What To Do the Year Before You Apply for an MBA

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
— Abraham Lincoln
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Say you're someone who knows they want an MBA but are not yet ready to apply. You might be a junior with a year to go before you're eligible for Harvard's 2+2 Program, Stanford's Deferred Enrollment, or Yale's Silver Scholars Program. You may have recently started on a new career and feel that you have not yet built up the work experience or credibility with potential recommenders to be successful in the regular application cycle. Older classmates and colleagues are sending in their applications and you may feel nervous sitting on the sidelines. Should you panic?

No. The only thing you need to do is recognize that the year ahead of you is a golden opportunity, which you can use to dramatically increase your chances of admission.

Even if you already have great GMAT / GRE scores in hand, the year ahead of you is your chance to "sharpen the axe" of your resume before you use it to chop through the MBA application. From navigating your career so that it will be in the best possible position right before Round 1 deadlines, to amping up community involvements that will resonate with your narrative and stand-out to admissions committees, to choosing your ideal recommenders and planning out how you can best shine in front of them, there is a lot you can do. We've thought a lot about this ourselves and have crammed all the best services to help a candidate boost their admissions odds in the year before they apply into a package that we call the Early Bird. Through that package, we seek to accomplish four major goals:

  1. Achieve clarity and confidence on your career and personal goals
  2. Discover your authentic personal narrative, and which moves you can make to bolster it
  3. Determine what your resume needs to say when you apply, and work backwards to achieve it
  4. Identify which "portable achievements" are within your grasp, and how to obtain them
  5. Obtain the best recommendation letters by determining who in your orbit could be best positioned to write them, and how win them over
  6. Get personalized coaching and mentorship over the course of the year.

There are many ways to do that. I've included the game plan we use in the Early Bird below, which also comes with 10% off any future purchases of our already lowest-priced Complete School packages, making it quite the valuable investment.

 

VisionBuilding

PHASE I: VISION BUILDING

STEP 1: Vision Exercise

We start with one of the most popular career-visioning exercises at HBS and Stanford GSB. You complete two fun, creative tasks designed to illuminate the hidden themes and dynamic tensions in your personal and professional life. The results of these exercises will help clarify pre-MBA career options worth pursuing and will help us understand how to best advise you.

STEP 2: Introduction & School Selection

We then discuss your background, goals for business school, and career aspirations. We offer our insights on what early careers in each field would feel like, and how they would eventually lead to business school. We then suggest a list of MBA programs for you to target, and back into the milestones you would need to achieve in your early career to be competitive at each.

 

 

Pre-Application Game Plan
$1,750.00

Are you thinking of applying to business school in a few years? We can help you use that valuable time to significantly improve your candidacy and raise your chances of admission.

This service starts with us getting to know you and understanding your motivations for seeking an MBA. We then help you determine which programs would offer the best fit, where you need to be in your career and community activities to get admitted to those programs, and then work backwards to develop a game-plan for getting you there. We also run you through our personal narrative boot camp, helping you build a compelling story to tell schools and future employers. After our initial touch point, we keep in touch throughout the year to answer any questions and make sure you are on track.

NarrativeBootCamp

PHASE II: NARRATIVE BOOT CAMP

STEP 1: Narrative Exercises

We send you a series of exercises based on the Harvard Kennedy School's latest research on personal narrative, political campaigning, and public speaking. These forms are designed to tease out the inspirations and motivations that will make for a compelling personal narrative and, and link them to your future aspirations.

STEP 2: Review and Ideation

We then take your completed exercises and existing resume, and construct a few possible narrative story arcs that we believe will tell your authentic story in the most compelling way. This is a highly personal and creative process. Each narrative is work-shopped one at a time, and is not the cookie-cutter result of some computer read-out. This gives you the confidence of knowing that your narrative will be totally original.

STEP 3: Instruction and Coaching

Over the phone, we walk you through our materials on personal narrative and political campaigning. Through this instruction, you will understand what separates a good narrative from a great one, as well as the psychology of how the admissions directors will read and interpret your application. We then apply these learnings to your particular business school application and future career aspirations, taking your questions along the way.

STEP 4: Narrative Selection and Honing

Together we create 2-3 compelling personal narratives for your unique application. We run through their relative merits, why each is compelling, how each will be interpreted by the admissions committee. We workshop the narratives together over the phone until we decide on the one that is the most compelling and authentic for your application.

