APPLICANT RESOURCES

Clear Admit Interview Guides
Be as prepared as possible for your MBA interviews this season with the Clear Admit Interview Guides! School-specific sample questions and in-depth strategy, campus visit details and places to stay.

Clear Admit School Guides
Seventeen titles available! Understand how the leading programs compare and learn more about the MBA experience in and beyond the classroom through Clear Admit School Guides. As featured in the Economist.

Essay Topic Analysis
Below are links to our comments on some of the top programs' essay topics for the 2007-2008 admissions season.
The Career Goals Essay
Berkeley / Haas
Chicago GSB
CMU / Tepper *
Columbia
Cornell / Johnson
Dartmouth / Tuck
Duke / Fuqua
Harvard
IESE *
INSEAD
London Business School
MIT / Sloan
Michigan / Ross
Northwestern / Kellogg
NYU / Stern
Oxford / Said *
Penn / Wharton
Stanford GSB
UCLA / Anderson
UNC / Kenan-Flagler
UT Austin / McCombs *
UVA / Darden
Yale SOM
* denotes last year's commentary

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• School: Berkeley / Haas
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• School: CMU / Tepper
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School Rankings
Rankings are a good way to start your research on various MBA Programs. Keep in mind each uses a different methodology.
Business Week
Economist
Financial Times
Forbes
USNews
Wall Street Journal

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Blog Archive

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ARCHIVE FOR FEBRUARY 2004

Thursday, February 26, 2004

“D-day” for Duke

Today is the ‘Round 2′ notification date for the Duke/Fuqua MBA program. For relevant discussion with other Duke R2 applicants, check out the BW Thread: http://forums.businessweek.com/bw-bschools/messages?msg=50749.1

The Clear Admit team would like to congratulate all those admitted to the class of 2006! Your hard work has truly paid off! We would also like to offer our support to those of you who did not make the cut this time. We encourage you to keep in mind the following points:

1) If you absolutely must go to b-school this fall, there are many other top schools with late round deadlines forthcoming (see our posting from Tuesday for details). Given the shift in application volume, this may be one of the few years to actually consider late applications.

2) Duke is very re-applicant friendly. In fact, feel free to send us any brief questions you may have about your odds as a re-applicant or plans going forward (be sure to provide relevant stats/background info). We’re happy to offer an initial assessment.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Wharton and Pearson (Financial Times, Penguin, etc.) Launch Wharton School Publishing

Interesting news. For details, check out the following: http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/whartonfacts/news_and_events/newsreleases/2004/p_2004_2_138.html

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Important Dates

While many of you are awaiting word on ’round 2′ applications, there seems to be some interest in the late deadlines this year (perhaps spurred on by the decrease in application volume and subsequent solicitation by the schools). Here is a quick guide to several important deadlines that are approaching:

Feb-27: London Business School
March-1: U. Michigan
March-1: Columbia (international applicants)
March-3: IESE
March-5: UNC and UC Berkeley
March-11: Harvard
March-12: Kellogg and Yale
March-15: NYU and Cornell
March-16: Stanford
March-18: Wharton
March-19: U. Chicago
March-22: Carnegie Mellon and Duke
March-24: Insead*
March-31: UVA

and in April, there are deadlines for Dartmouth, IMD and UCLA….(amongst others).

* Insead’s deadline is for their January start date.

Friday, February 20, 2004

Feedback from our clients…

This is the time of year when clients send us their thoughts on the services we provide. One client recently sent us this email to Eliot Ingram (co-founder of Clear Admit):

—– Original Message —–
From:
To: eliot@clearadmit.com
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 12:52 AM
Subject: testimonial

Dear Eliot,

I wanted to thank you for your help and write a testimonial that you can use (see below). I will not hesitate to recommend Clear Admit or serve as a reference.

“There is absolutely NO way I would have been accepted to three highly ranked business schools had I not used Clear Admit’s services. They not only helped me narrow down my list of schools, but were able to help me market myself in a consistent, unique, and competitive manner that I believe allowed me to stand out. As a ‘nontraditional’ applicant I was worried that I didn’t have a good enough story. Clear Admit helped me tell my story and turn my perceived weakness into a definite strength. They also helped me to decide whether or not to take the GMAT again, edited my essays, and prepared me for my interviews. In fact, at three interviews, I was not asked a question that my Clear Admit consultant hadn’t already asked me during our mock interview! Although my GMAT score was close to 40 points below the average of the schools at which I was accepted, Clear Admit did an amazing job of helping me highlight the strengths of my application. I would recommend Clear Admit to anyone applying to B school. They will help you get in to schools that may at first seem out of your league. It is great that I now get to pick where I want to go. Eternal thanks to the entire Clear Admit staff.”

