Harvard Business School’s New MBA Application
Maria |
June 29, 2024

In the newest episode of Business Casual, the hosts unpack the significant updates to Harvard Business School’s MBA application. HBS has rolled out three specific short essays focusing on business impact, leadership, and growth, replacing the previous open-ended essay, under the guidance of new admissions director Rupal Gadhia. Maria praises the fresh, bold approach, while Caroline discusses the challenges applicants face with the strict word limits.

Tune in to discover how these changes could impact future MBA candidates.

 

 

 

 

 

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.370] – John

Big news, everybody. Harvard Business School has changed its application for its MBA program. The school has replaced its one essay, which was open-ended, with three short essays, and says that it refreshed its criteria for evaluating MBA candidates in the future. Here Here are the three questions, and we’re going to talk about them and how we think you should approach them and what they really mean. There’s a business-minded essay, or it’s so-called, and it says, Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the business organizations and communities you plan to serve. 300 words. That’s your answer. Leadership-focused essay. This one is in What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what leader you want to become? Then the third one is called the Growth-Oriented Essay. It’s also limited to 250 words, and it starts like this. Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. Up to 250 words. The new change Changes come with just 10 weeks before the first application deadline on September fourth, which some people may find to be a fairly short period of time to get ready and submit their best application.

[00:01:43.650] – John

But there was a delay of nearly two months. Typically, Harvard MBA candidates would know when and what the school expected of them two months earlier than this year. Maria, what’s your take?

[00:01:59.520] – Maria

I mean, well, first of all, kudos to Rupal for really making bold strokes here. This is not an incremental change in what the HBS essay has been for years and years and years. This is a pretty massive change in terms of the essay portion of the application. God bless her for really swinging for the fences in terms of driving change at an organization that can sometimes be resistant to change.

[00:02:25.150] – John

We should point out that Rupal Gadhia is the new managing director of admissions and Financial Aid. She arrived last October. She’s a 2004 Harvard MBA. She has no admissions experience. Previously, she was the global head of marketing for Shark Ninja Robots.

[00:02:44.460] – Maria

Go ahead. Yes, indeed. I think it’s really interesting that for years, not only did HBS have a completely open-ended essay, it was basically like, Well, what else do you want to tell us about yourself? Which could be interpreted in all kinds of delightful and sometimes irrelevant and terrifying ways. A full spectrum of answers could be given to that. But actually, even for years, they didn’t even have a word count limit on it. If you felt that you needed 2,000 words, and most students did not need 2,000 words, but every once in a while, you would encounter someone who really had had a fascinating life. And those 2,000 words, reading them sped by, it was such a delight to read. It wasn’t common, but it did happen. And so they’ve gone from having the most open-ended essay with zero word count limit to now having three very prescribed… Even underneath the umbrella topic. So for example, just to take one, the leadership-focused essay, It doesn’t talk about leadership in general, which could happen. We all know that leadership can manifest itself in many different ways. They specifically are looking at how do you invest in others, which to me is one important facet of leadership, but it’s not the only way in which to demonstrate leadership.

[00:04:01.340] – Maria

And similarly, the growth-oriented essay specifically focuses on curiosity. And yes, having a sense of curiosity can be an important catalyst for any growth that we undertake, but it doesn’t have to be the only catalyst. So not only have they suddenly introduced these three big buckets of topics, but within some of those buckets, it’s very constrained. It’s very, very limited. And I can understand why they did that, and we can talk about that. And I know Caroline has some insights from one of her colleagues about how she thinks that this helps the admissions readers’ jobs, and I agree. But we’re not talking an incremental change here. It’s pretty dramatic. It’s pretty prescribed. And I think the word count limits are bonkers. One of the first things I always do when I encounter new essay questions is I pretend that it’s 2002 and that the Maria of 2002 is applying. So what would I have in response to these essays. I think I don’t know that these essays would have let me show the best parts of my candidacy necessarily, or at least I would have to massage things a little. I’d have to say, Well, moving to Asia was because I was curious about new markets.

[00:05:16.640] – Maria

I’d have to force the best of me into the confines of their wording. I’d have to massage it and twist it like a little yoga pretzel to meet these constraints. I also think I would have a really hard time with some of these word limits.

[00:05:33.570] – John

So we’ll see. And to your point, I’ll go back to the leadership focus essay that you mentioned earlier. So you have 250 words, but really, there are three questions in this one essay. What experiences have shaped who you are? That’s one. How you invest in others? That’s two. And three, what leader you want to become? You’re going to do that in 250 words? Give me a break.

[00:05:58.770] – Maria

Experience says It’s plural. Yes.

[00:06:01.740] – Caroline

So that’s four things, right?

[00:06:04.700] – John

It’s really four things. There you go. Caroline, what’s your first impression?

[00:06:11.020] – Caroline

Yeah, well, so I had some discussions with my colleagues this morning, including Carla Cohen, who used to work in HBS admissions. She’s actually thrilled about this. She says that the problem was with the old essay that they would often get the kitchen sink, right? People didn’t know where to take the essay and so would ramble on and not necessarily say anything that was terribly useful for the file readers. So the file readers would get frustrated that the essay, in some cases, wasn’t terribly useful for them. And so they’ve introduced these signposts to make it much clearer to candidates what they’re looking for. And she also says there is no change to what the school is looking for. So fundamentally, how they’re going to be assessing candidates in the rubric that they’re using behind the scenes to score people will be unchanged. Those key qualities that they’re looking for are embedded in here. So they’re looking at leadership is very important, and that can easily come into two of those essays, right? There’s one essay on leadership, specifically, and then leadership should no doubt also be part of your business essay. They’re looking for impact on community and how you get engaged with the community.

[00:07:25.620] – Caroline

That is part of the business essay and can be brought into the other essays as well. And then also what she talks about appetite and aptitude, and I think that links to the curiosity essay, right? Curiosity is very important to institutions like Harvard and Stanford and top business schools because it’s such an important quality to have to be a good student, right? You want people who are excited to learn new things because they will be more engaged in the classroom. And so And they’ll have more to share. So I think that that is why they have brought that up. But as Maria said, it is quite specific. And so, it may have to do, as she said, a little reverse engineering. But with that essay, something else Carla commented on is that that’s a good opportunity to be vulnerable. And it struck me that with that essay, you can talk about how you’ve taken risks. And as Maria said, maybe she could have talked about how she took the leap to move to Asia. And that was a risk, right? Moving to a completely different country, complete different culture, the other side of the world.

