This year’s January deadlines for the top schools are compressed into an incredibly short time-frame. Here’s the rundown:
Tuesday, January 3rd: Harvard Business School
Wednesday, January 4th: Chicago, Stanford, Cornell/Johnson
Thursday, January 5th: Wharton, UCLA/Anderson
Friday, January 6th: Kellogg, London Business School
Saturday, January 7th: Michigan/Ross
As you can see, the top 5 MBA programs all have deadlines within a 4-day window. To make matters worse, things don’t really let up the following week:
Tuesday, January 10th: Duke/Fuqua
Wednesday, January 11th: MIT/Sloan, Yale SOM
Thursday, January 12th: UVA/Darden, Dartmouth/Tuck
Sunday, January 15th: NYU/Stern
Throw Columbia’s “rolling” admissions process into the mix, along with Berkeley’s January 20th deadline, and it’s not hard to see that January should be a very busy month for MBA applicants.
This brings us to the point of today’s blog entry, which is that applicants who are aiming for the January deadlines should resist the temptation to put off their applications until after the holidays. This is particularly important for applicants targeting schools with deadlines during the first week of January. We expect a flood of candidates to login and complete their online applications as of January 1st. Given that increased server traffic often results in problems, it makes sense for applicants to target the next two weeks to wrap things up.
