Harvard Business School has an average acceptance rate of around 10% whereas Stanford GSB has an average acceptance rate of around 6%. The situation is somewhat similar for other top US business schools. The application process is highly competitive and thinking about the outcome can overwhelm you especially when you’ve poured your heart into your application.
Once you’ve submitted your application, an obvious question will come to your mind. How will the MBA admissions committee decide my fate?
To pull the curtain on what goes on in an MBA admissions committee and how MBA admissions decisions are made we talked to Petia Whitmore. She is the founder of the MBA admissions consulting firm My MBA Path. Before embarking on the path of helping MBA candidates become success stories, she served as Dean of MBA Admissions at Babson College and Managing Director of The MBA Tour.
Petia Whitmore’s experience
Q – How was your experience working as the Dean of MBA admissions at Babson College?
Petia – MBA admissions committee days used to be my favorite days back when I was Dean of Graduate Admissions at Babson College’s F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business.
All the hard work my team had done – traveling the world to meet with prospective students, running hundreds of events each year, interviewing thousands of candidates, and spending months on end reading MBA applications (for years, not a single Superbowl weekend went by where I wasn’t reading Round 2 files late into the evening and mostly missing the game) – would come to fruition and we would be making the decisions that would shape the next MBA class.
Q – Who is on an admissions committee?
Petia – The composition of the MBA admissions committee will vary by school and even by program within the same school. All adcoms will include admissions recruiters and directors.
Some adcoms may also include an academic leader (for example an associate dean or faculty director) as well as a representative of career services.
Q – Who makes the final admissions decisions in the committee and who are the evaluators?
Petia – It’s important to note that while many schools engage current students and alumni in the interview process, they simply provide input and are almost never a formal part of the adcom. Their feedback and evaluation are very important in the admissions process but they are not rendering admissions decisions.
The same is true of any external admissions readers that schools employ so they can read the thousands of MBA applications they receive each year. These readers evaluate admissions files and make recommendations but they are not the actual decision-makers.
How are decisions made during each MBA application stage?
Q – That’s very interesting. Let’s talk about each stage of an MBA application. What happens when an applicant hits the ‘submit’ button?
Petia – The first look at your file is usually done by an operations team. They process the MBA applications and ensure all required parts have been received.
After the application has been processed, the candidates will be able to see a checklist with the status of their application – complete if all materials, including the letters of recommendation, have been submitted – and incomplete if anything is missing.
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Q – What happens in the first round of application review?
Petia – The first round of review will determine who gets invited to an interview or not. This is often done on a rolling basis. I always like to think of interview decisions more as evaluation – a bit different than the selection that happens after the interview stage, when the actual admissions decision is made.
At both stages of review, the MBA admissions committee will look for strong evidence of academic ability, outstanding work experience, and career trajectory, and examples of leadership, accomplishment, challenge, and growth.
The adcom is also looking at the risk side – are your career goals realistic, do you have the right reasons to pursue an MBA, and are you a good fit for the type of culture and community the program has.
Q – If an applicant reaches the interview round what does it signify? How does the adcom assess the applicant’s candidacy in this round?
Petia – Being invited to the interview is truly great news for any candidate. It means you are “admissible” and the school is interested in you. An admissions reviewer, after a preliminary evaluation of your candidacy, deemed you potentially worthy of being offered a seat in their MBA class.
All your hard work on the admissions test, the essays, the application forms has paid off. But the race is far from over. Harvard Business School describes an invitation to interview as “a positive indicator of interest but not a guarantee of admission”. At this point, the offer is yours to win.
At the interview stage at the top MBA programs, on average two or three candidates are vying for a seat in the next MBA class.
The interview is where the adcom will assess your interpersonal and communication skills and your overall personality. If you perform poorly in the interview, your application will be denied or waitlisted. If you do well, you will move to the next stage of evaluation.
Q – What happens after the interview round? Is there further assessment by the adcom?
Petia – Once your MBA interview is completed, your file is ready for a full review – the one where an admissions decision will be rendered.