[00:08:34.550] – Caroline

So I think that’s an opportunity to show how you’ve got out of your comfort zone and also be honest about how that has gone. And and show some authenticity there. So I think there’s a lot to dig into in these questions. I agree that the word count is going to be a challenge, and that is probably going to be one of the biggest difficulties for candidates. So I think people will appreciate having the signposts. And on the surface, it can be easier to… It looks like it’s easier to write 250 words, half a page, not a big deal. But as Mark Twain said, I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. So writing something in 200… Telling a story in 250 words is much harder than telling a story in 750 or a thousand words. So being concise is going to be very challenging, and I think it requires a lot of reflection upfront. You need to think very carefully about which examples you’re giving, because honestly, you probably can only give one example for each of these essays. And if you try to give too much, you’re just going to be skating across the surface.

[00:09:47.980] – Caroline

So I would say, even if it does have it in the plural, I would rather that candidates focus on one specific example, but identifying which is their best example will be critical before they get into drafting any material here.

[00:10:05.040] – John

Before we get into your specific advice on each of these essays for applicants, I want to just step back from the whole exercise and ask you, is this an inspired change? Is it a clever, smart change? It seems to me that the first two essays are very traditional and regressive in some way, commonplace and can be seen in slightly different words than most other applications. The newest or the freshest one is the one that focuses on curiosity. Am I wrong or right, Maria?

[00:10:42.020] – Maria

Yeah, that’s right. Because even when I was applying over 20 years ago, they had a separate essay on basically why do you want an MBA? Talk about your career path to date. I don’t remember the wording, but it was essentially very similar to essay one. But so, yeah, the The growth-oriented essay is definitely a new one. I think what does make it unique is this very explicit focus on curiosity as the primary facet or angle of growth that they’re looking for, as opposed to the other ways in which a person can grow. Emotionally, a person can grow with wisdom, a person can grow. There’s so many other ways that we can grow. But so having to either be something that was genuinely spurred by curiosity or taking your best growth story and then reverse engineering like, Oh, yeah, I curious about how to do this. Then you use that as the excuse to go into your actual story. That one is definitely one that jumps out as me as being fairly unique within the pantheon.

[00:11:42.100] – John

I like that question, frankly. I think intellectual curiosity is key to a fulfilled and meaningful life, and I’m glad that it is in here, much more so than the other two, probably. Caroline, let’s take the first one, the business-minded essay. I’m going to repeat it, and then you tell me what advice you have for applicants in this season to answer this 300-word limit question. Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. How would you approach that?

[00:12:25.230] – Caroline

I think they’re looking here for the logical thread from what you’ve done in the past and how that links to what you want to do in the future. So they’re looking to understand what has inspired you, what has triggered your passions, what is it that has put you on the path that you’re on and drawn you to apply to business school that inspired your career goals. So they will need to, as we’ve said, I think you need to hone in on one or two experiences, max, and really be thoughtful about how you to pick those examples. And I think the impact is an important word in that question. And so they’re looking to understand what person you are in the context of what impact have you had and what impact are you going to have in the future? And I would counsel applicants to not get too bogged down. Keep it brief when you talk about the future, because the school It makes the view that past performance is the best predictor of future success, right? So anyone could cook up a grand vision of what they’re going to do in the future, but it’s much more credible if you can show that you’ve built a strong foundation for that and you’ve achieved great things in the past and you’re on a path of growth, and therefore, you are likely to be able to achieve significant things in the future.

[00:13:52.800] – Caroline

So showing that really strong foundation of impact that you’ve had so far and then linking that to the future. I think it’s about that logical thread and about impact.

[00:14:05.410] – John

Maria, do you have something to add on the business-minded essay?

[00:14:10.340] – Maria

I agree completely with what Caroline said. This is not an essay where you take the total word count and divide it a third, a third, a third between the three sub questions. The future-focused stuff, as she said, it’s purely speculative. I almost wish schools wouldn’t ask it because What leader do you aspire to be? Or those sorts of questions. It’s just so speculative. If you don’t bring the goods, then you could say anything. But if you don’t actually have the receipt, as the kids today call it, if you don’t have the evidence that this is the leader you have been to date, then there’s no real value in speculating about what’s the leader I’m going to be in the future. The leader I’m going to be in the future is hopefully a better, stronger, more impactful version of the leader I am today. So that is where I would focus the essay instead of on the the more speculative future facing.

[00:15:04.180] – John

How do you say anything other than I want to be a collaborative leader who gets results? I mean, seriously?

[00:15:11.720] – Maria

Well, yeah, you’re certainly not going to say, I want to take over the world and become a dictator that starts nuclear war. I would not advise that. And that advice is free, ladies and gentlemen. No, but seriously, of course, you’re going to pick a great… You’re going to pick good examples that show you in a positive light, and then you’re just going to say something along the lines of, I want to continue to be this type of person. Or perhaps if you’re applying with a career pivot story, then you could say, Well, and this is why I now want to shift my energies and bring what I’ve already learned to now the sustainability sphere or something along those lines. But to Caroline, I completely agree with Caroline. I would not make this about your grand vision for the future and the CBS wording, which is like, within What’s your wildest imagination dream job? It’s something like that. They have an essay where, at least in the past, they had a phrasing that was like, go out there and just really tell us what your biggest dream is. I would not focus on that stuff at all.

[00:16:14.250] – John

Okay, Maria, The second essay, Leadership-Focused Essay, What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what leader you want to become? 250 words, say it all. What do you say?

[00:16:29.820] – Maria

Okay, so similar to the previous question, what leader you want to become, presumably you’re telling a good story about a time you have invested in someone else, and therefore the leader you want to become is someone who continues to be good or better. I do think that the emphasis should be on the second piece of that question, how you have invested in others, because the experiences that have shaped who you are can certainly be interesting. But first of all, these are things that happened to you as opposed to things that you actively did.

[00:16:58.880] – John

It’s also covered It’s better than the first question.

[00:17:01.640] – Maria

Yeah, there’s some overlap.

[00:17:02.970] – John

Reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choice.

[00:17:05.690] – Maria

I know. There’s some over… I know. So yeah, there’s some thematic overlap. But this is more of a… It How you invest in others is something that is not necessarily career-related. It might have happened in a career setting. You might have invested in someone else who was a coworker who was struggling. You might have invested in someone else at work by starting a support group for other people who are also first-generation college students. There are different ways within a work environment or a work setting in which you can invest in others. But normally investing in others is something that I feel that specific wording is one that is a little bit more personal or touchy-feely. To that extent, I think the experiences that shape you, this would be something maybe shaping off the top of my head, how you mentor others or how do you support others or how do you show up for others when they need you. As opposed to more, the first one is more Well, I started a career in health care because my sister has diabetes. It is a little bit different, but there still is this idea of what shaped who you are.

