INSEAD Waitlist - September 2012 intake

congrat. to those accepted. Wonder if someone can post the number of koreans here.
Thx in advance

Posted from my mobile device

I'm also in!

I got a call from AN today informing me of their decision. I was on a business trip, in a facility the middle of the countryside and in a meeting. So I could not tell anyone, not even yell it, until the evening!

I have been silently following this forum and have to say that all of you guys have impressive profiles. I feel lucky to share the class of sept 2012 with you.

Best of luck for those still waiting.

Hello,

I am a long time lurker, first time poster on this forum. Now that I consider how much it helped me, I feel like doing the same for future generations

Profile: F/French/770/Engineer/5 WE in Cleantechs

I applied to INSEAD in round 1 for the September 2012 intake and was waitlisted. I didn’t send any information material and didn’t do anything apart from answering quickly to the mail offering me a waitlist seat. I was taken off the waitlist the 1st of February, much to my relief, and I would like to share some thoughts about the process.

I don’t think, for instance, that the waitlisted on Round 1 are offered a seat only if one of the Round 1 admitted drops out: to me it feels like they want to benchmark us against Round 2 and 3 candidates. If a R1 or R2 waitlisted is best than its “equivalent candidate” in R2 or R3, he/she gets the seat, independently of the fact that R1 is already full. It should be especially true for non-standard profiles. For instance, they know that they are going to admit 50 (or whatever big number ) American strategy consultants, so if you are an American strategy consultant you are very likely to have a Yes/No answer. If they don’t take you they will have 200 other candidates to choose from. They will waitlist 2 people with this profile in order to have the number they want if one of the admitted decide to go elsewhere.
On the contrary, if you are a less widespread profile, they are somewhat embarrassed because they would like to admit you, but since they have only 3 spots for your kind of profile, they want to make sure they will not have an application from a “better” you. When I see the profile of the people on this thread, I really see many original profiles. It is also the feeling that I had for myself: during the interviews, my two alumni stressed out that there were few applicants like me, so when I was waitlisted I had a hard time believing it was for diversity’s sake. Now I see that they were hoping for a person with the same profile but, for instance, more management experience (my weakest point). Pfffffuuu, I am lucky that this super-smart gal chose to apply to Stanford instead . To sum up, I do think that if you are waitlisted with an original profile you still can have some reasonable hope.

Another advantage for us is that the INSEAD waitlist is quite small. Schools like Harvard/Stanford routinely have 100-200 people on the waitlist (this is what they say themselves), whereas from what we can see in various forums, INSEAD appears to include max. 50-60 people in the waitlist at all times.

I don’t have the MBA Connect details yet, but I will be happy to keep you updated about the number/nationality/gender of admits!

Hi,

A question to all the lucky waitlister that were admitted yesterday:

Did you all have support letter sent to adcom from alumni? (I do not specifically refer to the waitlist period).

Thanks,

hey guys, could you share the deadline for your tuition deposit?

thanks

Deadline for tuition deposit is March 2.

balky7, that is a fantastic analysis and congratulations on your admit. Did you apply to other schools as well?

As I've stated in an earlier post, I am 95% likely going to decline INSEAD in favor of Oxford, mainly because I am not as interested in consulting (where INSEAD is the 800 pound guerrilla) and more interested in staying in UK post-MBA (French visa won't gain pts on UK transition visa, whereas UK student visa will). I am still in the evaluation process, however; as it is never easy to decide between two excellent schools for whom I've put in blood, sweat and tears into the application.

Oh, and balky7, damn girl. Nice gmat score. Go you!

No. My humble familly simply doesn't know anybody who ever got a graduate degree I didn't know any alumni well enough to ask for a recommendation. Similarly, my jobs were in no-name companies and my recommenders were, well, very far from being Steve Jobs/Warren Buffet/-insert $$$ name here-. What really matters is that your recommender says you are the best person he ever met and provides some exemples of your qualities. If I had stayed on the waitlist longer, I would have tried to produce a recommendation letter from a peer in my company, addressing the points I though were weakest in my application. ex: "I have worked with XXY for 3 years, (s)he is very that and very this, (s)he saved my ass several times, (s)he has potential for high responsibilities, blah blah"

As for the communication process, I would like to emphasize that a candidate should not be seen as pushy. Often I surprise my many nice American / Israelian colleagues by telling them that what they consider a positive, driven and go-getter attitude can be viewed in France as "pushy" or "too much in your face". Yep. My option would have been to send a concice (500 words) update every 2 months or so, without asking for immediate feedback.


