To understand the admissions process, you have to look at it from an admissions officer's point of view. Each year the staff tries to assemble a well-rounded class consisting of people from a broad range of work backgrounds. It's important that they assemble a diverse group because many assignments in Business school are collaborative and interdisciplinary. Consequently, projects will be more successful and students will learn more if their teammates can contribute their own unique perspectives.
The admissions staff faces a tough challenge, though, in assembling a diverse class because the majority of applicants to top programs come from only two broad work categories: finance and consulting. Many of these people have worked at the most prestigious firms. They got good grades as undergraduates (or they wouldn't have been hired by top firms), and almost all of them take GMAT prep courses because that's part of the culture at their firms. In other words, they have a lot going for themselves.
If admissions officers were to select candidates strictly on the basis of GMAT scores and undergraduate GPAs, their student bodies would be comprised almost entirely of people from finance and consulting backgrounds, which would make for pretty bad class dynamics.
The admissions people know about this disparity, of course, and they compensate for it by starting with a general idea of the class profile they hope to end up with.
A Typical Class Profile
Approximately 60 to 65 percent of admitted students come from finance and consulting backgrounds. Below is a typical admit profile.
The chart seems to show that finance and consulting are the best backgrounds from which to apply (they offer the most spots), but as I've already mentioned, a disproportionate number of people apply from those backgrounds, making them very competitive categories.
What Categories are the Most Competitive?
Investment banking and management consulting are probably the most competitive categories. Virtually everyone who works in those fields needs to go to Business school in order to move up in the industry. (That's why GMAT classes are full of people from those two backgrounds.)
What are the Less Competitive Categories?
After, "What do you score on the GMAT?" it's the question I hear most frequently: "What's the easiest work background from which to apply?"
Think about it from the admissions officer's point of view. Say you have 300 seats to fill. About 100 will go to applicants from finance backgrounds, and about another 100 will go to people from consulting backgrounds. You will use the final 100 spots to broaden your class and add some depth of experience to the group.
You will need some marketing people and some people from technical backgrounds. And every class has a few disenchanted lawyers and doctors along with some real odd balls -- people with tremendously unique experience that will be valuable to their classmates. But none of these is the easiest category.
The easiest background from which to apply is nonprofit, in part because very few people from nonprofit firms apply to top business schools. Business school has the reputation of being a very competitive place, and competition isn't part of the culture of your average nonprofit corporation.
Your Essay Strategy
All of this plays into your strategy. In writing the application essays, your strategy should be to highlight the unique experiences you've had -- both on the job and in your personal life -- that you believe will be valuable to your classmates. If you were assigned to an economic development project in Vietnam, for instance, that's unique. So is working in a refugee camp in Afghanistan. Very few people can bring that kind of experience to the table, and schools are looking for applicants who can share that background in the classroom. They will gladly discount GPA and GMAT scores to get those people into their programs.
But you don't need experience in a Third World country to have something unique and valuable to offer. A lot of my GMAT students are consultants with big firms such as Andersen Consulting, BCG, and Deloitte. In large part, they all have the same generic work experience, and most of them make the mistake of discussing that experience in their essays.
Think about how that looks to an admissions officer. She's got a pile of applications on her desk from consultants in every Andersen, D&T, Bain, and McKinsey office around the world. And every applicant is talking about the same thing. How does she decide who to choose?
Be Unique
That's the key to getting into top business schools. Convince them in your essays that you have something unique to share with your potential classmates, and I'll ignore your not-so-hot GMAT score and undergraduate GPA. I see it all the time. People with modest GMAT scores but valuable experiences are regularly admitted to top programs.
The problem, of course, is writing about yourself. That's tremendously hard to do. You may think that a certain experience is pretty mundane, but others may find it interesting.
Essay Tutorial
Most people have experience that is good enough to get them into top programs, but they don't know what admissions people are looking for so they stumble through some mind-numbing babble in their essays and end up being rejected.
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