[00:18:10.560] – Maria

The shaping part, though, again, to the extent that it was something that happened to you, As opposed to something that you actively did, I would focus most of the essay on that second part, or time or times that you have invested in others, because that’s where you’re the person driving the action. That’s far more interesting for me to read. The other thing I would caution people to keep in mind is that so many applicants… If you’re thinking about your essays in a vacuum, that’s great. But maybe also think about the fact that there are going to be 9,000 other people who maybe also had that high school football coach that inspired you. A lot of other people have had the grandmother that walked to the field. So just keep in mind that a lot of people are going to have similar major parts their lives that have been shaped in similar ways. But how you then choose to take action, given what you’ve learned and how it shaped you, what do you do with that? How do you then go out to others and support them? That’s going to be very different. We might have all had a family member who inspired us in a certain way.

[00:19:19.990] – Maria

That part might be similar, but maybe one person, it manifestsests itself in that they start a nonprofit, or someone else, it manifestsates itself in that they help one person one-on-one individually. I would focus on that middle part because that’s where you get to show that you are a leader who drives, hopefully, positive change in others.

[00:19:42.630] – John

Right. Caroline, your take on this question?

[00:19:46.080] – Caroline

Yeah, I agree. It’s best to focus on that middle part. So Carla shared some interesting context on this question. So she was talking about a book by Professor Frances Frey. I’m not sure if it’s Frey or Frey as German speaker, I would say Frey, but I apologize if I’ve got that wrong. So she’s written about leadership and talks about how it’s not about you as a leader, but it’s about how you’ve inspired others. And she says, We used to think of leaders and have them study themselves in the mirror, but actually it’s not about them. It’s about how you’re a wind of inspiration for others. And so she sees this this new question in that context. So it’s about how you inspire other people, how you’ve mobilized change, as Maria said, and inspired others around you. And so I think they’re looking to understand how you’ve done that, how you have influenced and and engaged with people around you. And I totally agree with Maria that you’ve got very little space here. So you need to pick a good example of how you’ve done that, link that to an experience that you’ve had and how that helped you to become that type of leader, and then show that logical thread again to the future.

[00:21:15.900] – Caroline

But again, don’t dwell too much on your vision of the future. You need to show that you’re ambitious, but also that there’s that logical thread of who you are, what you’ve become, what impact you’ve had, and then how that is going to lead you to have a greater impact in the future.

[00:21:34.790] – John

Okay, and then we have the third question. So, Caroline, this is the growth-oriented essay, Furiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. Again, 250 words is all you get to do that. What’s your advice here?

[00:21:56.780] – Caroline

Yeah, so I think the school is looking to see if you are someone who does have a lot of curiosity because as you said, that is a great quality for a student. It’s a very important part of a good learning orientation. If you’re not curious, then you’re going to sit in the classroom and not be to be engaged and not contribute to the experience. So that relates also to how an MBA program, so much of it is about the peer-to-peer learning, right? And so are you going to be someone who is able to draw out other people’s experiences and be curious about them and be open and vulnerable and able to share your own experiences. So that ability to engage in a learning community, I think, is really critical to top business schools and something that also Stanford talks a lot about. And so that’s clearly fundamental to this question. I think it’s an opportunity. I think you You can take it in different ways. And as Maria said, they might require a little bit of reverse engineering, but I think that you can show that you’re someone who has been led by your curiosity to be bold, to be courageous, to take risks, to go beyond your comfort zone and step out and do something different.

[00:23:23.190] – Caroline

And that may have gone well or it may have gone badly. I think you can be open and honest here and show what you’ve learned. So again, it’s a short word count. You’ve got to be very specific, get down to the nitty-gritty of the example pretty quickly. No long preambles and no long conclusions. But I think they’re looking to understand what growth journey you’re on because that’s going to be so important for your evolution and your development and your transformation at HBS.

[00:23:57.860] – John

Yes. Maria, what’s your take on this one?

[00:23:59.860] – Maria

Yeah, I completely agree. I do think that curiosity is an important characteristic for any MBA to have at any program. But I think specifically, considering the case method pedagogy, if you’re not someone who’s curious, you’re going to read what, 400, 500 cases in your time at HBS, and the chances are that one directly applies to your field of interest is like, what, two out of 400? I think I read two entertainment cases. I didn’t take any electives focused on the entertainment, but that was my at the time for my career. But we were also reading cases on people, I don’t know, like what was cranberry factories and industrial manufacturing companies and all kinds of… If you’re not someone who’s curious, you’re not going to get anything out of the program. Not only are you not going to engage with others, as Caroline said, and be that great classmate who’s helping others learn how to think in different ways and providing that different perspective, but you’re not going to get as much out of it because you’re going to say, Well, I don’t see how cranberries are applicable to me. You’re just going to dismiss it instead of saying, Well, how could I use this?

[00:25:06.000] – Maria

Is this useful for me? Maybe I could think about this in a certain way. I do think that because so much of the teaching there is through cases, and the chances are that the case will probably on its surface not actually be interesting to you. It’s not until you have to force yourself and be like, Well, what can I take from this? What can I learn from this that is useful for me? I think that’s really important. I do also think that out of the three essays, this is the one that is the one that’s going to be the biggest pitfall essay. I think that some people are going to use this as an opportunity to try to brag about their academic prowess. I think some people are going to say, Well, curiosity. I’m super curious. I’m an aerospace engineer. Let me tell you about this amazing algorithm that I developed where I built a wind tunnel. They might use this, I think, as an opportunity to brag about an academic… They may take it to brag about maybe an academic thing that they have taught themselves or learned about or something at work. I’m super curious.

[00:26:01.260] – Maria

I taught myself interest rate policy at my bank, and I’m so smart. I think the pitfall here for some candidates is this is about curiosity, but not I’m so smart. I’m smarter than everyone else. I’m the smartest person in the applicant pool, and you should take me because of that. So just be aware of that as a potential way to look at it.

[00:26:21.100] – John

Now, here’s something interesting. In the blog post, Announcing the Changes, there is a link under the word criteria criteria because Gadeya says, We have refreshed the criteria on which we will evaluate candidates. If you look at the criteria, it goes through these three questions, and then for this one on curiosity, here’s what it says, We will look for the ways in which you have grown, developed, and how you engage with the world around you. Nothing about curiosity. If you look for the second one on leadership-focused, it says, Your leadership impact may be most evident in community initiatives, or your professional work. So this is a clue that you could use any one of these to answer that question. And then on the first one about business-mindedness, Harvard is saying, We will look for evidence of your interpersonal skills, quantitative abilities, and the ways in which you plan to create impact through business in the future. I don’t know how helpful all that is. What do you think?

