In this episode of Business Casual, the hosts discuss strategies for MBA applicants during the holiday season, emphasizing the potential impact of Trump’s re-election on international and domestic applicant numbers. They highlight the importance of advanced preparation before the holidays to ensure applications are cohesive and recommenders are aligned.

The discussion also covers how applicants can effectively manage their application process during the festive season, making the most of the time for reflection and final adjustments to strengthen their submissions.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.370] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, the admission experts of the world, Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich-Vila. The holidays are coming up. Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Then, of course, before you know, Christmas. Christmas will be here, and then you’ll have that week between Christmas and New Year’s. And both these holidays are time when you can take a little breather and you can get to work on those round two applications. So what we want to do is give you a little advice going into round two. If you’ve been listening to our podcast, we think there are going to be fewer international applicants in the pool for round two, in part because of the election of Trump. This may actually pose an advantage to domestic applicants. It could even pose, incidentally, an advantage to international applicants who wave away whatever fears and concerns they may have about a Trump administration being unfriendly to immigrants. It’s always important to remember what happened last time, which there was a decline, but really, the bullseye for Trump is going to be illegal immigrants.

[00:01:23.260] – John

What should we be looking out for in round two? What should people be doing during these holidays holiday breaks to polish up and finish their application so they’re in good order to hit that submit button when the deadlines come one after another in January. Caroline?

[00:01:40.400] – Caroline

Well, as you said, John, people have some breaks coming up. I would just caution against leaving things too late and using the winter holidays and the end of the year to do some serious work on your application because that doesn’t give you a lot of time to go through what should be an iterative It’s a process of reflection and drafting and revisiting, and it’s not something that you can cook up overnight. That’s a great time for putting the finishing touches to your application, but I would suggest that you should be well-advanced with your preparations by the time the holidays come around. And also, of course, keep in mind that you should be mobilizing your recommenders, and they may be taking a break over those holidays and might not be available. And it’s often the case that candidates are in a panic at the beginning of January because they have been emailing their recommenders and they’ve just got out-of-office messages. And of course, you want to have some coherence between how you’re presenting yourself in your application and what the recommenders are saying. So you can get them set up now, but if you haven’t done the serious reflection and figuring out your strategy of how you’re going to position your candidacy yourself before you brief your recommenders, then there could be a mismatch between how you yourself in your essays in the various parts of your application and what the recommenders say about you.

[00:03:06.310] – Caroline

I think it’s important to have made some progress well ahead of those breaks.

[00:03:13.250] – John

Right. Now, what I’m hearing here is that, look, the day after Thanksgiving, when I’m digesting my turkey, my sweet potato, my carrots, maybe it shouldn’t be the day that I first try to attack the essays for the schools that I’m going to apply to. I should be thinking about well in advance. Now, sure, the day after Thanksgiving, when I close the door and my family can’t bother me, it is a good time to at least look at a draft and be prepared on another level, right?

[00:03:43.980] – Caroline

Absolutely. And you can use that downtime to review and reflect. But I would suggest that, ahead of that time, you should have already established the key messages that you want to get across and how all the different elements of the application, including your essays, your resume, the application form, some schools have video questions, and then, of course, the recommendations, how those different elements are going to come together to build a clear picture, like pieces of a puzzle where there’s some coherence, but also not too much overlap. You don’t want to be repeating information in different parts of the application. Having a clear framework well ahead of time is the best way to tackle things. And then, of course, you can use those breaks that you have over Thanksgiving or over the winter holidays to revisit and reflect and refine.

[00:04:38.570] – John

Maria, your thoughts?

[00:04:40.270] – Maria

Yeah, I agree with all of this, especially the part of the recommenders. I think that is the one that, especially just given those early January deadlines, that’s the biggest source of panic always with rounds two, because so many recommenders often are on holiday during that time. You can force yourself to pull in on nighter, but you can’t call your boss and say, Hey, this is due tomorrow, and I haven’t heard from you. You can’t really command them to do your bidding as much as we wish we could. The other piece, in addition to also setting up the essays, is also those application forms. The application forms themselves can often take a couple of hours, actually, if you’re going to be thoughtful about it. It’s not simply your name and your address. If you have not yet actually opened up the application form, this could be a good one to do on that day after Thanksgiving. If you’re still digesting that turkey, you’ve got the tryptophan, I think, is the one that makes you nice and sleepy and cozy. You don’t feel like doing a lot of mental heavy lifting, which I would urge you to do that mental heavy lifting.

