Seeking Feedback on Your MBA Applications
After you have completed (but not yet submitted!) your application(s), find one individual you trust—whether a professional consultant or someone with insight into the application process—to read your essays one last time and give you feedback. We strongly suggest that you limit yourself to requesting feedback from just one or two individuals, however.
Because the application process is subjective, you will discover that as you add readers, you will also add new and different opinions. Soon, a multitude of alternatives might appear, and although none of these varying ideas will necessarily be “right” or “wrong”—considering that a single candidate’s stories can be marketed in almost countless ways—they can create unnecessary uncertainty.
We are not suggesting that you ignore critical feedback, but rather that you not complicate your final days and create doubt where it may not be due. If one or two readers support your ideas and feel that your application needs minimal work, you are probably best off ending your feedback loop there and submitting your application.
Enlist the Help of an Admissions ProfessionalAt
mbaMission, admissions consulting is not a part-time job for our team—it is a professional calling. Our consultants commit their professional lives to helping business school applicants. Our team is available when you need them and committed to you as their number one professional priority.
Additionally, our consultants are constantly striving to learn and improve. We host our own annual consultant training conference in New York each year, flying in all of our consultants from around the world to share best practices and to ensure that they are up-to-date on admissions trends. We also have weekly team meetings to share the latest MBA information, brainstorm creative new ways to help our clients and conduct internal teach-ins on a variety of admissions-related subjects.
Our consultants are graduates of the world’s top MBA programs—Harvard Business School, the Stanford GSB, UPenn Wharton, Columbia Business School and more. We have team members who have served on admissions committees, including a former Stanford GSB admissions reader, a Wharton admissions committee member and several experienced admissions interviewers. We know the MBA application experience as both applicant and evaluator, and this level of experience allows us to serve you best.
When you apply to business school, you will be communicating with the admissions committees primarily through the written word. So having an MBA admissions consultant with profound communications experience on your side will be vitally important. At
mbaMission, we are elite communicators first and foremost, including an Ambassadorial Speechwriter, a managing editor with Fast Company and Inc. magazines, an author of the book 65 Successful Harvard Business School Application Essays, a journalist who interviewed world leaders, a former manager of The Yale Review, a contributor to a bestselling business book and more. No other admissions consulting firm can boast that its consultants have such exceptional communications expertise, but
mbaMission requires it. Your personal statements will be crucial to advancing your career, so you deserve to have an experienced communicator as your guide.
Should I involve my parents?When you are applying to business school, leave your parents out of the process! Although this MBA admissions tip may seem obvious to most candidates, those who are a part of “Gen Y” or “The Millennials” may be accustomed to having their parents guide their choices, given that the parents have done so throughout the candidates’ high school and college years. These parents naturally want to be involved in the MBA application process as well and are now leaving many admissions officers across the country shaking their heads.
Of course, having a parent call to confirm whether an important document was received when you are perhaps traveling/working abroad and/or cannot make such a call yourself during work hours is certainly not the same as having a parent call to ask why you have not received an interview invitation yet. Unless the matter at hand is an entirely practical one, you have nothing to gain by having your parents act as your agents. On the contrary, you have everything to lose. An aggressive parent can reflect badly on an applicant for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that his/her interference suggests that the candidate lacks maturity and perhaps even the ability to make independent judgments and decisions.
Think very carefully before you involve your parents in any aspect of the application process except sitting at home and waiting for great news. Successful applicants do it all the time!
Can I trust the message boards?Every once in a while, a concerned business school candidate calls us and says something like “Star491 wrote that Wharton won’t read past the 500-word limit, but IndianaHoops09 wrote that 10% over the limit is fine. Meanwhile, WannabeTuckie says….” Some of you may be guffawing as you read this, but the truth is that many people have difficulty not reading the various message boards, and some have even more difficulty not believing everything they read there. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, message boards are completely unregulated, and the opinions expressed by the anonymous posters should be viewed skeptically. For every individual who claims to know something authoritatively, there is always another individual who claims to know that the opposite is true. Round and round we go…
Our message is therefore to ignore anonymous posters. Although this should be valuable advice for you now, as you complete your first-round applications (ideally with your sanity intact), it will become even more valuable to you as the year progresses and many posters begin to make unsubstantiated claims about admissions statistics (offers given, GMAT scores of accepted candidates, etc.). If you tune out such noise now and put your energy instead into creating your best possible application(s), you will be far better off.
Of course, if you do have any questions, you can always ask us on the message boards over at
GMAT Club. Or sign up for a
free one-on-one consultation!