[00:27:26.900] – Maria

I mean, to the extent that those words, as you point out, don’t direct correctly tie to… I mean, they do, again, if we yoga, pretzel our way backwards, we can say, Oh, I guess it ties to the essay question in a way. But you’re right, they don’t necessarily… The growth-oriented thing. Yeah, I don’t even see anything about… Oh, it does have the word curious students for growth oriented in the paragraph above, but it certainly is not the only thing that they’re talking about. I also, just as a slightly unrelated note, the term business-minded, I really, really wish they would have chosen a different word, organization-minded, team-minded, something because… They do say in the direct from the director blog post immediately… Or where was it? Sorry, maybe it wasn’t on the director. On one of the blog post, it talks about how just because we say business-minded doesn’t mean you have to be from business. You can also be from other things. But then why did you choose that word?

[00:28:23.880] – John

Is it off-putting to nontraditional MBA students or would-be students?

[00:28:30.120] – Maria

Right. The ways in which you plan to create impact through business in the future. Yeah, but I’ve had candidates who want to create impact through the Department of Defense. They want to lead innovative defense initiatives, and they’re in the military and they want to go back to the military. They’re people who want to do nonprofit. Yeah, you could say, Well, okay, fine. We said business, but what we really mean is just organizations. Well, then why didn’t you just choose that? It’s very subtle. I don’t think anyone is going to say, Well, I was going to apply to Harvard Business School, but now I’m not going to because now they’re business-minded. But it does send a subtle signal that I think may be a little off-putting. You can see they’re trying to backpedal. Well, business-minded could be organizations. It says in paragraph above, business-minded is about the interest to help organizations succeed, whether in the private, public, or nonprofit sector. Then why don’t you just say organization minded? Because that’s broader and that does cover things like the military or your country’s central bank or things like that. Or results That’s such a nit to pick.

[00:29:31.140] – Maria

It’s such a nit to pick, I admit. But if there’s any school, all of these top schools, candidates read every word. This blog post is going to get reread and reread, and people are going to delve into every comma and semicolon trying to read the tea leaves. And so I just wish that there would have been a little… I just wish a different word would have been chosen. That’s all.

[00:29:54.870] – Caroline

Just in a defense there, it’s Harvard business school, right? So business is fundamental to the DNA of the school. And I think they have tried to explain in that paragraph that they don’t mean that you have to work in a for-profit business in order for that to be relevant. It’s more about what you’re looking to get out of the experience, what you’re looking to learn, and how you’re going to operate in the future. And you can apply those business principles in a lot of different contexts. So I agree that people could look at that and perhaps superficially think, well, then it’s not for me because I am not a business person and I’m not from that background. But if you are applying to business school, then that should say something about what you’re looking to learn and what you’re looking to get out of the experience.

[00:30:46.930] – Maria

Right. But for years, HBS went out of its way to say, we’re not just for business. The entire two plus two pitch to college undergraduates was, we’re not just for business people. If you want to run that a school system, if you want to be in the government, if you want to be a nonprofit, we’re also for you. You don’t have to go to a master’s in education. You don’t have to get a master’s in social work. The tools that we teach you can drive change in a variety of contexts. Like I said, I don’t think anyone is going to say, Oh, now I’m not going to apply, to be clear. I don’t think it’s going to impact anyone in that way. But to the extent that there are so many synonyms that are a little bit broader that could have been used instead. Like the first one that jumps to my mind is organizations. But I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, but something like that, I think, could have been… It could have been chosen a little bit more carefully. That’s all.

[00:31:38.880] – John

All right. There you have it. That’s the bottom line on the new Harvard MBA application. Three short essays, two limited to 250 words, one limited to 300, and a slightly refreshed criteria in which to evaluate the answers that you give. I think there’s going to be a scramble in round one to fulfill these. We know that applicants typically do many draughts before they settle on something that they think is their best effort. And applicants to Harvard who are successful already have demanding jobs, and they’re typically working 60 plus hours a week to begin with. So it’s going to be a challenge, I think, for many round one applicants to feel good about the answers that they provide to these three questions. My final question to our two co-hosts is this. Is this helpful for MBA admissions consulting because of that round one deadline, which is right around the corner, or is it neutral? Would it not really make a difference? Caroline?

[00:32:49.170] – Caroline

Well, I would say that the timeline is a bit tight. I know it’s going to be a challenge for some candidates who have been thinking about their HBS this application for months already, and so have given a great deal of thought to how they would tackle the previous essay and now have to start from a blank sheet of paper. So I think that it is challenging for this particular batch of candidates and that’s just unfortunate. But at least I think they’re giving, as we’ve said, clear signposts about what they’re looking for, and hopefully the reflection that they’ve done already for the The previous essay and how they would present themselves, some of that reflection should be useful here. So it’s going to be important to take a step back and think about what are the best examples that they have, what do they want to come across? What strengths and results and examples can they give that are going to really come across strongly in these three essays? So it’s definitely going to require a step back. And then a lot of wordsmithing, I think, to get down to those particular word counts.

[00:34:05.240] – John

Maria, good or bad for your business. You already put up a triage video on your site, applicant lab, just before coming on the podcast.

[00:34:15.550] – Maria

Is it good or bad for a consultant? I mean, to the extent that the human response to change is normally not a good one. I do think that the fact that there has been such a drastic change will cause some people to maybe not panic. Panic might be too strong of a word, but certainly, if you have been working on your essay up until now, yes, will you be able to take some aspects of it and smush them into the new three prompts? Sure. But it’s certainly not that. They went from having a wide open field to having a fairly three little constrained corrals. I do think that that’s going to require quite a bit of work. I think to the extent that people will be looking for guidance on, Okay, now Now what? I do think that there will be more reliance on admissions consultants. I also wonder if some folks might delay their round one application to round two because they’re going to want a little bit of extra time, perhaps, to digest some of these questions. I hope not, but I can’t help but wonder if there are some people out there who are going to say, Whoa, I thought it was going to be this, and I was ready to go, and I was ready to hit submit today, because we all know there are people out there who are literally waiting for the day the application opens.

[00:35:29.640] – Maria

I do think that some folks might say, Whoa, I’m going to need a little bit of extra time on this, but hopefully not. Hopefully, if you’re listening to this, you will be able to take the existing reflection, as Caroline said, that you’ve already, hopefully, been doing. If you have written some draughts already, you can hopefully pick and choose and reverse engineer your stories to fit these three prompts.

