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I’m Janet Nakano with MBA Podcaster. We’re bringing you a special MBA Admissions panel discussion, co-produced with Manhattan GMAT. Recently Manhattan GMAT brought together admission’s commit members from Wharton, NYU Stern and Columbia to discuss important aspects of the application process including professional experience, recommendations, interviews and essays. For more information on this show visit us at MBAPodcaster.com.

Chris Ryan: My name is Chris Ryan; I’m the Director of Product and Instructor Development here at Manhattan GMAT. Thanks for coming out to our business school admissions panel. On my left, I’ll introduce our panelists. First we have Ainsley Parker who is Associate Director in the Office of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at the Wharton School. Second is Alison Goggin who is Director of MBA Admissions at NYU Stern’s School of Business. And the left is Ainsley Parker who is Assistant Director of MBA Admissions at Columbia Business School. Welcome to them and welcome to you.

So first of all, what does your school look for in a potential business school candidate? I’ll turn it over to Alison.

Alison Goggin: Good evening, everyone. And welcome. Again my name is Alison, from Stern and I am delighted to see so many of you here tonight. So just in general I think the goals for all of us for this panel is to help you create the most competitive application that you can and to really walk away from tonight with some tips that you can apply immediately no matter where you are in the process, if you’re still thinking about business school, if you are putting the finishing touches on your application or if you’ve actually already submitted an application and you might be hoping for that interview in the coming weeks. That is really our goal. We’re going to keep it very conversational and light and hope that you’ll gain a lot from it.

So my question, what does your business school look for in a potential candidate, I am going to kind of broaden that to what do top business schools look for in potential candidates and even more specifically in a class. Because not only is it about your individual application but keep in mind that we’re also creating a class, we’re shaping a class. So I will allude to that at some point during my topic. So before I kind of take you through four major points, four major areas that we look for, I want to start by kind of talking about this idea of having a story and your story. And you’ve probably heard this a couple of times if you’ve already been in the MBA application process and it doesn’t go away anytime soon, in fact once you get to business school you have to then think about crafting your story for recruiters and even out of business school your story for the next job. So you can kind of think of this application process as a real kind of inward look at yourself and a kind of self discovery and exercise in writing your story that will help last a lifetime. I say that because what we look for in candidates is for you to really tell your story and that sounds very simplistic but you’d be surprised by how many times that we see candidates writing things that they think that we want to hear, not things that they are necessarily passionate about or interested in but you know they may have read on a website that may have some very helpful tips or heard from somebody else. So I want to start out by saying that you really want to think hard about what some of your proudest accomplishments have been, what your passions are, why you really want to make this step and really be honest with yourself through the process. Because a question that comes up very often is, ‘How do I make myself stand out from other candidates?’ and one of the best ways and the easiest ways is to really be yourself because each of you has your own unique story. So as I am talking through these different areas that we’re looking for just kind of keep in the back of your head.

So there are really four things that I want to talk about. The first, we’re looking for outstanding academic potential. The second, we are looking for a proven track record of career success and strong professional promise, post-MBA. We’re looking for a high level of certain professional and personal characteristics that we deem valuable during the MBA program. And I will get into exactly what characteristics those are and then finally we’re looking for a genuine interest in our school, in our program.

So, first, along the lines of outstanding academic potential, we want to know not only that you can do the work in a rigorous MBA program but that you will excel and so that is why we’re looking at things like your undergraduate performance, the courses that you took, your GMAT. And beyond that you should think about that and how you are demonstrating your ability to succeed in the program but beyond that keep in mind that most admissions committees are also looking for diversity in terms of academic experiences. So when I say that I mean diversity of majors, or just general academic experiences. We have candidates that went to all different kinds of institutions, so one of the common misconceptions is I have to have had a business background or an engineering background in order to succeed and if you look at all of our profiles you’ll see that there is a very wide variety of major s represented. So when you think about how you represent yourself from an academic standpoint, there are certain things that you’re not going to be able to change, right? You’re not going to be able to change that GPA. You might be working to change the GMAT, but also think about some of the unique attributes of the academic experience that you had, whether it was the specific program or experiences that you had during your undergraduate experience or further graduate experience that you might be able to kind of contribute to the MBA experience.

