Welcome to MBA Podcaster the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Catherine Girardeau. It’s amazing how many business school applicants make avoidable application mistakes. It’s unfortunate that these avoidable mistakes can result in your application being rejected. It’s time for you to take charge of your application. It’s time to hear what MBA Podcaster’s experts have to say about application pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Today we’ll talk with admissions directors from some of the top business schools as well as admissions consultants from two of the country’s most respected firms. Who are they? Let’s meet our guests. “Hi, my name is Rose Martinelli and I’m the Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.” “My name is Liz Riley Hargrove and I’m the Associate Dean for Admissions at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.” “My name is Graham Richmond and I’m the CEO of Clear Admit which is an Admissions Consulting and Publications company.” “I am Kellee Scott and I’m Senior Associate Director of MBA Admissions at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.” “I’m Linda Abraham; I’m the Founder and President of Accepted.com, one of the older admissions consultancies that are around.”

What do all of these people have in common? They’re on the other side of your application. You write it, they read it. They’re in a position to either help you spot the follies of your application package or to spot them themselves. Let’s take a look at the odds for a moment. You submit one application to each school you’re applying to. They read, well a lot of applications, hundreds even thousands. While admissions committees are absolutely committed to evaluating every single application that comes through their doors complete and on-time. If a short cut to rejection is staring them in the face a glaring error, an omission let’s face it they’re going to take it. You don’t want to give an admissions committee that opportunity.

Let’s let Kellee Scott of USC Marshall’s School give the admissions committee’s perspective, “What happens from the admissions side is we start seeing so many applications that they all start sounding alike and we’re looking for the uniqueness in the applicant. You know every applicant is going to have a GMAT and a GPA, every applicant’s going to have an undergraduate transcript and for us you know we usually look for some work experience but then it’s those unique things that make a person stand out in the pool. What do they do outside of work? What kind of leadership skills do they take? How are they involved in their community? And essentially what are you passionate about in life and what drives you? Those are the things that we look for in our applications but often students kind of shy away from that because they may have the idea that everything has to be strict, professional and business like in a business school application.” Linda Abraham of Accepted.com concurs, “They tend to write what they think the admissions committees want to hear. Instead taking a tip from JFK they should be thinking about what do they want the admissions committees to know.”

Let’s step back and take a look at the applications process as a whole. First our admissions consultants break it down for us, Clear Admit’s Graham Richmond, “The MBA Admission’s process is sort of a multi-variable equation. There are a lot of moving parts.” “Before an applicant starts responding to essay questions or filling even boxes out on the application, I think the applicant should step back, review the application, think about their transcripts, think about their test score and realize it’s one big puzzle like a jigsaw puzzle and all of the pieces are going to come together to present a picture of the applicant. They shouldn’t duplicate, they should compliment so that first step has to be a certain strategizing and looking at the whole picture and saying okay I want to make sure each piece gets put in, each stone in the mosaic that is me is present. So you don’t really need to say what your GMAT score is, they have that somewhere else. You don’t want to just recount your resume, that’s there; they don’t need that in an essay. In an essay you should discuss your motivations for some of your career choices and you might want to go much deeper than you could in a resume into a particular situation that you handled very well or that was particularly challenging or something along those lines.”

Rose Martinelli of the University of Chicago Booth School said application mistakes can be lumped into two main categories: obvious and strategic. Martinelli knows of which she speaks, not only is she Associate Dean of Recruitment and Admissions she recently completed an Executive MBA of her own. Let’s start with the obvious because avoiding these mistakes will make it harder for admissions committees to weed your application out, “The obvious mistakes are not following instructions, not answering questions, trying to guess what you think the admissions committee wants versus providing a transparent or authentic picture of yourself. Miswriting the name of the school to which you are applying in your essay, making sure that the cities to schools to which you are applying at the right cities so there’s a lot of what I would call find and replace mistakes that often happen in the application. But many of those errors could be easily avoided by some thoughtful proofreading and some careful, strategic planning about what is required by that school and following those instructions very clearly.”

