As the weeks zip by and the holidays approach, the MBA blogging community is faced with numerous challenges. Applicants are attempting to juggle interviews, R2 essay-drafting and pending decisions (for those that applied to schools in R1). First-year MBA students are struggling to the finish line of the infamous “first semester” and second-year students are equally focused on finals and recruiting.
We’ll kick off this week’s edition of FFF with a look at the applicant-blogger community. For those of you who are considering applying to schools in January, we’d like to highlight a post by IWillMakeIt, who describes the frustration associated with missing Cornell’s latest deadline and the need to push things off until January. The reason that this is relevant has to do with the serious deadline compression we’re seeing on the horizon: in a span of 5 days in early January, there are 9 schools with R2 deadlines! We cannot stress enough how important it will be for R2 applicants to make use of the next two weeks in order to avoid a last-minute panic. On a lighter note, applicant-blogger Qzoink offers another fashion commentary – this one after checking out students on the UCLA campus.
While some applicant-bloggers are focused on the upcoming deadlines, others are awaiting R1 results with bated breath. In particular, many applicants are getting jumpy with each seemingly innocuous email that admissions offices send out. Brownoski describes how his heart skipped a beat when he got a recent note from the MIT/Sloan adcom (to alert him to the fact that his file was ‘ready for review’) and Ty Coon describes the feeling of getting an email from Yale only to find that it was in fact just a newsletter.
The beauty of blogs, forums and other tools is that they allow applicants to share information and support each other through the process. LaserLikeFocus used his blog to report that Kellogg will begin releasing some R1 decisions this week (which they have), Ty Coon checks in with the fact that Yale has started to deny some of their R1 applicants and John Galt reports that he has gained an admit from Tuck (congratulations!). On a less positive note, Resolute reports that he received a deny letter from Chicago – hopefully better news awaits on the Wharton front (after a positive interview). Given that so many of you have great information to share, we’d actually like to invite all members of the blogging community to have a look at the tool we discussed earlier in the week.
Beyond the decision jitters, many R1 applicants continue to navigate the MBA interview process. RedWolf checks in with a report from his Wharton alumni interview, ForrestGump describes his U.Michigan/Ross phone interview, BBirds describes the panel interview at the Indian School of Business and SgHama describes how he was invited to schedule a Tuck phone interview.
Turning to the MBA campus, the blogosphere was inundated with reports from final exams in the last week. MargaritaLuvr mentions that finals at CBS are “no joke”, LadyRattler reports on finals and GND at Stanford, FutureMBAGirl celebrates the end of the semester at Wharton (while Hella still has some work to do) and Wakechick wraps up the quarter at Chicago (see LeVoyageur‘s Chicago summary too). Keven also checked in with a finals update from Wisconsin, Jerry Blank seems to have created his own mid-term awards at Yale, Buckyhoo describes a marketing final at UNC, Ben reflects on changes at Ross/Michigan and Amit checks in after finishing exams at IIM. Closing out our exams/curriculum segment, we turn to KV, who is trying to finish up the semester at LBS, IESE-MBA-2007, who has learned a lot at IESE and DeathSpiral, who offers a list of things to do instead of studying at INSEAD!
Congratulations to everyone who’s finished up exams this week or received admits to b-school. Our fingers are crossed for LaserLikeFocus and PupStar78 who just submitted at Berkeley/Haas and GunnerMBA who finished his INSEAD application. That’s the news for this week. Have a great weekend everyone!