[00:35:53.730] – John

All right. There you have it. I should also add that what has not changed is the post-interview reflection That is the email that is sent to HBS admissions. If you are invited to an interview, you have to send that within 24 hours of having that interview with an admission staffer, and that has remained the same. So check it out. There’s a fairly brief blog post on the Harvard Business School Directors blog, and then a little more detail buried in the website. You can read all about it, of course, on Poets and Quants. And to all of you out there who actually want to apply to Harvard Business School and do it in the first round, good luck. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Harvard Business School’s New MBA Application
Maria |
June 29, 2024

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Well hello everyone, this is John Byrne with Poets and Quants, welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Today we have a special guest, Heidi Hillis from Fortuna Admissions. She is based in Australia, is a senior expert coach for Fortuna, and has three degrees, all from Stanford, a BA in English literature, that’s my degree, an MA in Russian studies, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business. And we have Heidi here to discuss some really fascinating research. Here’s what Fortuna did. They dug into the last Two class profiles of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

That’s the class of ‘23 and the class of ‘24. They looked up all these folks on LinkedIn to identify a little bit more about their backgrounds, including their former employers and their places of undergraduate education to come up with an incredible analysis. Heidi, welcome.

[00:00:46] Heidi Hillis: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:48] John Byrne: Heidi, what is, what are the big takeaways from your deep dive discovery?

[00:00:54] Heidi Hillis: It’s hard to know even where to start. I think there’s a quite a few interesting kind of trends that we’ve seen that have taken place over the years. We were mentioning before the call that traditionally there hadn’t been, 10 years ago, if you’d looked, you wouldn’t have seen so many tech companies represented, but now there’s a big presence of tech companies who are feeding a lot of these MBA programs in Stanford in particular.

I think that the thing that was really interesting was, looking, not just at where the companies that were feeding the students, the applicants to Stanford. When they were working there, when they were applying, but actually the paths that they took prior to their current job.

So how many people were working, if you look at McKinsey, for example, or Bain and BCG, those are obviously companies that feed a lot of applicants to the program, but we found 20%, which seemed to be normal of, the class came from consulting, but if you actually look into the numbers in their background, You would see that actually 37 percent of these two classes had worked at McKinsey sometime prior, or actually in consulting, so it was, it’s The kind of the patterns that are behind, what you would normally see in terms of what Stanford tells us.

So you get a sense of the paths that people have taken. And so that’s something that was really interesting to see.

[00:02:16] John Byrne: Absolutely. And of course, this is this analysis goes so far beyond what any applicant would learn by simply looking at the class profile that the school up because, this level of detail is never available to people.

[00:02:33] Heidi Hillis: No, and yeah, for example, you could see that, Stanford will say that they have around, each year around 50 percent of applicants are international, which is a great statistic and gives you lots of hope if you are an international student. But when you dig into the numbers, you actually understand that.

75 percent of the people who get into Stanford actually went to a U. S. University. So even if you’re international, it does have does seem to have kind of an advantage of having been educated in the U. S. That seems to be something that they look for. However, I think. The concentration of universities in the U.

S. that are feeding to Stanford is something also that, if you’re looking at it, you might find a little bit dis, disconcerting. There’s a few programs that are really, obviously the top. Programs as you would expect places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the Ivies but if you look at the international universities very diverse from all over the world, really lots of people from different places, which is also really interesting.

[00:03:38] John Byrne: Yeah I tell you, one of the things that struck me in the data is how consistent it is. 10 years ago, we did the same exercise at Stanford and a bunch of other. Schools from Harvard and Dartmouth and Columbia and talk and a few others and back 10 years ago, we found that 25. 2 percent of the class of 2013 were from Ivy League colleges.

And the Ivy League 8 schools, not including Stanford. And if you included Stanford, it would have been 32. 6%. So now, let’s move forward to your data. And in 23, 30. 7 percent went to Ivy League schools, even above the 25. 2. And in 24, 27. 9 percent went to Ivy League schools. So it looks like Stanford has gotten even a little bit more elitist than it was.

Yeah,

[00:04:41] Heidi Hillis: It’s, it is it’s what the data says, right? Obviously, this is a sample. We have 80 percent of the two classes. So we don’t know where those other people went. And that might skew the data a little bit in another direction. But it is, if you look at there’s 15 schools, that include the Ivy’s and then you have UC Berkeley and obviously Stanford that really are contributing, 49 percent of the class of 23, 47. 3 percent of the class of 24. So that is a pretty heavy concentration and But, if you actually look into the data, you see a lot of people also, each of these is actually an individual story.

You see a lot of people who come from other schools as well. So it’s not like you have to give up hope if you come from a different school. I see a lot of individual stories that, from the whole range of U. S. schools that really are feeding into Stanford. So I think what the data doesn’t also tell you, unfortunately, is how many of these Of people from these backgrounds are actually applying.

So

[00:05:39] John Byrne: good point.

[00:05:40] Heidi Hillis: It’s it’s hard to know. And sometimes I think people this is. A path that a lot of people who go to these schools plan to take from the very beginning. So I would see, it would be interesting to know that I don’t know that we will ever find that out. But, um, that’s something to keep in mind as well.

[00:05:56] John Byrne: Yeah. And that’s a fair point. Because how reflective are these results of the applicant pool reflective of an elitist attitude probably a combination of if I had to guess, but, it is what it is, and these institutions obviously are great filters, so you come from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and you go to Harvard or Stanford or Penn, and you pass through a fine filter, and it makes you less of a admissions risk than if you went to, frankly, the University of Kentucky and worked for a company that no one knows of.

That’s just the reality of elite MBA admissions, right?

[00:06:40] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. And so you will see that the people who are not going, you’ll see a lot of the people who you would, the profiles that you would expect, the Harvard undergrad that then goes to Goldman that then was working at a PE firm.

That’s a really typical profile that you’ll see. But you’ll also see some really, unique and interesting ones, which I think, Okay. Helps you understand that if you don’t have that path, you also have a real chance at these schools, and maybe even more of a chance, again, not knowing, how many of those Goldman P.

E. Harvard grads are applying. So I’m thinking of the guy that I saw who he went to UPenn undergrad, studied engineering, started out a kind of pretty typical path working in private equity, but then made a big pivot to work for go to Poland where he was working in a real estate investment firm and the head coach of the Polish lacrosse team.

So you have really interesting profiles like that, that you can see that. aren’t necessarily taking that typical path. And sometimes that really does help you stand out.

[00:07:42] John Byrne: True. Maria, what surprised you most about the data?

[00:07:48] Maria Wich-Vila: Wow. I think we already covered, the, one of the biggest ones was the number, the percentage of people who would had some sort of either their undergraduate or graduate education within the United States.

Intuitively, I had felt that was true. And sometimes when I try to, give some honest, tough love to applicants from certain countries, and they’ll say, oh, but Maria, I think you’re being a little too pessimistic. After all, X percent of the applicants at these schools are international, and Y percent are from a certain geography internationally.