Second, a proven track record of career success and bright professional promise; so we’re going to look to see what kinds of contributions have you made to the organizations that you’ve been a part of. Have you really taken advantage of all of the opportunities that you’ve had to succeed and grow? And here keep in mind that we’re not looking for a certain industry, again a very common misconception. You know, I have to have had banking experience in order to do the MBA and if you look at our profiles you’ll see that it’s a wide variety of experiences. You know all of us have in our program people from for-profit, non-profit, government, worlds. So really it’s about how can you really represent why you made the decisions that you did. How can you represent that you really tried to grow in a way that made sense for you and in a way that indicates that you are kind of looking long term. On the professional promise side, what I am referring to there is that you have a very firm understanding of what your goals are in wanting a MBA. It fits into them at this point. And that is different for every person so don’t get caught in the trap of I have to have a certain number of work experience, or I have too much work experience or I have too little. Everybody’s story is a little bit different and everybody decides at a different time why this is the best time for them but that is something that we’re going to look at. We want to know that you thought through your plans so that when you come to school that you’re going to be ready to contribute, take part in student activities, take part in the recruiting process and just in general be successful because business school is a very busy time and you don’t have time to really figure it out once you get there.

So these professional and personal characteristics that we’re looking for and I am going to preface this by saying that you don’t have to be excelling in all of these areas. Business school is where you develop some of these skills but we will look to see that you have kind of the raw materials for those skills and we would hope that you would excel in some of these areas already. And in terms of these skills, this could be represented in your work experience, it could also be represented in community service, extra curricular activities, some of the experiences that you had in undergraduate. So the first is the ability to communicate effectively and obviously we’re going to see that in the writing in your application, in your essays. Keep in mind, one small tip (I don’t think I am really supposed to be offering tips but I will) that when we say your application, that every, a lot of times, you can ask each school, correspondence that you have, written correspondence, emails, that goes into your file so every time that you communicate whether it’s a formal essay or it’s an email that you send to the committee, we’re saying how does that email look? Does that email have errors in it? Did they say something inappropriate? So when I say communicate effectively from a written standpoint it is everything that you have ever written to us.

Chris Ryan: So, “Yo, Alison,” doesn’t really?

Alison Goggin: "Yo, Alison,” doesn’t work. In any setting actually.

Chris Ryan: Check it. Okay so, I’ll remember that

Alison Goggin: And then of course the ability to communicate effectively, verbally and our programs we all conduct interviews for almost all of the students who we admit and so do those mock interviews, think about how you’re going to articulate your story verbally because sometimes it is much easier to get it down on paper than it is to be doing that in person and in the back of our mind we’re looking for people who again we feel really good about how they communicate about themselves, they may have some development opportunities but we know we can work with it because we’re thinking down the line to when this person is going to be in front of an employer doing an interview and how they are really going to be representing themselves and representing Stern.

The second characteristic I would say is the ability to show that you can excel in diverse teams and be collaborative. The MBA as many of you I am sure know is a lot about team work and we want to see evidence that you’ve had work in diverse teams whether it is in your work experience, extracurricular activities, that you’ve been able to handle working in successful teams as well as some times that you may have been part of a team that wasn’t as successful and be able to sort of say well this is why it wasn’t and this is what I learned from it. Then that ability to be collaborative. I think with all of our schools, the students recognize they are part of a community and they want to help each other succeed and help each other grow their network, so evidence that you are a collaborative person in your application is very important.

Leadership, MBA is often time associated with leadership. We’re going to look for evidence of your leadership potential, it doesn’t mean that you have to have managed people or taken on the leadership of a very large scale project, it can be represented in a lot of different ways. So just think about you personally and your leadership style and some of the things that you feel really proud of and really represent that in the application.

The last three skills kind of all go together. The first is self-awareness. So really kind of that inward look at yourself, that I know what I am good at and I know what I need to develop. We look to see if that comes out in the application, comes out in the interview. Appropriate judgment, so again something like, “Yo, Alison,” not but even more so in your essay’s knowing what is appropriate to talk about and not appropriate to talk about and we’ll probably get into this in the later section but I think in this day of social networking there is a lot of information put out there about people and you need to make some good decisions about what exactly goes in a MBA application versus other places in your life.

Then interpersonal skills, and this is something that recruiters often site is something that makes candidates stand out from one another, because all of our schools, we produce candidates who are very smart, they are team oriented, recruiters know that they have the skills, the analytical skills to do well. So oftentimes what sets a candidate apart is that extra sort of soft skills, interpersonal skills, so we’re really going to be looking for that and that will come through again in the application but probably even more so in the interview in person to see sort of how you interact just one-on-one with another person.

Then finally, genuine interest in the school. You know we understand that you’re going to be applying to multiple schools; there are several of you in here probably applying to all of our schools. And of course, as a committee member at a certain school we’re only interested in why you want to consider us. So doing that research on the front end, we want to see evidence that you’ve really thought about how you can contribute to the community, why you think you’d gain from the community, that you have kind of felt out the personality of the school and that’s where we all differ and you can kind of say this is why I am a good match for this school.”