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Sample Interview Questions for HBS

Here are a handful of sample questions for those of you preparing for your ’round 2′ HBS interviews. These are taken from our database of HBS-specific questions, but they should be of use for anyone approaching an MBA interview.

Clear Admit’s HBS Interview Questions, Section 1: Leadership

1. Tell me about a recent leadership experience since submitting application (e.g. not in your essays).
2. Expand on the leadership essay #1.
3. Tell me about a leadership experience with a college activity and a community activity.
4. What is your leadership style? What qualities should a good leader possess?
5. What is your best leadership example?
6. What have you learned from good leaders? Who is your hero?
7. Have you ever had a bad manager? Why was he/she bad? What did you do about it? What were the results of your actions?
….

Contact Clear Admit for more information about our HBS mock-interview services. We’ll review your HBS file and develop a custom non-blind interview that helps you focus on the areas that HBS is likely to probe.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

HBS interviews trickling out!

HBS has begun inviting ’round 2′ applicants for interviews. HBS’s ‘non-blind’ interview style is very different when compared to schools like Kellogg, Wharton or Stanford. As such, it requires careful preparation. Contact us for details and access to our HBS sample questions and interview strategy guide.

Wharton interview invitations, rejection letters

February 19th is the last day that Wharton will be releasing ’round 2′ interview invitations. They will also notify all ’round 2′ candidates who did not receive an invite to inform them that they have been denied admission to the school.

While tomorrow will undoubtedly be difficult for many applicants, the benefit of this early notification is that it gives candidates a chance to regroup and assess their profile/positioning strategy prior to the ’round 3′ deadlines for other schools. In many cases, this ‘early feedback’ from Wharton can serve as a turning point - enabling an applicant to have a greater impact in the late rounds (or as a re-applicant).

Thursday, February 12, 2004

Schools soliciting ‘Round 3′ applications?

A few Clear Admit clients have alerted us to an interesting phenomenon of late. A handful of top-15 schools are actually emailing candidates to encourage late season applications (Columbia, Tuck and Fuqua are the names that have come up most frequently). As we have reported here over the past few months, many top schools are looking at substantial decreases in application volume (anywhere from 15-25%). Based on this, many admissions committees are still searching for highly qualified applicants to help ’round out’ their classes. As such, it still makes sense for solid applicants to consider late applications this year.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Getting Ready for the Interview

Now that the ’round 2′ interview invites are being handed out, many of you are turning your attention towards preparing for your interview(s). Here are a handful of basic tips that should help you prepare:

1. Find out who conducts the interviews. If possible, you should always go into an interview with an understanding of who might be sitting opposite you. Will it be a second year MBA student? A seasoned admissions officer? The admissions director? A professor? An alum? In each of these cases, you might build a different approach. For example, an alumni interview might be fairly casual - over a lunch meeting or coffee - whereas a sit-down with the admissions director on the MBA campus should have a fairly different feel.

2. Find out what type of interview the school typically conducts. Will your interview be ‘blind’ (based solely on a resume that you bring with you)? Will it be non-blind (consisting of targeted questions based on a thorough review of your MBA application)? Semi-bind? Will it be a ‘fit’ interview? A ‘behavioral’ interview? A ’stress’ interview? Will it last 30 or 60 mintues? All of these details are crucial as you prepare. The more you know about the interview’s structure, the more comfortable you will be when it’s time to step up to the plate.

3. Practice. Get your hands on sample interview questions via web sites, discussion boards or any of the quality publications out there. Practice your responses to the questions - keeping in mind that the only way to prepare is to actually work on your answers with another person. Reading over sample questions and convincing yourself that you’ve got an answer is simply not enough. Hearing how your answers sound is key.

4. Work on your resume (if needed for the interview). Get your vital information onto a single page that is very easy to follow (in some cases, two pages may be acceptable - but this is extremely rare).

