Harvard Business School’s Admission Director Provides Guidance on New Post-Interview Exercise
Harvard Business School (HBS)’s plan to pose a follow-up question to its interviewees has created a flurry of its own questions from prospective applicants, questions HBS Admissions Director Dee Leopold sought to answer in a recent post to her Director’s Blog.
According to Leopold, all interviewees will be asked the following question: “You’ve just had your HBS interview. Tell us about it. How well did we get to know you?”
HBS has not set a word limit on applicants’ replies to this question, and Leopold stressed that the exercise is NOT another essay. “We want your response to be much more like an email,” she writes. The hope behind this new element of the HBS application process is to give applicants an opportunity to interact with the HBS admissions staff in more of a real-world scenario than traditional application elements have offered.
“In the Real World, it is unlikely that you will be given months and months to craft essays of any sort. It just doesn’t happen,” writes Leopold. “In the Real World, it is almost a sure thing that you will be asked to write emails summarizing meetings and giving your opinion in a short time frame,” she continues. Noting that HBS tries to be as “close to practice” as possible, Leopold calls this shift from essays to more real-time writing appropriate.
Leopold’s blog post comes in response to multiple inquiries from prospective applicants seemingly distraught over the 24-hour deadline on the new interview reflection email. “I know this is hard to hear but this should NOT be a cause for anxiety,” Leopold stresses. HBS is simply looking for applicants’ genuine reaction to the interview experience. In fact, Leopold says, her team will even be much more generous in its reaction to typos and grammatical errors in this element of the application than in others.
That said, her team will not be pleased if an applicant’s email seems like it was produced before the interview or was the result of significant coaching, editing or polishing. “We do not expect you to solicit or receive any outside assistance with this exercise,” she writes.
So there you have it.
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