Chris Ryan: So maybe we’ll kick it over to you, Ainsley for the second question: how the application process works at your school.”

Ainsley Parker: Sure, so there are a couple of ways to kind of approach this. The first is to talk a little bit about sort of specifically what Wharton looks at. And then sort of the nuts and bolts about the how’s and the whys and what happens once you guys hit submit, where does it go. So I think one of the things that we specifically at Wharton have looked at and I think probably this is a trend across all business schools, I know Harvard has a program that is kind of similar, we remove the work experience requirement from our application. For us, we really do believe in early career candidates who are people who have three years or less of work experience, you know we believe in the quality versus quantity, some people do an immense amount in two years and some people do absolutely nothing in eight years. So we don’t want you to be intimidated by the average number of work experience or the average age of our students. We really encourage you if you feel you are ready and you’ve done some self reflection and some introspection and really if you’ve really come to the conclusion that this is the right place and the right time in your career, we’re willing to look at that and we encourage you to do that.

In terms of sort of how our process works, once you hit submit, everything gets printed out and we hire a staff of second year MBA students who we call graduate assistants, they apply, they are hired, and we train them, they are full members of the admissions committee and we have about 65 of them on our staff. Then they are the first read on each application. So they go through every piece and part, take a lot of notes, and then it comes to one of the six associate directors in our office and we also then read through the whole file and every piece of (I can’t reiterate this enough) every piece of communication you send, every additional thing you add to your application is in that file. So please, please, I encourage you to be judicious in extra material, be very careful in your communication with us because we do read absolutely everything that comes through our door. Be it an email that you sent to our director saying, “Yo, Tom: You know I really want to hear more about this, it was cool to meet you in Mumbai. Peace out, Ainsley,” we’ll see that so keep that in mind. So at the end of the second read, both the graduate assistant and myself will recommend either to interview or to not interview. If you are not selected for an interview, our process ends for you there and you are welcome to reapply the following year but for that academic year that’s it for you. We offer interviews in one of three ways, you can interview on-campus with a second year MBA student, you can interview in your local area with an Alumni or you can interview in different hubs across the world with one of the six of us. And those hubs change every year depending on where we have alumni coverage. It doesn’t matter where you interview. For us it is much more about you being able to articulate again your goals, your visions, why do you want to come to our program, what about our program is going to help you meet your goals and do what you want to do when you finish. The interview is certainly not going to make or break you, it’s not something that is going to decide whether or not you are going to get admitted but for us it is a really important part and a really important way that we can understand another dimension of who you are. We have a lot of information about you on paper and a lot of information about how you presented yourself and what you’re looking to do and what kind of goals that you set for yourself. But in person it is really, really important for us because again we’re crafting a class of people, not applications.

And though our program is fairly large, we have 800 students in each of our classes, we really carefully craft that class because we are such a team based, collaborative, collegiate environment. We hand pick every single person who is a member of that class. So once your interview is finished your interviewer will write up an interview report which is a standard form, it gets put back in your application then your application is read again up to four more times by one of the six associate directors. I should also say that Thomas, our Director, reads every application twice and he is the ultimate decision on whether or not to interview you or not, and whether or not you were admitted or not so I would like to take a moment to sort of pass the buck there. No I am just kidding. So Thomas does read every application twice. At that point we go into committee, we discuss all of the applications as a group, there are seven of us who discuss the applications so it really is a very iterative process, it’s an incredibly thorough process, we really don’t miss much. We do have a number of re-applicants every year which we encourage. We offer feedback sessions on a first come, first serve basis where we’ll offer to walk through your application with you and offer you some constructive criticism about what we saw as strengths, what we saw as weaknesses to help you improve. We think it’s a really important way to have applicants gain insight and knowledge into A) what our process looks like and B) how they can improve if you want to continue this process going forward. I think that this is certainly a huge undertaking to apply to business school, to go to business school, to invest this much time before you get to business school and taking the GMAT and writing the essays and talking to your recommenders and really thinking through the whole process of what it takes to make a good application. So that is sort of why we offer those kinds of feedback sessions, you guys have put so much work into each application that we really want to be able to help you along in the process as much as we can.”

Chris Ryan: So Alison, Victoria other thoughts on how your processes are similar or different? What happens when people hit submit?

