It was very disappointing. This morning Chicago-Booth sent out an email, informing me that my status had changed. I knew that it meant I had been denied.
The many hours spent studying for the GMAT, writing essays, preparing materials for recommenders, putting together a presentation had yielded no result. Why didn’t they pick me, choose me, invite me to interview?
I’ve been asking myself this question all day. Here are some of my thoughts on it.
Application Essays
For most of us who apply to b-school, we know that writing good essays is important. But something is definitely to be said of the kind of essays schools ask you to write. Personally, I LOVED writing Kellogg and MIT-Sloan essays because they gave me an opportunity to paint a full picture of who I am. Yes, the approaches might differ, where Kellogg wanted to hear more about leadership and teamwork while MIT-Sloan was more behavioral, but I feel someone who reads my application at these schools will get a fairly deep understanding of who I am.
Chicago-Booth’s essays on the other hand purely focused on career goals and a mistake. The PowerPoint is one place where you can differentiate yourself by demonstrating other aspects of your personality, however I wonder if this is the optimal way of getting this information. Those four pages could be better used if Chicago asked specific essays about accomplishments, leadership, volunteer work and community involvement. Just my two cents.
The Numbers
Chicago-Booth has approximately 595 spots, about 40-50% of which will get filled up in R1. If you do the numbers, you realize that they probably sent out 475-600 invites. Given the small number of invites, not everyone can expect to receive an invite.
The Economy
The Midwest, especially states around IL have seen many layoffs due to the recession. Chicago-Booth apparently received 20% more applications than last R1 of 2008 and I’m betting this is one factor that explains this trend at Chicago-Booth when overall applications have remained flat or declined. A lack of geographic and cultural ties to Chicago-Booth and the Midwest may have worked to the disadvantage of those candidates who are applying to many schools and live on the coasts or abroad.
Chicago-Booth may have also been somewhat hesitant to take folks who work in finance or financial services (aka me) for fear of impacting their hiring numbers as finance jobs are few and far between.
Qualitative Factors
On some level, applying to b-school is a gamble. As Derrick Bolton, the Director of Admissions at Stanford’s GSB said, an application requires a candidate to establish that he/she is not only qualified but also unique.
The GPA, GMAT, recommendations can establish that you are indeed qualified, but demonstrating that you are unique is fuzzy science.
It depends on you and your ability to write good essays but it also depends a lot on who is reading your application, their bias and preferences, their mood that day, and the set of applications they get to read on a particular day. If they’ve read about someone who rescued chimps, built a windmill in an African country or acted in an Oscar winning movie at 19, the profile of an ordinary guy trying to do extraordinary things might be refreshing and could get two thumbs up. Switch things around a bit, and you begin to get the picture.
I believe that not having richer essay prompts in the Chicago-Booth application increase the randomness that qualitative factors can add to the entire process.
The Weakest Link
After all the applications are read, at some point a pool of qualified, impressive candidates is created. The problem that faces adcoms at that point is that they cant invite all these wonderful people for an interview and so they start playing “the weakest link.” (Quirky show that used to be on British TV, which I saw with my English homies.)
At this stage the adcom is probably looking for a reason, a good enough reason to send your application to the “Deny” pile. It could be anything really, but you can be pretty sure you get ranked or rated based on these reasons before being eliminated.
Final Thoughts
Why am I spending the time to share this? It is because I know there are many like me who are a little down today because they’ve not made the cut. Hopefully, after reading this post, they will be able to understand that it’s not worth beating yourself about it and constantly asking yourself whether you’re “good enough.”
We’ve all got to continue persevering and trying and hopefully we will all be admitted to a b-school where we will be happy and able to thrive. I truly believe that everyone’s worth it.
Good luck fellow b-schoolers!
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