CareerEnhancement

PHASE III: CAREER ENHANCEMENT

STEP 1: Employment Gameplan

We discuss career-enhancing moves and the way in which can weave your new compelling and authentic personal narrative into the applications for achieving them. By working this way, you will ensure you are walking down the most compelling and purposeful professional path before you send out a single job application, minimizing the amount of time wasted in the application process.

STEP 2: Resume Overhaul

We then use your new narrative to overhaul your resume. Where possible, we provide school templates for you to use to emphasize your commitment to your dream school. After initial formatting corrections, we suggest strategic edits that will enhance your ability to showcase your narrative in the most persuasive way. 

 

YearRoundMentorship

PHASE IV: YEAR-ROUND MENTORSHIP

STEP 1: Regular Check-ins

We schedule three follow-up calls in the next year to check-in, make sure that you’re on the right track, answer any questions, and offer advice for any issues in your career that may arise. 

STEP 2: Constant Contact

You will retain email access to both Nate and Anna for one year to ask quick questions related to the topics discussed in Early Bird.

STEP 3: Future Savings

When you're ready to apply to business school, we will take 10% off our already best-in-class prices for any future purchases of Packages.

Impact! And how to include it in your resume

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Some applicants believe that their business school applications are little more than the facts of their resume. And why shouldn’t they be? Many prognosticators of admissions odds ask only for your GPA, GMAT, Undergrad, and most recent employer to reach their predictions. After all, those facts are immutable, admissions committees are familiar with them, and any other attempt to dress up an application is just sleazy marketing, right?

Wrong.

It’s pretty easy to see for yourself why it's not just the facts of the story, but the story itself that matters. Consider the following examples out of news articles:

#1: 36.5% of Americans are obese.

#2: Rising rates of obesity will cost the American taxpayer an additional $200B per year, and reduces available funding for education.

What is the difference between these two statements? In a word, Impact.

While the first statement captures the complete statement of fact, the second captures what it means, what the damage is, and why we should care. Only an educated reader, who knows that obesity is growing, that it is expensive, and that its costs will require tradeoffs in governmental priorities, might be able to read the first statement and infer the rest. But even then, the first sentence does not include enough context to know what point you're trying to make.  Are you telling us about obesity because you want to talk about growing sizes in retail clothing? The need for sturdier cars? Or looming budgetary tradeoffs?

When you write your business school application, it is imperative that you tell a compelling story for why your work is important and why a bystander with little knowledge of the topic (i.e. an admissions officer) should care about it. If can make the admissions officer care about the personal impact you are making in the world, he or she will likely care about you, and whether you are admitted. This is how applicants with sterling credentials can still be denied from top schools when their submissions focus on facts rather than impact. Consider some examples that one might find in a personal essay:

Accomplishment without impact

I am a credit risk analyst at Deutsche Bank, have worked on four deals valued over one billion dollars, and have been promoted twice

Accomplishment with impact

As a credit risk analyst at Deutsche Bank, I developed a new model that helped us better price risk among less credit-worthy customers, allowing the firm to issue more loans needed to grow small businesses.

See how the second narrative is stronger because it not only explains the actions taken but the impact achieved? Of course, we at Ivy Admissions Group don’t just stop there. We’ve argued time and time again that to have a truly exceptional application, one must also tie their achievements and impacts into a broader personal narrative

Accomplishment with Impact and Narrative

My mother was a small business owner, and growing up I saw firsthand both how difficult it was for entrepreneurs like her to get the capital they needed to sustain their businesses. Small businesses are the key to growing the modern economy, with 67% of new jobs coming from small businesses. I joined Deutsche Bank because I wanted to help people like my mom achieve the American Dream, and was able to do that by developing a new risk model that made small business loans more affordable.

Should I take the GMAT or GRE?

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There are a growing number of business schools that now accept both the GMAT and the GRE -- HBS, GSB, Booth, Wharton, and Tuck, to name a few (click here for the full list).

Many students ask, which should I take?