Victoria Hess: Well you know I’d like to echo a lot of the things Ainsley said, a lot of the parts of the process are very similar but I think each school does have different nuances to their programs and their processes. So for our school in particular, for Columbia, an application gets submitted, we actually don’t have any students read applications, so it is always done by members of the admissions committee. Each application is read twice by different admissions officers and then it goes to a committee of substantial number of people from our office, so between five and 10 people will be in committee and Linda Meehan, the Director of Admissions is always a part of that committee process. Most of the people that are admitted are interviewed. It’s not 100% but the majority are and our interviews are actually only done by alumni in your area. So we don’t do any interviews on campus, we personally don’t interview anybody, we’d rather have somebody who we don’t have a current student who is part of the community reading the applications so this is an opportunity for somebody who is very familiar with the program to get to know you a little bit better. So you know it’s you know I can’t speak for other schools but ours is a relatively informal process, you should treat it like a business interview but you’re probably not going to get, at least at Columbia, you’re not going to get a case study, or a problem set to do it is more a chance for you to talk about yourself, why you are looking to go to business school, that particular school and you know just again for somebody who is very familiar with that community to get to know you and see if you would be a good fit. If they would like to have you as a fellow classmate and as a fellow alum of the program. Our feedback policy is currently pending so I don’t have any information on that right now. We seem to change it every year; we try to provide it on sort of a limited basis. It’s not a first come, first serve but rather you know a lot of the times it is a very competitive process and we don’t have specific feedback for applicants and we do always encourage re-applicants because a lot of the times we would like to see somebody but it just wasn’t in the cards that year, we would like to see somebody in the class. For applicants that maybe there is something more specific that could be improved or changed or you know what have you we do like to take the opportunity to discuss that with them.

Alison Goggin: Okay, at Stern processes probably very similar to Columbia’s in that we also, we don’t use students to read the applications. We use them a lot in the recruiting process, but not as actual readers. We have 11 members on our committee and for us one thing I want to spend some time talking about is the interview. We do interview every student that we admit so an initial notification from us can be one of three things, the less desirable options which could be waitlist decision or a deny or it could be an invitation to interview. We conduct 90% of our interviews at Stern, on-campus. We actually offer lunch with the student, a tour, as well as class. We really want you to take the opportunity to get to know us and really to figure out if it is the right place for you. Again, you should treat it like a job interview, it is evaluative in nature but we really do want you to get to know the committee, or get to know the school, as well and really kind of be interviewing us. A couple of other things about our process, the committee members do probably 95% of the interviews so we do have some alumni who help us with special interview days who are trained but it will undoubtedly be an admissions committee member who you’re interviewing with and not only will that person have read your file, other times but they will have re-read it right before they meet with you and so it’s always a good idea to re-read that application because our questions tend to go very much beyond walk me through your resume. I’ve definitely asked some questions and seen some surprised looks on people’s faces like I will remember a sentence from their essay and you know you wrote those essays probably months before so it’s always a good idea to re-read your application. From the interview, we will try to make a decision of admit or deny but sometimes that might be a waitlist decision. At the interview level we typically interview about 30% of the applicant pool. So when we bring you in for an interview the admit rate is typically around 60-65%. It is a good step along the way. In terms of feedback, right now we do have a no feedback policy, we do have a kind of a standard way that we kind of approach feedback requests when we get them and we offer some tips in that but we don’t do any individual counseling at this point. We do encourage re-applicants and we actually have an abbreviated application process if someone re-applies within a year.

Chris Ryan: Great and so now we’ll move on to Victoria’s set of questions around correctible mistakes, so to speak if they can be and also the unripeness of candidates sometimes. So you’re the worst stories right?

Ainsley Parker: Okay so, the couple weeks leading up to submitting your application even probably the month up to it, you know a lot of the things in your application are going to be static at that point. So you know your undergraduate GPA is not going anywhere, probably, hopefully, have gotten a GMAT under your belt at that point, your work experience is pretty much set, hopefully you’re not doing a last ditch effort at signing up for 100 activities in the month before you apply. We know what you’ve been involved in and your interests. So a lot of the sort of factual pieces of your application are sort of already done, it’s now really about really how you present it all. And you know, Alison was talking a lot about telling your story and most schools are going to have an essay question that basically when you boil it down it is asking you what are your short-term and long-term post MBA goals and why are you interested in attending this particular school? So it’s really important that you take the time to explain that in a thorough, straightforward, well written, concise manner. We don’t know you that well, or at all. We may have met you through the process, we may not have. You want to make sure that you’re telling it like we don’t know you. So don’t make assumptions if you’re a consultant and you’ve had projects in healthcare and you want to go into healthcare. If you don’t tell us that it’s hard for us to put the pieces together. So it is helpful for you to go through it and sometimes have somebody read it, I certainly want you guys all to think about having people proofread your essays, that is certainly not against the rules. So have a good friend read it, then have somebody maybe who doesn’t know you that well read it and see if they understand what you want to do, why you want to do it, why you want to go to that particular school. That last piece, why you want to go to that particular school is an important part of the application. And it is something that is very much within your control, how much information you give, how passionate you come across about being part of that community. And if you can go through your application and change school x, to school y, to school z by doing find and replace, you are not answering the question properly. Because you know there are a lot of really good schools out there who are going to offer you wonderful opportunities but they are all very different and it is up to you to take the time to learn about those differences and about what you’re going to get out of that program, how it is going to help you achieve your goals, what you’re going to add to that community and again what you are going to take away from it.