Linda Abraham of Accepted.com lists what she considers obvious mistakes when it comes to MBA application essays, “They miss gravacity, platitudes, sometimes you read an essay and you sense that it’s all smoke screen. That the essays you know when you read these broad, grandiose or even modest generalities they are so boring, they are so boring and they come at you like a smoke screen, like somebody put a veil in front of their face and decided to hide it by claiming a dynamic personality and passion. I’m very passionate about something but you can’t come up with one specific incident where that passion drove you to action. It’s a smoke screen. Admissions committee people read many, many essays and when there’s genuineness, a sincerity, when there are specifics that are revealing of true and genuine passion the contrast is really very stark.”

Let’s turn now to the Chicago Booth’s School Rose Martinelli’s top strategic application errors, “I would say the first leading indicator of a strategic mistake is when a person tries to write one set of essays a one size fit all application across all schools. We see that very, very quickly and it really will be a big mistake for the candidate, let me tell you why. Each of those schools while we have one MBA degree provides a very different programmatic experience, everything from curriculum to majors and concentrations to sizes to team based learning, experiential learning to more formulaic styles of learning but every program is distinctly different. And that whole issue of fit that we raise year after year at our applications presentations means that a student really understands who they are and why a particular school would be a good fit for them and they can draw the lines between their experience and the resources that that school will afford them during the MBA.”

All of our experts agreed that you should do everything in your power to avoid the mistakes in the obvious category. Use your word processing program grammar and spell-check. Don’t upload an essay that you have written for one school to another school. Fill-in all of the boxes on the application and submit everything on time. But what you need to do to avoid strategic mistakes is not as obvious. Rose Martinelli said the first step that a student needs to take in avoiding strategic application errors is a thorough self-assessment. Why? “To understand the experiences that they have had to date, their educational preparation, their community involvements, their life as a person and as a professional and really draw out those characteristics that are important to highlight and important to understand as you are preparing to commence in what would be termed as a very significant investment in your life, in human capital development. And so if you don’t spend time in understanding where you’ve been and linking it to where you’re going you’re going to miss a lot of the richness that most MBA admissions offices seek in the application process. Once you’ve understood yourself then comes the choice of understanding the programs and while it’s very easy to do research on websites the differences may not be all that apparent without having conversations with students or alumni of that program or making a campus visit. So understanding who you are, what your needs are and then drawing it to the resources and the fit of the institution is incredibly important but is most often missed by the majority of applicants and this is something that separates a great applicant from what I would call a good applicant.”

Liz Riley Hargrove of Duke University’s Fuqua’s School of Business agrees that if an applicant has scrimped on self-assessment it shows. “The applicants who are not successful in our process that when we read those applications we feel like ah this person is really not ready for this type of experience. So someone who doesn’t know how a MBA can really help them advance their career goals or why they want to get a MBA. And I always tell students pursuing a MBA is not really about trying to find yourself. For most students this can be a pretty intimidating environment to try to find yourself especially if you don’t know what you want to do. The applicants that we see write beautiful essays about what they want to do short-term and long-term and then they get to this environment and change their mind and that’s okay because once you enter this environment you’re surrounded by your 400 peers who have done incredible things around the world and you could very well change your mind about what you want to do once you begin having those kinds of interactions but for the student who doesn’t know what they want to do because of the pace of a MBA program the fact that you’ll be starting the interviewing process your summer internship so early in this process that you spend a lot of time doing career exploration and not necessarily taking advantage of everything that the experience has to offer. So students who are not ready for a MBA who don’t know what they want to do oftentimes are not successful in our application process.”

Since all of our experts said it’s obvious to them when an applicant has not allowed enough time for the application process, I asked them this question: what part of the application process do you wish applicants would spend more time on typically? “Well one of things that candidates really need to spend more time on is first doing some research before they actually submit the application and that is first, finding out about the school online. Visiting when the school is in their area as part of either some of the MBA tours or stand alone recruiting events and last but not least just actually visiting the school, talking to people in admissions, talking to students to find out exactly what the school is about before they actually submit the application.”

Rose Martinelli stressed the importance of using alumni networks, “I think it’s a big mistake when people don’t reach out to the school and our alumni to get a sense of who we are. There is so many activities that happen around the world that can give you a sense of what Chicago Booth would be like, whether they’re alumni events or global leadership series events that we have around the world but they are a great way to meet lots of people and see if you those alumni are people that you want to be around and they can share your experience.”