[00:05:40.030] – Maria

But if it’s just not in you and you’re doing those Black Friday online sales, a relatively simple task to do to start checking off your to-do list is to go through those application forms and really start digging into if they ask you, for example, Okay, here are, List your top three extracurricular activities. Here’s a box where you can describe your impact, or for every the job that you’ve had, why did you take that job? Or what’s your greatest accomplishment? Why did you leave that job? All of those different forms. Every school will ask different questions. They will have different character counts for each of the questions, and you are not going to want to simply copy and paste what’s in your resume. So if a school asks you, for example, okay, list your responsibilities for each job in this text box, you don’t just want to copy and paste the resume. Technically, that’s correct, but it makes you to look a little bit on the lazier side, right? So that, I think, is something that you could do, especially Specifically that day after Thanksgiving, that is in fact useful but does not require as much mental heavy lifting.

[00:06:36.450] – Maria

But I agree with Caroline on everything else. You are going to want to start having those draughts. If you haven’t already, at a minimum, have an idea of what you’re going to say or which stories you’re going to focus on. That way you coordinate with the recommender so that there isn’t too much repetition. Then also if you start during the Thanksgiving break, then that will give you a little bit of fresh time to step away for a few days and come back with fresh eyes later, as opposed to if you save the entire writing process just for that last week of December, it’s not going to be as optimal because you will miss things in your own writing.

[00:07:12.630] – John

So you mentioned recommenders, and since it’s The upcoming holidays are a time when you can send someone a gift, should I be sending someone a bottle of wine over Thanksgiving to share with their family? And in the note, thanking them for all their support, which is a subtle reminder to, get me that damn recommendation, put it in the mail.

[00:07:35.800] – Maria

If you think that’ll help, look, I think the recommendations have a lot of benefits, but one of the subtle benefits is, can you manage people above value over whom you have no actual authority. And so if you know that that former boss of yours, who’s your second recommender, you know that they like a certain brand of whiskey, and you also know that they tend to drag their feet. If you’re managing upwards, if that’s what it takes, then absolutely. Now, at the end of the process, you should absolutely thank your recommender and give them a nice gift. Whether or not you strategically have that gift arrived a little bit earlier in order to encourage them along, I think that’s really smart, right? That shows that you do, in fact, understand how to manage these folks over whom you have no authority. And so, yeah, I mean, why not? If that’s what it’s going to take.

[00:08:25.630] – John

Caroline, how much should I spend for a bottle of wine for a recommender?

[00:08:28.800] – Caroline

Yeah, Well, I guess it depends on what they like, as you say. Perhaps you can try and get some insider track on their taste and what would go down well. But I think it’s also a very good point that you want to stay in touch with them and be proactive in communicating with them regularly. Too often candidates have a conversation with their recommenders two or three months ahead of the deadline, and that’s great. And then assume that they are off to the races and then check in with them a week before the deadline, and there’s radio silence, and they haven’t done what they were going to do. And of course, recommenders, by their very nature, they’re extremely busy people. They have multiple demands. This is not part of their job description to have to write these recommendations, and they’re doing it in their spare time, probably late at night or at the weekend or something. So they’re doing you a huge favor, and it’s not going to be their number one priority, right? Of their day-to-day So you want to be regularly in touch with them and don’t pester them, but at the same time, just keep in touch so that you have a sense of where they are in the process and whether there’s anything that you can do to support them with it.

[00:09:46.100] – Caroline

You should perhaps have a discussion with them or send them some bullet points about what are the key messages that you think that they could convey in their recommendation, what are the key strengths that that you hope that they could showcase and perhaps give them some examples of how they have demonstrated that. Because when I’ve written recommendations for people, it can be difficult to do that, especially if it’s not someone who is your current, not and not a member of your current team. So if you’ve worked with them in the past and you’ve worked with many people, it can be difficult to remember, okay, what exactly was this individual’s contribution to that project that we wrapped up two years ago? Because with two recommenders, you’ll probably have, ideally, you’ve got your current boss and you’ve probably got a former boss in there. So especially with a former boss, it can be hard for them to remember exactly what you did, how you did it, and how you stood out. And what I’ve had to do in the past when it was writing recommendations is go back and dig through the performance reviews that I had done.