Chris Ryan: How often, let me just ask you, do you see with any regularity the wrong school name?

Ainsley Parker: Yes, very obviously the find and replace. I was not just joking there. Another part of your application which you may not think you have a lot of control over but which you actually have more than you probably imagine is the recommendations.

The recommendations most schools are going to ask for two recommendations, you guys, two so two recommendations most likely from somebody who knows you in a professional capacity. And you should really take the time to think about who can really speak on your behalf. Some schools are going to have guided recommendation forms, we personally do, so it is 10 questions, we are looking for very specific information. Other schools may have a more open format but you know if they do have a guide of recommendation form, ours is available on the website, you can take a look at it and look for the information for what we’re trying to gain. Think about who knows you in those sort of capacities. Who can speak about your accomplishments, about your ability to work in a team, to be a leader, who can talk about your professional promise? Sit down with them, make sure that they are comfortable writing this recommendation on your behalf and also talk to them about why you are interesting in going to business school, why you are interested in going to that particular school so that they can bring that to the table in your application. Because at least for us, part of what we’re looking for is that if they think your goals are realistic. If you are, you know if these are achievable for you. And if you haven’t sat down and talk to them about that, they are not going to be able to you know bring that to the table and that is doing you a disservice when we’re looking at other applicants who do have that information as part of their recommendations.

One other thing to note is that we are not; at least I think it would be for most schools, particularly impressed by titles. We’re looking for people again who know about your experiences, who can talk about what you do on a daily basis, how you have matured throughout your time there and if you ride the elevator every morning with the CEO and you’re both Giants fans, so you talk about the game that is not going to give him much substance about which to write in your application. So focus on who can best talk about your strengths and your promise. If you’re not comfortable telling your current boss that you’re applying to business school, that is perfectly understandable, you can look for alternative ways, you can go to a previous supervisor, you can go to a client, you know there are other options.

And one thing that I would also note; we know that your recommenders may be in positions where they are very busy, they don’t have a lot of time but if they come to you and ask you to write the recommendation for them, please don’t do it. You know we can tell, you know we read a lot of applications, we’re very familiar with writing styles even if you try to hide it, and you know you’re just kind of doing yourself a disservice because you’ve already been able to tell us why you think you’re great, let somebody else tell us why you are great, give us alternative examples. Maybe things you don’t even recognize in yourself about your potential. You know there is someone senior to you and they are going to be able to give that different perspective. So you know we understand that as a situation arises and please try to be sort of ethical about it and you know discuss it with them about why you think it is really important for them to write it on your behalf. Another tip, think about your whole application as a package, so you know we spend a lot of time talking about essays, and making sure you proofread those, but those are so many other parts of the application just in the data forms and in the correspondence and you have to think about everything and how it is fitting into your application. You know, I have seen some people who have had some really great first and second essays and then you could tell that they didn’t put quite the extra time into the third essay or there were some spelling errors in the activities on the data form. One time in essay three we got a pie chart that was supposed to represent all of the different areas of somebody’s personality and it added up to 80. You know it would have been one thing if it was 110, I could have maybe gotten it, but 80?!

Chris Ryan: Was there a missing slice? Like and then this 20 is to be discovered by you

Ainsley Parker: There was no indication, I flipped it over, is there more? Is this a joke?

Alison Goggin: He’s still trying to find that 20% of himself. Well he’s supposed to find that in business school right?

Ainsley Parker: Yeah apparently, apparently.

Chris Ryan: Thank you all for coming tonight. Please give our presenters a warm round of applause. And good luck with your applications. Thanks.

This show was brought to you by MBA Podcaster and Manhattan GMAT. I am Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster, thanks for listening