Accepted.com’s Linda Abraham said allowing enough time for all parts of the application not just the essay is crucial, “They sometimes fail to allow enough time for the boxes. They kind of assume that’s a throw-away. Those boxes on the form, on the web form provide context for the entire application, for the essay, for the resume, for the transcript, for everything else, so make them work, make them quantify, provide details when possible. Make sure that you’ve filled out every box and provided some information that is going to help you get accepted. That’s one point. The other point is allow enough time for the essay writing process. The writing, the re-writing, writing is a time consuming process. The idea that you can sit down the day before, pop out four essays and hit submit the next day does not work well.”

For the unprepared the essays can be shark infested waters. Let’s dive in. All of the experts agreed that applicants should not do this, “Writing their application especially their essay based on what they think the school wants to hear versus writing who they are, why they are a great candidate, and why there would be a great addition to the school.” That’s also Accepted.com’s CEO Linda Abraham’s top essay pet peeve, “Each essay has to have a point, in other words it has to have a theme. It has to answer the question and I think that it’s absolutely critical that the applicants make use of specific details. At the same time provide some analysis to why these details are important, what do they signify, what does it tell somebody about them?”

Graham Richmond of Clear Admits sights another seemingly obvious pitfall that in fact may not be all that obvious to some applicants, “A lot of candidates are used to working in PowerPoint or in kind of presentation mode from their professional careers and when it comes to writing essays the tendencies is often toward bullet points and that’s another classic pitfall. You need to write in prose.” The old adage for good writing, “Show, don’t tell” absolutely applies to MBA application essays, Graham Richmond, “They’ll tell the admissions committee that they are a great leader or that they exercise leadership rather than show how they did that exactly by indicating how many people they supervised or how they guided the team to achieve some accomplishment.”Accepted.com’s Linda Abraham sums it up, “You can be the right candidate but if you fail to show it you still won’t get in.”

So what’s an applicant with writer’s block to do? Linda Abraham, “Reflect on yourself, to thy own self be true. Write in your own voice. Solid, substantive answers the questions, that’s number one. Number two, professional writers have editors and if the pros have editors I don’t see any good reason why people who by their own definition or by your definition have poor writing skills shouldn’t have editors. I think it’s really important. Writing is re-writing, an experienced pair of critical and supportive eyes can be a tremendous advantage in writing an outstanding essay.”

“The applicants who do the best job in their essays really let their personalities shine. There’s a sense of authenticity an applicant telling us about who they are and where they come from that really resonates with me personally. And I feel like at the end of that application that I have a really good sense for who they are.”

The good news in putting together a successful MBA application is not as complicated as you might think. Liz Riley Hargrove sums it up, “We’re looking at sort of a holistic picture of this candidate so your GMAT score is important but it’s not the one thing that is absolutely going to gain you admission or keep you from being admitted to the school of your dreams. In our process specifically your GMAT is weighted equally with your work experience and your essays and your recommendations, your interview and your undergraduate record as well as your what we call sort of your impact, your leadership impact so your community involvement, the opportunities that you’ve had to demonstrate leadership or initiative within your community or within your profession.”

Is doing what you have to do to get into a MBA program worth the effort? The University of Chicago Booth School of Businesses, Rose Martinelli says absolutely yes, “These are very, very unique times world-wide and having students come into a program who are willing to learn from what’s happening in the world today and shape tomorrow is an amazing opportunity for students. It’s a great time to pursue one’s MBA. It’s also a time, a very demanding time for new leaders who think differently and who think critically. So if you’ve got the guts, if you have the drive and the passion to impact the world for positive change then I would say go for it. It’s worth the effort, the application is just the beginning of the journey but it’s an amazing journey and this is spoken from one who graduates tomorrow. So I wish you all very good luck in your pursuit of a MBA.”

For more information, a transcript of this show or to register for your by-weekly MBA podcast visit mbapodcaster.com. Look for us on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest news and insight in the world of business school. This is MBA Podcaster. I’m Catherine Girardeau. Thanks for listening and come back next time when we explore another topic of interest in your quest for a MBA.

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