[00:10:50.860] – Caroline

And so often the detail is captured there. But you can save people a lot of time, and they will thank you for that if you can do some of that homework for them.

[00:11:00.430] – John

Now, both of you have been through round one already, and I wonder, based on what your round one applicants have found, meaning the response that they got from the schools that they applied to, if there’s any learning or going into round two. Maria, let’s start with you.

[00:11:17.570] – Maria

Let me think about that. I think, let me see the learnings. I know that a bunch of schools had new essay questions that led to a lot of uncertainty going into round one. Like Harvard. Like Harvard in particular, right? Going from the one open-ended essay into three far more constrained essays. And so I think a lot of us who were working with candidates in that round one, we were giving advice based on our our educated guess of what would make sense and what would be a strong way to approach those three essays. And so I think based on what I saw, I think we’re seeing that, yes, the essays are new, but at their core, what the school is looking for is not different. So The essay questions, and this, I think, applies to every school, the essay questions might change from year to year, but the core DNA of the core culture of the school and what they seek in their successful applicants, that does not change. I think that a lot of the round one results are verifying that. So that was nice.

[00:12:20.690] – John

Even though those essays are incredibly short, two are 250 word limits and one is 300 word limit, which is very restraining, I think, particularly when you look back not all that long ago when Harvard had one essay and there was no word limit at all on it for quite a few years. Caroline, based on your observations of round one outcomes, any thoughts for our round two applicants?

[00:12:44.210] – Caroline

Well, it’s early days. One thing that I always talk to round two applicants about is the need to really go the extra mile to show schools that you are really motivated to go there, because especially Actually beyond the M7 schools, and even some of the M7 schools, they’ll get a surge of applications in round two from people who have been dinged in round one, right? And they expect that. They know that’s going to happen, and many of them will be great candidates. But what they tend to see is that in round one, you typically have candidates who are very clear about wanting to attend that school, who’ve really done their homework, who articulate a good case for why that school is a really good fit for them. And in round two, you do see more candidates who have clearly gone down the list and they are not as motivated for that particular school where they’re submitting an application. Maybe they haven’t done as much homework, they haven’t had as many conversations with members of the school community, and they are a little bit more sketchy in the details of why this school is a great fit for them and why they really want to attend.

[00:13:59.280] – Caroline

So So you need to differentiate yourself from that pool of applicants. So you need to go the extra mile, I think, in round two to really show that you have kicked the tires, you have done your homework. It’s not something that you have just skimmed the website a few days before the application deadline and wrote in the name of a few electives and professors to show some vague knowledge of the school, but show that you’ve built your knowledge over time. Perhaps you’ve attended some events, perhaps you’ve reached out to student leaders who are running some of the clubs that you’re interested in, and you’ve had some informative interactions, and you can reference those in your applications. So I think showing you that you are genuinely motivated and showing some authenticity there is even more important in many cases in round two than it is in round one.

[00:14:54.940] – John

Yeah. Having had the opportunity to sit in Admission Committee meetings, both in Europe and the US and in Canada, for that matter, those interactions are important and they’re noted on your application. When you attend a webinar, when you go to a campus and do a day attending a class and having lunch with a student or having a conversation with an admissions official, it’s remembered and it’s remarked upon when an admissions committee member may be an advocate for you. That’s how they’re trying to sell you to the rest of the committee members. Now, I’m sure you get this just as I get this. It’s inevitable. I’d say almost every week, every other week, I’m getting someone who reaches out to me either by telephone or by email or through even a member of my own family. They tell me, I went to Yale undergrad. I was a military vet. I now work for the US Space Force, and I want to apply to Harvard. What are my chances? How in the world can you even go there and tell them what the chances are when Harvard accepts only 12, 13% of their applicants? We know that the vast majority of people who apply are very qualified to get in.