I’ll say yes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all Solely from that area. A lot of them are, do have significant international educational experiences. I think another, speaking of the international piece the percentage of people who had significant international work experience as well was something else that really jumped out at me.

Because it would signal to me that Stanford really does value this global perspective both within probably its domestic applicants and also its international applicants. So I thought that was also a really interesting piece of data that jumped out at me.

[00:08:52] John Byrne: Now remind me what percentage was that?

[00:08:56] Heidi Hillis: People who are international

[00:08:58] John Byrne: who have had international work experience.

[00:09:01] Heidi Hillis: I think it was 30%.

[00:09:02] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty

[00:09:04] John Byrne: impressive.

[00:09:04] Caroline Diarte Edwards: 30%, which I was thrilled to see. As well as coming from in Seattle and Europe. Obviously the international schools put a heavy emphasis on international experience and I hadn’t fully appreciated that. A school like Stanford would also.

really value that to the same extent. And it’s great to see that candidates are making the effort to get outside of the U. S. and get international experience because I think you gain so much from that exposure. And you bring more to the classroom if you’ve got that experience. I know that both Maria and Heidi.

I’ve worked outside of the home countries as well. Pre MBA and I think that you just have so much more to contribute to the whole experience. And it was great to see that 30%.

[00:09:50] John Byrne: What else struck you, Caroline?

[00:09:53] Caroline Diarte Edwards: We talked about the concentration of academic institutions, and I was also surprised about the concentration in employers.

So while there is a very long list of employers where the students have worked pre MBA when you dig into the career paths that they’ve taken there is some interesting concentration. Heidi had noted that the reports that There are 26 companies that account for nearly one third of the class in terms of where they were working right before Stanford.

But when you look at their whole career history, those same 26 companies represent over 60 percent of the class. So that is, yeah, that’s quite extraordinary that so many of the class have experience of working at quite a short list of companies.

[00:10:46] Heidi Hillis: I think that’s reflective of, if you really think about it, you have a lot of these companies.

You’re talking about the Goldmans and the Morgan Stanley and McKinsey that have really large programs that recruit out of undergrad that are really training grounds for. A lot of people that then on to do, work in industry or go on to work for in finance in particular, a lot of people starting out at some of these bulge bracket banks and then going into.

Private equity or smaller firms. So the diversity within finance in terms of where they were working prior to MBA is quite large compared to consulting because there just aren’t as many consulting firms, but a lot of people in financing, a lot of different firms, but they, a lot of them really do start out in these training programs, these analyst programs that are so big and popular.

[00:11:34] John Byrne: Yeah, true. And looking back, I did this exercise as well. The feeder companies to Stanford 10 years ago in the class of 2023, 22. 8 percent from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and your data, 22. 5 percent work there. Incredible consistency over a 10 year period. When you look at the top six employers 10 years ago, they were McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JP.

Morgan Chase. They accounted alone for 34 percent of all the students in the class of 20, 2013 at Stanford. In your data for 23 and 24 they account for 29. 8%, just a few percentage points less. So remarkable consistency. And I think you’re right, Heidi, this is a function of the fact that these firms bring in a lot of people who are analysts and actually expect them after 3 to 5 years to go to a top MBA school.

So there’s a good number of them in the applicant pool to choose from and let’s face it, they’re terrific candidates.

[00:12:46] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. I think another pool of really terrific candidates that you see, and I don’t know what the 2013 data was saying, but is the US military, which is really, I think, again, something that I felt having worked with lots of military candidates myself, understand that, Yeah, intuitively, I would have expected, but to see it in the data is actually really interesting.

You just see Stanford in particular, I think, is really looking for leadership potential, and it’s so hard to show that as an analyst, as a consultant, but as in the military, these people have such incredible leadership experience that it really helps them to stand out.

[00:13:23] John Byrne: Yeah. And let’s tell people what the data shows.

How many out of us military academies,

[00:13:28] Heidi Hillis: In all in total, we had, 20 over the two years. So that’s in the two classes that we found. So that’s, a pretty large number. And they come from all the different academies, right? So you’ll find them from different, not academies, in the army, navy and the marines.

So you’ll see that. And you also see quite a few, in the data we’ll, we see a lot from the Israeli military as well, but that’s actually a little bit difficult to because every Israeli does go into the military. So it’s they have that in their background. Any Israeli candidate would have Israeli military background as well, but again, that’s.

Place that people can really highlight their leadership. So you had eight people from who had been, who were Israeli and obviously had military experience where they were able to demonstrate significant impact and leadership prior to MBA.

[00:14:18] John Byrne: Yeah. In fact, 10 years ago, roughly 2%. of the class went to either West Point or the U.

S. Naval Academy. Good number of people actually from the military. Maria, any other observations?

[00:14:34] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, I was also surprised at the fact that within those top employers And when we look at the tech companies, it was Google and Facebook and Meta with a pretty large showing. Google was actually the fourth largest employer after the MBBs and, but then, I was expecting there to be an equal distribution amongst those famous large cap technology companies.

So I, I would have expected even representation amongst Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, et cetera. And yet. Apple and Amazon only had one or two people each versus Google at 25. So I thought that was really fascinating and it makes me wonder if perhaps it’s a function of maybe Google and Meta might give their younger talent more opportunities to lead impactful projects, perhaps.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe Apple and Amazon perhaps are more hierarchical. And maybe don’t give their younger talent so many opportunities, but I was really surprised by that. I would have expected a much more even distribution amongst the those famous those famous tech companies.

[00:15:40] John Byrne: Yeah. You’re right. And I crunched the numbers on the percentages and Google took three and a half percent of the two classes and that’s better than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase. Facebook had 2. 7 percent and Microsoft at 1. 5, and I was shocked at Amazon because, Amazon is widely known as the largest single recruiter of MBAs in the past five years.

At one point, they were recruiting a thousand MBAs a year, but in, in one sense, maybe Amazon quite doesn’t really have the prestige. For Stanford MBAs who might rather work elsewhere, I think that might be is, you look at the employment reports at a lot of the other schools and Amazon is number one at a number of schools and very low percentage of people from Amazon going to Stanford.

We don’t know, of course, how many. Leaving Stanford and going back to Amazon, but it can’t be that many.

[00:16:41] Heidi Hillis: I wonder if there’s something about just a proximity effect here. You have the plate, like the meta and Google just being so close to Stanford, maybe it just, attracts more people applying because they.

They’re almost on campus and maybe, just being Amazon all over the world and different places could be not attracting as many. I don’t know.

[00:17:03] John Byrne: Yeah, true. The other thing, the analysis shows, and this is what you also gather from the more public class profile is really the remarkable diversity of talent that a school like Stanford can attract year after year.

