As July moves quickly towards August, it’s critical for applicants to finalize school selection and develop a personal schedule based on published application deadlines.
Let’s take a quick look at the Round 1 deadlines for the “top 15″ MBA programs:
Harvard: 10/11/05
Columbia: 10/12/06 (ED*), 04/20/06 (rolling)
Wharton/U. Penn: 10/13/05
Cornell/Johnson: 10/15/05 (EA), 11/15/05 (R1)
Stanford: 10/19/05
Darden/UVA: 10/19/05
Kellogg/Northwestern: 10/21/05
Chicago: 10/26/05
Duke/Fuqua: 10/27/05
MIT/Sloan: 11/02/06
Berkeley/Haas: 11/04/05
Tuck/Dartmouth: (not yet published, was Oct. 18th for ‘early action’ last year)
Yale SOM: (not yet published, was Oct. 27th last year)
Michigan/Ross: (not yet published, was Nov. 1st last year)
UCLA/Anderson: (not yet published, was Nov. 13th last year)
NYU/Stern: (not yet published, was Dec. 1st last year)
* binding decision
When looking at the deadlines above, most applicants begin thinking along these lines:
“Yikes! In order to apply to all of the schools on my list in the first round, I’ll need to have a very productive August/September…”
This realization typically leads to another thought:
“In a worse-case scenario, perhaps I can apply to a batch of schools in round 1 and the rest in round 2″.
While this reasoning can make good sense, we’d like to call your attention to an important nuance in looking at certain programs in R1 and others in R2. In order to explain this nuance, let’s compare the deadlines and decision dates for two schools: Wharton and Chicago.
Wharton R1 applicants apply on October 13th and then learn of the school’s final decision by December 22nd. Chicago R1 applicants apply on October 26th and get the final decision on January 11th. This information may seem somewhat meaningless on its own, but it is important to remember that most R2 deadlines for the top schools fall within the first few days of January. In other words, a Wharton applicant who is rejected in R1 will have learned of the bad news long before Chicago’s R2 deadline (Jan. 4th), whereas a Chicago applicant who hears their R1 decision on January 11th, will not have this information before Wharton’s R2 deadline (Jan. 5th).
We’ll delve more into the art of scheduling in a future posting, but the key points we wanted to cover today are as follows:
1) Plan to be busy in August and September so that you have time to apply in the first round. Don’t forget that your time may be split between resume drafting, essay writing, recommendation coaching, GMAT prep, school research, visits and more…
2) If you cannot apply to all of your schools in R1, think carefully about which schools should be in which rounds. Don’t forget about the advantages of knowing some R1 results before you apply in R2.