  • Amazing at math? Take the GMAT.
    • The quantitative portion of the GMAT covers a broader set of mathematical topics and offers more complicated problems than the GRE. Additionally, in the GRE you can use a calculator--not so for the GMAT.
    • However, because those who take the GMAT (namely, business school students) score higher than those who take the GRE (general graduate school students), it is harder to get a high percentile math score on the GMAT than on the GRE.
    • For example, a scaled GMAT quantitative score of 51 (i.e. no wrong answers) puts you in the 97th percentile and a score of 50 (only one wrong) puts you in the 87th percentile. On the GRE, a perfect quantitative score or one off would both put you in the 97th percentile.
  • Bad with time pressure? Take the GRE.
    • In the GRE you are given a certain time allotment per section (30 minutes for 20 Verbal Reasoning questions or 35 minutes for 20 Quantitative Reasoning questions) and you are free to go back and forth answering questions within a section. The GRE even has a function that allows you to "flag" questions that you would like to return to. This allows you to calmly budget your time according to the difficulty of the questions and not waste your time on one impossible one.
    • The GMAT on the other hand only presents one question at a time. You can't go back or advance to the next question until you answer the current one. The test does this because the difficulty of later questions depends upon how well you answer earlier ones. People who stress out on standardized testing may spend the GMAT fretting about each question they get and second-guessing their previous answers if they see an easier question later in the test.
  • Not a native English speaker? It depends. 
    • The GRE has a very heavy emphasis on vocabulary. Even native english speakers have to build up decks of flashcards to study the arcane words that the test loves to use.
    • The GMAT emphasizes grammar logic. Pick your poison.
  • Bad at test taking in general? Take the GRE.
    • Some business schools, usually the ones who are fighting to maintain or move up the MBA rankings (e.g. Wharton, Columbia, and Yale), place more emphasis on the average GMAT score of their incoming class, since publications such as U.S. News & World Report and The Economist use that statistic in their annual rankings of business schools.
    • If you are going to get an equivalently low score on your standardized test, it is better to do so in the GRE since that statistic is not as closely tracked and a school may have less hesitancy in admitting you for fear that you will bring down that average.
  • Not 100% sure about business school? Or want to do a Joint Degree Program? Take the GRE.
    • The GRE will get you into any graduate school, and leaves you some optionality.
    • However, certain joint programs (such as the JD-MBA at Kellogg) require you to take the GMAT, so do your research.
  • 100% sure about business school? Take the GMAT.
    • If you feel you're equally equipped to take both the GRE and the GMAT, and you're serious about business school, take the GMAT. It can signal to the Adcom that you're serious about business school, and can even qualify you for some merit-based scholarships. However, if you know the GRE plays to your strengths, go ahead and take it. Your score matters!

At the end of the day, our advice is to take the test where you can score highest. Take practice tests to figure out which is best for you.

Mark Zuckerberg's advice for MBA applications

Facebook CEO and noted dropout Mark Zuckerberg gave the commencement address at Harvard’s graduation this year, and he left the graduates with an important nugget of advice for applying to business school. If you weren’t paying close attention, you may have missed it.

Here is the full video. The quote in question comes right after 6:00:

Here is the quote:

One of my favorite stories is when John F. Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walked over and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

What did the Janitor do in his reply to strike a chord with the President? In a word, he offered a purpose for his work.

Say one of the Janitor’s Window Cleaner peers applied to business school. If we were on the admissions committee and came across his resume, we might see lines such as “expertly cleaned all glass surfaces with 10% fewer streaks and peers” or “implemented new harness safety program, dramatically reducing falls.” 

JanitorIvyAdmissionsGroup

Now let’s consider the Janitor. What might his business school resume say? Maybe, “Enabled the success of the moon-landing by providing clutter-free work spaces that enabled calm, decisive mission management” or, “Aided the President’s key national priority by maintaining safe, clean, and functional work spaces that top engineering talent would want to work in.”

Why do we find the second resume more compelling even though they have similar performance in similar jobs? In the first case, the Window Cleaner demonstrates an achievement-orientation and a desire to do his job better than others, but his impact starts and ends with himself. His resume explains why he is a better worker, but it does not explain why we should root for him to be successful. We never learn why we should care about how well he does his job. Meanwhile the Janitor, much like the Third Stone Cutter in an earlier blog post (check it out if you have the time), extends his impact outside of himself. In doing so, he creates a cause -- a vision, a meaning, a mission --- big enough for all of us to root for. The purpose of his work is clear and all of us can feel a part of it.

When we help clients craft their admissions essays, we never lose sight of the fact that Admissions Committees are made up of people who find meaning in their work by believing that it matters on a global scale who they decide to extend offers of admission. Whether at undergraduate colleges or MBA programs, all Admissions Committees want to give those spots to the people they believe will make the most of them. The surest way to make that argument in your application is to clearly explain not only the nature of your work, but its purpose as well. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What was your goal in founding Ivy Admissions Group?

When we went through the MBA admissions process, we found it full of unnecessary anxiety, odd speculation, and bad information on sketchy websites. The goal of Ivy Admissions Group is to take the stress out of the process by sharing good information born out of our own experience and working with admissions.