Generally, the file, now complete with the interview notes, will be read by another reader, possibly two. Each of them will make an admit or deny recommendation. The readers might read the application “blind” – without looking to see what the previous reader recommended.
Most admissions directors will tell you they start with the resume. This is logical since the resume is a snapshot of your candidacy and provides a summary of who you are before the reader digs into the rest of the application. They might follow by reading the various short answer questions and then dive into the actual essays.
The letters of recommendation might be next. The interview is often left for the end. Remember that at this stage, your application is already assessed and you were deemed admissible. So throughout this read, the goal is to see how your overall candidacy has come together. Do the parts connect? Is your story compelling? Are you the type of person that the adcom gets excited about adding to the class?
Q – That’s very insightful. Does the adcom categorize the applicants after the interview stage?
Petia – While this process again will vary from school to school, in my work in MBA admissions, we used to dedicate several full days to deliberations and making decisions for each round of MBA applications. After all, that is the primary goal of having admissions rounds in the first place – to compare and contrast a broad pool of candidates and make selections.
In my experience, adcoms seek to reach consensus about a candidacy through active, often lengthy deliberation, especially of candidacies who are not clearly in the “admit” or “deny” category.
At the end of the adcom session, there will be three groups of candidates – admitted, denied, and waitlisted.
Q – There would be a few applicants who do not fit in the ‘admit’ or ‘deny’ category. So, does an adcom decide their fate?
Petia – Many admissions files end up not being squarely into the “admit” or “deny” category. That’s when a lot of deliberation happens on the merits of an MBA candidate.
If an admissions recruiter feels passionate about someone, they will advocate on their behalf and make a case why they should be admitted.
This is part of the reason why establishing a relationship with the school is important. Wouldn’t you want to have someone in your corner when such an important decision is being made? It is not unusual for the advocate to be able to persuade the committee, resulting in the coveted admit decision.
Q – Who decides the scholarships?
Petia – Some schools have a scholarship process that is separate from the admissions decision one. In my life as Dean of Graduate Admissions, the same adcom made merit scholarship decisions immediately after the conclusion of the selection process – each admitted candidate was considered for an award based on the strength of their application. The candidates found their admissions decision and scholarship award at the same time.
Q – How’s the day before releasing the admissions decisions for the adcoms?
Petia – In my life as a dean, the night before admissions decisions went live was always a sleepless one. A computer glitch or error messing up the admissions decisions is every admissions officer’s worst nightmare.
Fortunately, during my decade at Babson, our outstanding operations team and recruiters ensured that never happened.
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Q – Adcom heads are also referred to as gatekeepers. What do you think about this term?
Petia – The heads of MBA admissions are often called gatekeepers but that’s a major misnomer. Being a dean of admissions is first and foremost a tremendous responsibility. You are making decisions that have an impact on people’s careers and even lives – often for a lifetime.
The ultimate goal of your work is to find outstanding future leaders and innovators that will have a positive impact on society and open the doors for them.
Q – My last question. How does signing the final admissions letters make you feel?
Petia – I think it’s only fitting if I say a word about the signing of the admissions decision letters. I still remember how excited I was when I got my letter of acceptance back in my MBA application days!
When I got that big pile of admit letters to sign, I thought of all the candidates on the receiving end, of their story and journey.
I never used a signature stamp – each letter was personally signed by me. Signing the letters for large rounds across a number of programs (at Babson, my office was in charge of recruiting and admissions for four MBA programs and several specialized business masters) could sometimes take a couple of hours.
I used to play music so I can infuse great energy into the pile in front of me. I used to joke that’s part of my yield strategy.
For one of the last rounds I signed, I listened to the entire recording of Stromae’s Racine Carrée concert that had taken place at Montreal’s Bell Center a few months earlier. I danced in my seat a bit that day – we had put together a great class that year!
About Petia Whitmore
Petia Whitmore is the founder of the MBA admissions consulting firm My MBA Path. Before embarking on the path of helping MBA candidates become success stories, she served as Dean of MBA Admissions at Babson College and Managing Director of The MBA Tour. You can reach Petia at petia@mymbapath.com with questions about how to become a more competitive MBA candidate.
