your insights rhyme.

after GSB introduced the powerpoint requirement..i have lost all respect for this school's adcomm, apart from patronizing micorsoft (an argument I dont even want to get into rightnow)..check out the following link:

https://www.unc.edu/~mumukshu/gandhi/gan ... rpoint.htm

I feel my story is complex enough that it is an insult for GSB to ask me to put into a powerpoint slide..I work as MC and whenever we have to present a very complex idea, we write a white-paper..infact I am rated based on how many white papers I wrote. Powerpoint is a tool our sales/marketing office uses..not to convey anything meaningful..Even the finance types will agree that an excel spreadsheet presentation goes a long way in making your point than a powerpoint slide!

so what really ticks me off is that GSB asks me to put a slide presentation on who I am ..which quite frankly is a very complicated topic..even more than some of the questions on the essays ..

aight..enough ranting..as you can all imagine..i am having a tough time with this powerpoint thing..

I would argue the PowerPoint is one of the absolute best ideas for an essay of any of the top schools. You are essentially given a blank slate to convey any ideas you want to share that the other essay questions don't hit on. It gives an applicant the chance to fill in any holes in their application. Also, as you said in your post, a PowerPoint presentation is for Sales & Marketing, which is exactly what you are trying to do now. You are creating a brand for yourself and trying to sell it to the adcoms. Seems to me it is really the perfect essay format.

To argue the other side:

In the link you describe, it says that "It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,''... but would a senior manager have read a 20 page thick technical assessment? Would that have truly been a better medium? If you can't get a point across in a 30-second slide with less than 100 words, why would I believe you could get it across in 1000 words?

If the engineers failed to convey their point appropriately, they failed to master the art of being concise. That's not powerpoint's failure - it's their failure to be able to convey the material. (Thats not to say that powerpoint documents are not often terrible)

As an MC, I'm surprised to see you chose a whitepaper over a deck. Do clients actually ask for this? I've never seen a CEO say "Ok, type up all the analysis, all the metrics, interview details, primary and secondary arguments, issues, concerns, sources and other assumptions and provide me with a fully documented thesis on the issue that I can read over the course of a few hours" Rather, I see clients say, "Look, I trust you've done the analysis, show me the basic steps you took to get there, give me the upshot, and if my staff have questions I'll direct them to you."

Thats 98% of the art of consulting as I know it - condensing large amounts of data into clearly demonstrated, well researched, easily digested recommendations. The reason the consulting firms (bain, bcg, mck, deloitte, etc) have case interviews with lots of irrelevant detail is to see if you have the ability to look at information, extract the important facts and present a cogent argument.

see you guys missed the point, not everything in business, as in life, can be explained in 30 sec or less..thats just making the audience dumber ..and to think that you can convey a fairly important point in a bullet, either assumes the audience already has a very good understanding of the problem or is incredibly dumb that you cannot afford to explain to them something in detail.

for instance, lets take a real life experience from my own personal history, my father passed away when i was 14.. now i can put up a bullet point saying "FATHER PASSED AWAY, VERY DIFFICULT TIME" blah blah.. but really if i were to write a passage and actually relate personal experiences from that phase in life..I think i can convey the gravity of the problem i was faced with..

as for MC, any complicated case study I have done over the past 2 years the final product is almost entirely a whitepaper. While you can make very high-level assessment using powerpoint, in order to explain something, or convey the gravity of a problem, you use whitepapers. Believe it or not, whitepapers are part of my KPI, they account for 50% of annual rating.

I think your problem is that you are thinking of this PowerPoint as only the business type of presentation with bullets. You'll need to be more creative with your presentation and I'm sure you'll get there eventually. While, you might choose to have some bullet points in your presentation, I wouldn't go this route with too much frequency. It will be pretty boring.

As an example: Why not honor your father with a page celebrating his life and showing how he influenced who you are today? You can convey this example through some combination of pictures and words, for that is up to you to decide.

Good luck to you, and my advice is for you to try and expand your concept of what exactly a PowrPoint can look like. Do not just put bullets in an outline format or you can expect a pretty quick ding.

This is NOT a power point, this is another essay, but rather than a written one is a more visual one. I sent mine as a pdf, and I've never used Microsoft anything to produce my pdf (I'm a Mac user).

If you can't tell who are you that fast, how would you behave at an interview with that question? Do you think that the interviewer would want to spend 4 months with candidates and then when he or she knows the candidates better then he or she would decide who to hire?

Life is not fair, and I agree is not "linear" or if one prefers is not "Cartesian". Anyway, I've already said that the slide presentation is another point in the admission at the GSB as it is any other point else, if you don't like it, that's fair, I didn't like many thing in my process. But ask anyone within the GSB community and you'll see how everybody liked doing this after all...

JB thanks for the tip..

well see the problem with putting pictures is i dont know if adcom is just going to print them in black and white or are they actually going to use projector..though I am not planning on using animation at all...

as for in a 4 minute interview answering questions IS VERY different from making a slide presentation about yourself...

so the question is should i risk putting pictures not knowing if the adcom will be using color printers or not? or are they going to user projectors???

They used color printers last year. You are not allowed to use animation (they only look at static printed stuff) so that was never an option. Most admitted people I know put pictures on their ppts (and I've seen a few). I didn't put a single picture on mine. I also got dinged after an interview.

Hope this helps.

I never said everything could.... I wouldn't expect someone to explain quantum mechanics in a few slides..... but if someone handed me a slide that said: "Fix the side panels or they will peel off and the shuttle will explode on re-entry" and next to that is a picture of a burning shuttle and people crying, I'd probably pay attention. More so than if I got some document with a title like "A Non-Linear Probability Model for Verifying Deterministic Forecasts of Shuttle Re-entry Events".



Interesting. I've never run into a firm that delivers whitepapers to clients as their primary deliverable. You learn something new every day I guess. A lot of the firms I know generate the stuff simply for the purposes of future selling ("Hey check out this whitepaper / though leadership we have on the subject"). Is your firm primarily focused in research? 50% and a KPI seems awfully high!

ryhme, the thing about MC is that as you progress in your career you have to develop a SME and whitepapers are your means of telling to the world that you are an expert in a specific area. Every year I undertak 4-5 major projects and I am supposed to write upto 4 whitepapers.

Whitepapers do serve as a selling tool, however, for example in my area of expertise (corp. strategy and business development), I conduct workshops, so while during the course of an assignment I will use powerpoints, however the end result of my assignment, usually a Workshop strategy readout document, is in the form of a whitepaper. If the lessons learned have a wider impact on the industry, I will author a "public facing" whitepaper.

I dont think a first year associate will author any whitepapers, but as you progress, whitepapers become a major component of your rating..

ryhme, the thing about MC is that as you progress in your career you have to develop a SME and whitepapers are your means of telling to the world that you are an expert in a specific area. Every year I undertak 4-5 major projects and I am supposed to write upto 4 whitepapers.

Whitepapers do serve as a selling tool, however, for example in my area of expertise (corp. strategy and business development), I conduct workshops, so while during the course of an assignment I will use powerpoints, however the end result of my assignment, usually a Workshop strategy readout document, is in the form of a whitepaper. If the lessons learned have a wider impact on the industry, I will author a "public facing" whitepaper.

I dont think a first year associate will author any whitepapers, but as you progress, whitepapers become a major component of your rating..