About the schools, I planned to apply to London BS, MIT Sloan and perhaps another (Haas?), but the alumni I met for London didn't transmit me a "love" for this school (and I wasn't too hot about eating British food during 2 years, sorry enkie ...), and as for MIT and Haas, I wanted to see alumni and/or visit campuses during a business trip but had to postpone my plan: eventually I only applied to INSEAD this fall.

balky7, haha no offense taken. I think even the Brits themselves can't argue with you there. Congrats again. Job well done.

enkie, I've seen many of your posts on this forum and would like to tell you that I would really love to study with you in Singapore .
As for consulting, I am not fond of it either, and INSEAD is known for placing 30% of its students in the industry, so that shouldn't be a great problem (unless the economic downturn gets worse and worse).

I got the "IN" email from INSEAD on February 1st like other admitted candidates on this thread. I think balky7's analysis makes perfect sense and I belong to the rarer kind, so I think there was a good chance nobody had a profile like mine for Round 2.

My profile: M / 27 / Vietnamese. 4 years of experience 3 of which is consulting / business development. High-schooled in India, college in US, campus exchange in France. Speaks English, Vietnamese, French, and Japanese with more or less competency. Just went back to Vietnam from 2.5 years in Osaka, Japan. My GMAT was 680 (1 take).

My weakest points were probably: 1) not working for a big-name company, 2) not demonstrating enough leadership and management skills, 3) My INSEAD objectives aren't very clear (I can sense this from the interviews)

Good luck to the rest of the waitlist-ers.

Belyok, thank you. That is really sweet and nice of you to say -- I would also love to study with other strong, smart students such as yourself! I am definitely having a super tough time with my final decision.

so the next important dates for waitlisted are, probably:

- 24 february (R2 decisions)
- 2 march (tuition deposit for admits from waitlist)

problem is we are also gonna have more waitlisted people by that time... not looking bright in my view!

Hi Acax,

I don't think that march 2nd would be a very critical date for us, because I don't think it will serve as a trigger for the admission committee to review waitlisted candidates again.

We are definitely in a worse situation than a month ago:
* The class is less vacant
* The waitlist will be larger as of 24th of February

However, I don't think we should be too pessimistic right now. As Brhams (I think it was him) described it earlier this thread, it is just a matter of luck - if someone with a similar profile would decline his/her offer.

Insead state that they review the waitlist pool on a monthly basis. Based on threads from previous intakes, I believe the next big milestone would be around the end of March, when the deadline of first payment of R2 applicants is over. I assume (and this is definitely only an assumption) that they will have no incentive to do a mass movement in the waitlist around the 24th of February - they would probably want to wait and see the yield of R2 applicants, and then reassess their class toward end of march, especially considering the large amount of students who paid the first payment so far.

I believe we will see another "large" movement (5-10 people) toward end of march. If not admitted then, chances will reduce significantly (I guess up to the point of arbitrary movement here and there).

I dunno, this is just my opinion...I am still optimistic.

Hello,

as promised, here is the current data:

198 people on MBA connect

Breakout by sex/nationality (Attention! Some people are listed 2 times because around 15% have double nationality)

nationality M F
american 24 8
argentinan 1 0
australian 3 3
belgian 8 0
brazilian 7 1
british 3 5
bulgarian 3 0
canadian 10 2
chinese 4 8
dutch 2 1
egyptian 1 0
finnish 0 1
french 15 4
georgian 1 0
german 6 2
greek 0 1
hungarian 2 0
indian 19 10
israeli 7 0
italian 7 1
japanese 1 1
jordan 1 0
korean 0 1
lebanese 5 1
liechtensteiner1 0
moroccan 1 0
new zealand1 0
nigerian 0 1
norwegian 2 0
pakistani 3 1
portuguese 3 1
romanian 0 2
russian 2 2
singaporean 4 2
south african2 0
spanish 3 0
swedish 1 0
swiss 2 2
taiwanese 2 3
thai 1 0
turkish 1 2
ukrainian 2 0
uzbek 1 0
vietnamese 1 0

44 nationalities already

Thanks a lot balky7. That's really helpful.

I have an account in the mbaconnect, but I am not listed in the search.
Although it is still possible that I did not allow (tick somewhere, change settings or something like tat) that functionality and that 198 number coincidentally corresponds with the pre-waitlist movement at the beginnig of the month, I do not think that it includes recently admitted candiddates from the waitlist. Probably the total number will change again soon.