It is, it blows you away, really. The quality and the diversity of people despite the concentration of undergraduate degree holders or company employers, it’s it’s really mind boggling, isn’t it?

[00:17:33] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, they come from everywhere and really interesting paths and even the people I think that, have those kind of typical paths, you see a lot of diversity within them as well.

So I think, even if you’re coming from a Goldman or a McKinsey having lived in another country or gone to done a fellowship abroad or running a non profit on the side. These things are actually what helped them to stand out. But you do see some really interesting, I think, profiles, too, of people who’ve just done, you get a sense of what it would be like to be in the Stanford classroom.

People from really unique and different backgrounds. People who come from all different countries and lawyers, doctors people who have run, nonprofits in developing countries people running large programs for places like Heineken or Amazon too. But, it’s a real diversity of backgrounds.

[00:18:27] John Byrne: Now, Heidi, I wonder if one is an applicant. Is this discouraging to read and here’s why if I’m not from Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and if I didn’t work for McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google am I at a disadvantage and should I even try? Some people look at the data and come away with that conclusion.

[00:18:52] Heidi Hillis: I think it’s a reality check for a lot of people. I think it’s just, it’s really, it just helps people understand, what it, the difficulty of this, why it’s so competitive, but I think that there is, again, behind the kind of the percentages, you do look at these individual profiles and I would get, I would actually take a lot of hope from it if I were looking, as an applicant, because especially if you are.

Maybe a little bit more of a big fish or small fish in a bigger pond or big fish in a smaller pond you go to Rice or you go to Purdue or, and you do really well, those are the people who, they’re definitely looking for that diversity of background as well as the international.

I think that’s really neat. think that, instead of looking at the data and saying, why not, why I shouldn’t even apply, it’s why not me look at these other profiles of people who have taken really unique paths that that do get in. So I think it is actually a Kind of a mix of both, it is a reality check for a lot of people, but it’s actually, there is so much diversity in the data as well.

I think also one thing that we haven’t really covered is about is just the prevalence of social impact in, that’s really taken hold of the class. I don’t, again, going back to your 2013 analysis, I’m not sure how easy it was to tell that, but a lot of you can see reflected in the both the types of organizations people are working for, but also their titles and the kinds of work that they’re doing that that there’s a huge 40 percent of the class of the two classes had some kind of social impact in their background.

Whether that’s, running their own nonprofit on the side or volunteering or. Running trans transformational kind of programs within companies that are, either in finance or consulting or in industry. That’s a big trend. I think that people can take heart from as well.

So if you’re working if you feel like you’re in an organization where you’re not getting the leadership that you. can use to highlight your potential for Stanford, that’s definitely a place you can go is working for in volunteer capacity for a non profit or on the board of a of some kind of foundation.

Those are the kinds of places that you can highlight your potential

[00:21:00] John Byrne: true. And I know we have a overrepresented part of every applicant pool at an elite business school are software engineers from India. And I wonder in your analysis, how many of them did you find from like the IITs?

[00:21:18] Heidi Hillis: That’s a good question. The IITs, it was again, it was one of these you have about 50 percent of classes internet, so 25 percent of the class. was educated outside of the US. The IITs are going to be up there. Let’s see from India, 2. 1 percent of the class came from India. So probably, I don’t know offhand exactly how many of those were IITs, but

[00:21:43] John Byrne: I’ve had a lot of them.

[00:21:45] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, probably a lot of them. Although I think, that’s the other thing is that people who come, to work with me from India, they feel like if they haven’t gone to IIT, then that’s going to be a disadvantage. But I think, you’ll find that there are, there’s representation of other universities as well.

Definitely.

[00:22:00] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I was just looking at the list of undergrad institutions. And for example, you’ve got Osmania University from Hyderabad. So it is not, it’s not all IIT. Okay.

[00:22:12] John Byrne: Yeah, exactly. And Caroline, 1 of the things about the institutions that are really represented here and that I don’t really see unless I missed it.

I didn’t see a Cambridge or an Oxford. Two of the best five universities in the world. And I wonder if that’s just a function of fewer people in the applicant pool or what? What do you think that could be about?

[00:22:36] Caroline Diarte Edwards: I had a look through the uk Institutions and you have got cambridge in there.

I think I also noticed. Bristol university there are a few different universities. So i’m aston university, which is not it’s not on a par with Oxford or Cambridge. So I think that speaks to the point that Heidi made that you don’t have to have been to an elite school to get into Stanford.

Aston is a good solid university, nothing wrong with Aston, but it’s not it’s not one of the top UK universities. So there’s definitely some interesting variety in the educational backgrounds of the students going to Stanford. And

[00:23:16] John Byrne: then, yeah, it is if you’re a big fish in a small pond, like Afton, you’ll you could still stand out in the pool.

[00:23:26] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely. There’s a lot of really interesting background, you have look hard on blue and you have Miami University and some really smaller universities abroad. I think. Again, it’s really, if you look at that, it does give you hope because it’s really what you do afterwards and if you, obviously, if you come from one of these schools, you probably want to be in the top, 5 percent of the graduating class, you want to show that you have the GPA that can support an academic background that they feel comfortable that you’ll be able to compete academically, but, and maybe that’s what you’re Offset by the, the GMA or the scores, you don’t know, we don’t have those on here.

But, um, the path post university really becomes much more important in those cases. What you’ve done since then where you’ve, how you’ve risen from starting at a entry level position to, running a division or heading a country group or something like that.

[00:24:21] John Byrne: And as far as Cordon Bleu goes, every good business program needs a Cordon Bleu, for God’s sake, right?

You want to eat well at those NBA parties, don’t you?

[00:24:32] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely.

[00:24:35] John Byrne: Maria, I’m sure that was true at Harvard.

[00:24:38] Maria Wich-Vila: I wasn’t the one doing the cooking but I certainly, I was certainly a member of the wine and cuisine society where I happily participated in the eating and consuming a part of that.

But to, to the point that we were just recently talking about. regarding being a big fish in a small pond. Not only have I seen it personally with applicants that I’ve worked with who did not attend these elite universities, but even many years ago, I attended a, an admissions conference where Kirsten Moss, who was the former head of admissions at Stanford, she actually told stories about how they’ve accepted people who even attended community college.

But within the context of that community college, they had really moved mountains. And she said that one of the things that they look for is, Within the context and the opportunities that you’ve been given, how much impact have you had? So maybe you don’t have an opportunity to go to Yale or MIT or IIT for your undergraduate, but whatever opportunity you have been given, have you grabbed that opportunity and really made the most of it and really driven change?

