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MBA Admissions Essential #3: Look Beyond the Numbers

You’re applying to b-school. You look at the application and its requirements: academic records of all coursework and degrees earned since high school; the GMAT; list of extra-curricular activities and/or community service; a resume or record of professional work experience; essays; letters of recommendation; and sometimes an interview. Your first thought is to focus on the most easily quantified requirements: GPA, GMAT, and years of work experience. Since these are clear-cut measures of your ability, you naturally assume the adcoms reviewing your application will do the same.

      

Think again.  The MBA, unlike a PhD and many other advanced degrees, is a professional, applied program. As such, applicants do not compete with one another for entrance into the program based on academics alone. In fact, we find that ~75-80% of all applicants are admissible based on academic and professional experience. All things being equal, it is the more qualitative measures that come to the forefront in the evaluation process.  Key differentiators in many applications become personal qualities such as leadership, management, communication skills, initiative, contribution to community, and integrity.

    

The irony for many applicants is that it is precisely the “numbers” over which they fret and the area over which they have least control at the time of application. What applicants do have the greatest ability to manage is essays, choice of recommenders, and general presentation. Presenting a clear, genuine picture of oneself helps adcoms assess your “fit” for the learning environment and school culture. 

    

Two analogies may help to explain: charisma and movies. With charisma, few agree on how to define it and whether or not it is an inborn or acquired quality. Yet charisma is something we all recognize when we see it.

      

With movies, think of your top five favorite movies of all time.  Are you able to identify any one key element or group of elements all five movies have in common? Not likely. You may prefer one for its genre, one for its visual effects, one for its plot, one for its actors/actresses, and the last for some indescribable reason or gut visceral reaction that defies logic or words.

      

So forget strict numbers. Admission is neither as random as playing roulette in Monte Carlo nor as exacting as a multiple regression analysis of all elements of an application. Rather, admission is a holistic assessment of both qualitative and quantitative dimensions. And like charisma or a good movie, when we’ve read thousands upon thousands of applications, we know a good “fit” for Wharton when we see it.

05 Oct 2006 11:50 AM in Application Strategy | Permalink

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