[00:16:16.950] – John

The difference is between and among most of them is so slight that it’s almost impossible to predict who’s going to get in, who’s not. I wonder from both of you, what’s your batting average is? What can you work with applicants, you see applicants on a regular basis. You probably have a gut feel over whether or not they can get in or they can’t. How good are the two of you are predicting a person citizens basically invite to a highly selected business school?

[00:16:50.290] – Caroline

Well, I could jump in first. I think it’s sometimes easier to predict whether they’ll get to interview stage than what will happen after the interview.

[00:16:58.560] – John

True.

[00:16:59.470] – Caroline

Because Because you can dig into their profile, and you can understand their undergraduate track record, their test scores, their professional track record, their extracurriculars, so you can see how they stack up. And we have experience of working with candidates over many years and seeing having that context of the pool. So it can be… Of course, there are always surprises of people who get interviews or people who don’t get interviews where you think it might have gone the other way. And of course, it depends who else is applying at the same time. And it can be, of course, much harder with candidates who have a profile that is quite common in the applicant pool. So, John, we were just talking with Carla. She was saying At one point, she had 15 McKinsey candidates on her desk, and only two could get through.

[00:17:52.110] – John

So how do you whittle that down? Yes, this is Carla Cohen, who had been an associate director at Harvard Business School Admissions and now works for Fortuna as a director Sure.

[00:18:00.470] – Caroline

Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure all of those McKinsey candidates were fantastic. They would have had… The fact that they went to McKinsey means that they had strong undergraduate, that they were high performers, that they were over They’re achievers by their very nature. So with those more common profiles, it can be a little bit harder to predict.

[00:18:22.090] – John

Yeah, it’s hard to mission sitting at Harvard Business School, you’re an admissions official. Someone dumps 15 applications on your desk, tells that they’re all from McKinsey consultants and that you can only pick two. So with those highly selective scores, there is, of course, a strong element of luck because it depends who else is applying.

[00:18:44.860] – Caroline

Then, of course, there is a subjectivity in the process. And so you can be the best candidate in the world, but you don’t control everything about how your application is going to be evaluated, who is reading it, how they’re feeling on that particular day, how many people you’re being compared with. So for the best candidates, there’s always an element of luck as well.

[00:19:09.670] – John

Which is why you need to apply to more than one or two schools to increase the chance that you’ll get in because after all, there is some randomness to this. If an admissions official can only take two McKinsey people instead of 15, because in their cohort, they already have 10 more, that’s not your problem. That’s their problem. But ultimately, it’s not going to lead to the outcome you want. It’s a good idea to be applying at least four to six schools in any given time. Now, Maria, what’s your batting average on predictability?

[00:19:45.160] – Maria

I agree that I think predicting who will get the interview is much easier than the actual decision because, as Caroline was alluding to, we have no idea who else is in the applicant pool and what the dynamics are within your competitive bucket. At the end of the day, they don’t have quotas or anything, but they don’t want to just let only McKinsey consultants and Goldman Sachs bankers in. They do want people from different backgrounds because that’s how you learn from your classmates who have done all kinds of amazing things in all kinds of industries prior to business school. Within your bucket, how many other people are there going to be who are product managers in fintech companies? If there’s a thousand of them, in other words, I can look at someone’s profile and say, Yes, I think you’ve got a strong chance. It’s a little dicey or it could go either way or like, No, I don’t think it’s going to work out for you. But then after that, it comes down to, Well, maybe you were the only fintech product manager that they saw, and they’re like, We need to… Or maybe there were 300 that applied this year.

[00:20:45.560] – Maria

Because of those dynamics, it does get a little bit more challenging. But I think what admissions consultants do, and you can actually do this yourself a bit as a candidate, is I call it finding a resume twin. That is where you try to find someone who’s their pre-MBA background looked a lot like yours. So to stay with the McKinsey example, let’s say you work at the New York office of McKinsey, which I’m sure has probably dozens of candidates to the top business schools each year. And you notice, like, huh, last year, only two of the other people in my group got in, and 10 of them applied, but only two got in. So what is it that those other two did? Did they have better ratings on When they get assessed by their higher-ups? Did they get better ratings on the project? Is the partner specifically asking to work with them on a certain project? What do I think the recommender is going to say? If the recommender says, This is the best analyst that we’ve had in 10 years, then you’ve got a better shot, versus if you are doing a perfectly fine job, but you really haven’t distinguished yourself in any way.

