Bad Attitude

Thanks for the PM I appreciate your effort in taking Johnnyx9's legacy forward. He was mostly talking about adcoms, but you took it to another level.

I think it would be just as funny without the language

@ Hazay! Amazing write-up

One more nugget. They do NOT read all of your application. Yes Sir, you heard it first here. I say this as I uploaded a ppt for an essay (the school asked the applicants to use any method they wanted. Guess which one it is) and they never even viewed the god damn thing and proceeded to send a ding letter.

I did ask them about this pecularity and was greeted with the "we take a holistic approach towards profile evaluation". Evasive much. Any ways my two cents are that if you are from India and have an average GMAT (read 720) then don't bother applying to at least the one school I mentioned here.

real feelings!

yes I agree. I cannot believe that schools read each and every application. Not possible. Not feasible. There has to be a prefilter of some sort - age, GPA, GMAT etc. and then to sound right, they might read a few below the cutoffs.. So technically they read some representative samples.

Yes, I agree but it kinda goes against the whole concept of we take consider all the components of your application while deciding. They should just come out and say that we filter applications based on x, y and z. Also if they do not go through the complete application, I wonder where my 250$ go!

Dear business schools,
For $250, can you please offer me a t-shirt, coffee mug or some retarded memorabilia worth $2.50 so I know I tried?
Regards,
Severely in debt applicant

That's probably true that they stop reading some applications early on. What is unknown is whether that point is after your basic stats (Age, GMAT, GPA, etc.), or after reading a couple of your high profile essays (ie. career goals essay). I tend to think that the statistics definitely give them a basic understanding of which pile they just place you in, but then you can still blow them away with that first essay. I'll give the example of what a Columbia adcom told us during an information session. I'm paraphrasing here but it was something like:

"I was looking through this applicant who had a terrible GMAT score. I was flipping through the pages, and noticed that the person made over $1 Million last year. This grabbed my attention, then I read his goals essay and found out that the person was an ex-NFL player who later became an entrepreneur. I wanted him in my class. Plus he had a very high GPA."

This sounds like the application was on its way to the "reject" pile until the adcom saw something unusual (applicant's salary in this case). He then proceeded to read the goals essay, and made up his mind to admit the person. He was looking for the "wow" factor and found it early on in the application. In my honest opinion, the wow could have come in the first essay too. But it's a gamble when you leave the wow to the third essay. You need to showcase yourself enough to grab the attention of the adcom way before that so the third essay can be the icing on the top.

One exception to this would be if you submit a third essay that is completely out of the ordinary, and delivered to the office. If you send them a beautiful painting (or whatever unique) that you made, I'm sure that you'll catch their attention. If all you bring to the table is a link to youtube, you need to make them want to click that link in the first place.

Great thread!

Posted from my mobile device

YES!! That would be a fantastic recruiting tool, "Even if you get dinged, you'll get some sort of prize so you won't think of us as a-hole adcoms. We want to show our thanks for your valiant attempt to enter our ivory tower."

"I applied to HBS and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"

Here is some interesting maths for you guys

Assumptions

Applications received - 4500

Application Fee: 250$

Application Fee paid by 90% of the applicants

Total Applicatioin Fee collected ~ 1 million dollars

No of Admissions staff

Level 1 staff: 4; Salary: 30000 $ per year

Level 2 staff: 3; Salary: 60000 $ per year

Level 3 Staff: 3; Salary: 200000 $ per year

Time Spent by the admissions staff in the application process

Level 1 staff: 6 months

Level 2 staff: 4 months

Level 3 staff: 3 months

Therefore total expenditure on the admissions team: 0.27 million dollars

Further analysis would yield that with the above org structure the admissions team should be able to read 100% of the applications with a three stage filtering.

Stage 1: 30% of application rejected by Level 1 staff reading ~9 applications in a day

Stage 2: Another 50% out of the remaining applications being rejected by Level 2 staff ~ 12 applicatioins in a day

Step 3: Another 50% out of the remaining applicatioins being rejected by Level 3 staff ~ 11 applications in a day

As you can see that the argument that schools do not have the time to read all the applications kinda falls flat after going through the data. I don't think most schools even employ even 10 people in their admissions team.

I'd so wear that and pajamas and go interview HBS kids when I'm a mega-zillionaire.

When I was filling out Haas’ application I about puked in my mouth.

Other than Haas I actually started enjoying the apps after a while. It was a great learning process.

90% of applicants don't even get a t-shirt. Congrats on your accomplishment!

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