So she specifically called out, I believe, I believe there were two students that year at the GSB who had both started their educations, their higher educations at community college. Anything is possible. It really is about finding the people who, wherever they go, they jump in and make an impact.

[00:25:55] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that to that point, I think it can almost be a more difficult if you’ve gone to Harvard and then worked at one of these, gone on one of these paths because we know that there’s, that’s an overrepresented pool in the applicant pool to stand out among those to have had that, that pedigree sometimes can be a disadvantage, right?

If you haven’t done as much as you should have with that, or if you started at that high level to show that level of progress over the course of your career is actually a little bit more difficult. Okay. And coming from a community college and rising to, a country level manager in some places is actually puts you at a significant advantage, I would say.

[00:26:31] Maria Wich-Vila: Because it’s hard for those people, it’s hard for those people to stand out, but also I think some of them go on autopilot, right? I think some people are on this kind of achievement, elite achievement treadmill, where they’re not even really thinking about what do I want to do with my life?

They’re always reaching for whatever that next, what’s the best college to go to? It’s Harvard Princeton. Yeah. Okay. Now that I’m here, what’s the best employer to work for? It’s McKinsey, Bain, BCG and without actually perhaps stopping to think about what is my passion? What impact do I want to make in the world?

And so I feel sometimes those autopilot candidates, I feel a little bit bad for them because they’re doing everything quote unquote and yet sometimes when you speak with them, that passion just isn’t there. And I do think that may ultimately harm them in the very, very elite business school.

Admissions because business schools want people who are passionate because at the end of the day, in order to do hard things, you’re going to need passion at some point to get you through those low periods. And so I think that’s something business schools look for. And I do think that sometimes these.

These kind of autopilot candidates might sometimes be at a disadvantage.

[00:27:29] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that, to that point look in the data, when you look at it, you see so many people who’ve gone to McKinsey, Bain, Weasley, or Goldman, but then there’s a, you see a lot of success for people who’ve actually pivoted.

So those pivots that are post The second or third job really do show you that, if you’re if you get a candidate who’s coming from, still at McKinsey, okay, that’s fine. They have to be the top 5 percent of McKinsey, like they have to be going to get so many McKinsey applicants that the only the, you can look at the data in a couple ways.

One is, oh, my God, they took 12 people from McKinsey and the others. Oh, my God, they only took 12 people from McKinsey, right? That’s So if you want to be one of those 12, you have to be the top 12 in the world, right? Whereas if you’ve gone to McKinsey and then done an externship at a health care startup and then moved on to be a product manager at for health at Google, that kind of a path is definitely showing a little bit more, maybe risk taking, maybe ability to follow your passions.

So I think that. When I see candidates who come to me, for example, and they’re like, not thinking about applying now, but maybe in a year or two, I say, look for an externship, maybe think about pivoting out of one of these places and looking for some operational experience.

And because you see in the data that works.

[00:28:42] Maria Wich-Vila: And they’re doing themselves a service not only in terms of enhancing their admissions chances, but even just in terms of determining, what do I want to do with my career? If I do eventually want to go into industry, what functional role do I want to have?

What industry do I want to work in? So it’s, it actually benefits them in the long term to do that as well, even if they don’t go to business school. I think those secondments and externships and second job, post consulting jobs are extremely valuable. Totally agree with you.

[00:29:06] Caroline Diarte Edwards: And I’m sure they also bring more to the classroom as well.

I would think that’s also why Stanford is selecting some of those candidates, because not only have they worked at McKinsey, but they’ve also led a non profit in Africa or worked in private equity or whatever it is. So they have much more breadth that they can bring to the classroom. And I think that It’s seen as a very valuable contribution

[00:29:29] John Byrne: in Heidi.

Did you see that? The majority of the candidates to examined actually did work in more than one place, right?

[00:29:37] Heidi Hillis: Yes, most of them did. There were very few that, you see working at one place. And I would say that those are people that would have really risen through the ranks.

Someone who’s worked at Walmart and become, started in, I don’t know, in one state, but then to become a regional manager and things like that really are going to onto a global role. The people who have stayed at one place really have shown significant career progression within that.

And then the other people I think you do see a lot of movement. The big. The most typical would be from investment banking to private equity and then you do find in finance, there’s a little bit less kind of movement into other industries. You see a lot of people staying within finance, but within finance.

Yeah. Yeah. The other industries, especially consulting or other, tech, people are really moving into other places and it’s becoming, it is a little bit difficult. We have these categories that we’ve talked about, for example, healthcare, but it’s hard to categorize some of these companies.

Are they healthcare? Are they tech? There’s a lot of overlap. And so everything’s a little bit of tech in something nowadays. So whether it’s finance and fintech or education and ed tech or health care and health tech, these are all merging and combining. It’s hard to categorize them.

[00:30:53] John Byrne: So looking at the data here I wonder if you’ve seen your old classmates in the sense that these new people are very much like the people you went to school with at Stanford. I

[00:31:05] Heidi Hillis: put this out and it’s really interesting to a lot of my classmates downloaded the report and read it. And a lot of them came back and said, oh, boy, I would never get in now.

It’s these people are super impressive. I think that you see a lot of. It’s just become more and more competitive. And I think that with more information and more people every year applying, it is becoming really difficult. I think that you do see a lot of, I am encouraged by the diversity part of it that you see still Stanford.

I feel like they do take risks on some really interesting profiles and candidates that maybe some other schools are less likely to do. And so that’s what does give me. A lot of hope when I get some kind of really nontraditional candidate who wants to, their dream school is Stanford. I feel like, I say all the time, there’s a 6 percent chance.

You’re going to get in, but there’s 100 percent chance. You won’t get in if you don’t apply. So you’ve got to, you got to give it a go. And that’s, the attitude that we take to it.

[00:32:04] John Byrne: Indeed. So for all of you out there read Heidi’s article on our site, it’s called who gets in and why exclusive research.

Into Stanford GSB and I’ll tell you one conclusion I have about this is that, man, if you really want to get into Stanford, you need a Sherpa, and and Heidi would be a great Sherpa for you because the, just the profiles of these folks, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished in their early lives is so remarkable that To compete against, in this pool for a spot in the class you need every possible advantage you can get.

And and having an expert guide you through this trip probably would be a really big advantage. So Heidi, thank you for sharing your insights with us and the research, the very cool research.

[00:33:01] Heidi Hillis: Thank you

[00:33:03] John Byrne: and for all of you out there. Good luck. And if you want to go to Stanford, you got to check out this report.

Okay. It will inspire you to up your game, even if you are from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or wherever McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google, you want to look at this report and you want to really think about. What it will really take to get in. I think it will inspire you, motivate you to really put your best foot forward.

Thanks for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants.

Maria

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