[00:21:55.590] – Maria

That is pattern. If you work in a company that does tend to send a lot of people to business school, then look around at the people who got in the year before or in the years prior to you and stack yourself up against them. If you don’t work for a company where you’re like, Well, nobody else in my company has ever gone to business school, then try to find people from similar backgrounds. If you’re, say, an oil and gas engineer doing some stuff in the Permian Basin and you’re like, I’m working at a small oil, natural gas company, whatever it might be, okay, fine. Maybe no one from your company has gone to business school. But if you When you look at, let’s say, the energy club roster at a business school that you’re targeting, and you can see the lists of the officers that you can start to look them up on LinkedIn and say, You know what? Actually, I’m only two years out of college right now, and I’m not really leading any teams. And when I look at the people who did get in prior to business school, they had six years of experience.

[00:22:49.450] – Maria

And they were lead. So that’s how as mission consultants, we, because as Caroline said, because we work with so many people over so many years, we start to develop to develop an intuition for that pattern matching, but you don’t have to have all of that experience necessarily. You can start doing some of that on your own to determine your own candidacy’s strengths. And at the end of the day, I’d say it comes down to how much impact you’ve had. If you can point to having impacted wherever, whether you’re at a large multinational or a tiny startup, if you can show that you’re the person who jumps into a situation and makes good things happen, then you’re already going to be head and shoulders above people, even if maybe your GMAT score might be a smidge lower or what have you.

[00:23:34.950] – John

Right. Now we’re in mid-November. Is it too late to hire an admissions consultant to help me meet my round 2 deadline?

[00:23:43.430] – Caroline

No, it’s not. So typically at this time of year, we work with candidates on an hourly basis rather than doing the what we call comprehensive school package, which is an all-inclusive package, which takes you through several steps of, first of all, developing your application strategy and all the reflection and so on, because of the more limited timeline now, you may not get all the benefits of that multi-stage process. So we certainly do start working with candidates at this time, but it would normally be a more focused service rather than this all-inclusive package that takes them through to build a really strong foundation for their application before they start drafting any materials, because at this point, as we’ve discussed, you really do need to be in the weeds already of drafting. Sometimes people come to us and they’ve developed their application and they’ve done it already and they haven’t worked with anyone, but they want someone to kick their ties on the application and review it and bring a fresh set of eyes. And they’re 90 % there, but they want some help with finalizing and putting the finishing touches to the application. So we do that typically at this time of year in December.

[00:25:01.860] – John

Actually, given the odds of admission at any of these highly selective schools, that’s a tire-kicking exercise. It’d probably be a really smart thing to do, and it wouldn’t cost you all that much, right?

[00:25:13.700] – Caroline

No, that’s right. I mean, normally a few hours of our time, and it could be very effective to help bring a different perspective, bring that perspective that we have, as really said, of understanding the broader pool and how they, as a candidate from their sector, may line up against other candidates from similar backgrounds and whether they’ve done a good job of teasing out those differentiating stories and getting some clear messages across about what is different about their candidacy versus other people with a similar background.

[00:25:46.980] – John

All right. One good thing about modern technology this time, and for the last few years, of course, if you’re doing your application and working on this the day after Thanksgiving, and you’re eating the mashed potatoes that were leftover, you don’t have to worry about splashing them on your application and sending them a soiled piece of paper to the admissions official of your favorite school because everything is being done on computer these days. Isn’t that a beautiful thing?

[00:26:19.770] – Caroline

Just don’t spill your lunch on your computer.

[00:26:22.080] – John

Oh, no, that would not be good. That would be awful. Exactly. All right. So for those of you who will be working hard over the holidays, be it Thanksgiving or Christmas, fitting in the final touches on your application in round two. Also in between all the shopping that you’re going to need to do for the gifts under the Christmas tree, we wish you the best of luck and stay with it. Put your best foot forward. Have someone take a look. I love the idea of a tire kicking exercise by an admissions consultant. I think that’s a good way to get some really good advice at this stage of the game. For not a whole lot of money, for a few hours, it could be really, really helpful to you. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Thanks for listening to Business Casual.