These basic tips merely scratch the surface. Contact Clear Admit to learn more about our school-by-school interview guides, resume editing help and mock interviewing services. We’ve helped hundreds of applicants improve their interviewing skills and find success in an often decisive aspect of the admissions process.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Background Checks

As some of you may know, many of the top MBA programs engage in a verification/fact-checking process for those candidates they admit. This involves finding out whether the applicant worked where they claim to have worked, earned the salary they listed in their application, received recommendations from the people cited on the application forms (rather than making them up), etc.

The purpose of this exercise is to protect all stakeholders of the MBA program (students, faculty, staff, alumi) from those who would seek to falsify their background and pervert the admissions process. It goes without saying that background checks are a good idea, yet there have been varying levels of protest from applicants on the Business Week b-school discussion boards.

In particular, there has been an interesting debate about Wharton’s charging admitted students $73 for the verification/background check. See the thread for the entire discussion. Also, here’s the Wharton Admissions Director’s official response on the matter.

Monday, February 09, 2004

How we’re doing…

Clear Admit clients continually update us with their results in the MBA admissions process. Now that the first round of MBA admissions is rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror, here’s a partial listing of the schools that our clients have been admitted to thus far:

Berkeley/Haas, Cambridge/Judge, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth/Tuck, Duke/Fuqua, Emory, Harvard, HEC, IESE, Insead, Kellogg/Northwestern, London Business School, Michigan, MIT, NYU/Stern, Oxford/Said, Rotman, Stanford, UCLA, UNC, USC, UVA/Darden, Wharton, Yale SOM.

Once again, we’re having a strong showing across the board. We’ll be adding to this list as we get more news from our clients.

DISCUSSIONS / BLOGS / WIKI

• Top Bush Education Official Leaves to Lead Business School Consortium
• Fridays From the Frontline
• Harvard Business School Deadlines and Essays Topics 2008-2009
• Tuck School of Business Auction Supplements Nonprofit, Public Sector Summer Internship Salaries
• Admissions Tip: Round 3 Results

Wiki

Discussion Boards

School-Hosted Blogs

Straight from the source: aggregated posts from students and administration. Below are the seven most recent posts in school-hosted blogs.

Individuals' Blogs

Bloggers by School

Community Blogs

Best of Blogging

• Top 10 Applicants:
• July Dream
• Miss Curly Bee
• VidiViciVeni
• B-School Bound
• Tinydancer
• gltnforpnshmnt
• mbabound08
• Achilles
• Eight Schools
• MBA Runner Girl

• Top 10 Students:
• m@ (Ross)
• MaybeMBA (Chicago)
• Hair Twirler (Georgetown)
• Iday (Chicago)
• J-term Johnny (Columbia)
• La Laudiaria (Wharton)
• MBA Gladiator (Yale)
• Angel Angie (LBS)
• Necromonger (INSEAD)
• Chrisof Meyer (Darden)

• Top 10 Applicants:
• Rungee582
• Iday
• Juggler
• Asiangal
• Forrest Gump
• RusGirl
• Hair Twirler
• JatWarrior
• MBA Babe
• Anand

• Top 10 Students:
• Angel Angie (LBS)
• The Divine Miss N (LBS)
• From Cali (Ross)
• Tim K. (McCombs)
• Noelle (IESE)
• Jerry Blank (Yale)
• Benny (Tuck)
• La Laudiaria (Wharton)
• Karlitos (LBS)
• MBA Gladiator (Yale)

• Top 10 Applicants:
• MBA Jackass
• Marina
• Forrest Gump
• Pupstar78
• Axechick
• Sorebrek
• Angel Angie
• I_Will_Make_It
• Redwolf056
• Vatsa

• Top 10 Students:
• Marquis (Stanford)
• Poweryogi (Chicago)
• KV (LBS)
• FutureMBAGirl (Wharton)
• The Divine Miss N (LBS)
• Vijay (ISB)
• Wakechick (Chicago)
• NoelleBellie (IESE)
• Jerry Blank (Yale)
• Olivier (INSEAD)

• PowerYogi
• Brit-Chick
• bskewl
• WakeChick
• Dave
• Iceman07
• iwhoElse
• Atta Girl
• Aregon23
• Classy

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