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So it’s just the two of you?

Yes. We’re not trying to be a big industrial admissions consultancy. We only want to take on a few select clients and offer them exceptionally insightful and highly personal advice. We have very different backgrounds and are confident that between the two of us, each applicant gets a diverse set of perspectives.

What makes Ivy Admissions Group special?

A lot, actually.

  1. We focus on narrative and know how to build credible, authentic ones.
  2. We’re Harvard MBAs. We’ve walked the walk and can empathize with clients.
  3. We have the results. Our clients have been admitted to Stanford GSB, HBS, Wharton, Booth, and elsewhere
  4. We’re boutique, not an application factory. All clients work directly and only with us.
  5. We’re marketing managers. We are used to brilliantly marketing things to discriminating audiences.
  6. You get two diverse perspectives for the price of one.
  7. We’re not just copy editors. We intimately help with application brainstorming and crafting that perfect package.

Why are you so focused on narrative?

I (Nate) know from experience. When I applied, I had all the right elements. An above average GPA from a target school, a perfect GRE, impressive leadership experience in the military, and glowing recommendations. What I had was a brand, but not a narrative, and so I was placed on the waitlist at HBS, Stanford, and Wharton. Through update letters that established my narrative, I was able to get admitted to all three. So take my advice, and get your narrative right the first time around.

How did you start advising admissions applicants?

I (Nate) started by re-reading college applications of younger friends after they had been deferred admission from Dartmouth. I’d go over essays about community service and cringe because I knew that admissions officers would read them as “vacation stories”. I would work with them to improve their narratives for the general admissions cycle and got a lot of satisfaction watching them get get into fantastic universities.

Did you hire admissions consultants when you applied?

No. We wanted more than just a series of worksheets and spell-checkers. We wanted someone who had actually been admitted to HBS, who knew what the classes and clubs were like, and who had enough contact with admission deans to know how they think. We built Ivy Admissions Group to be the service that we wish we could have used.

When did you decide to make this a business?

When we found ourselves spending 20+ hours per week advising MBA applicants for free! We realized the advice we were giving them was superior to what our advisees were getting from paid consultants, that we were more responsive than paid consultants, and that we sometimes found ourselves more invested in our advisees' admissions prospects than they were. Switching over to a professional service allows us to go deeper with a smaller number of motivated applicants.

How do you set your prices?

We have day jobs (as marketing managers), so we're not in it to earn a living. We believe in offering the best value of any admissions service, while charging and fair and consistent prices that are just enough to make it worth our own substantial time investment in each applicant. Definitely do your diligence before choosing a service, but let us know if you can find a better deal.

How do you determine which clients to work with?

We only work with clients we think we can offer substantial value. If we don't believe we can move the needle that much in a particular case, we figure that out upfront, refund that client's money, and try to refer them elsewhere. We believe our value is clearest for applicants applying to top schools, where the admissions process is most difficult.

When is the right round to apply to business school?

The conventional wisdom can be summed up as follows: apply when you’re ready but as early as you can. The common fear is that later in the cycle, particularly Round 3, it becomes “impossible” to get in. One admissions prognosticator I read said that she believes HBS admissions rates drop from 14% in Round 1 to 7% in Round 2 and below 3% in Round 3.

This is baloney. If you ask the admissions deans and dive into the data, you will find that while the number of applications fluctuates with each round and cycle, the acceptance rate remains reliably constant.

However, the key insight is that the applicant mix in each round is different.

Round 1

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Round 1 is for all the traditional MBA candidates: consultants, investment bankers, private equity investors, etc. If you worked at McKinsey or Goldman, your time to apply is in Round 1. And why wouldn’t you? You’re on “the path.” You’ve known since the day you started at your firm that everyone expects you to go to business school one day, maybe even with the company’s sponsorship. That means that you took your GMAT early, had your recommenders at the ready, and kept your resume up to date. All you needed was the essay prompt and you were ready for Round 1.

What happens to a candidate in this bucket who instead decides to apply later in a later round? Well, at the start of each application season, the admissions director allocates the number of admissions spots for each kind of profile. Because the traditional candidate applies early, by later rounds, almost all the spots for them are filled. You might be just the consultant the admissions committee was always looking for, but unfortunately they already gave your spot away. To prevent this from happening, follow the herd and apply with your cohort.

Round 2

Are you literally any other type of candidate? Someone with a background in entrepreneurship, manufacturing, military, corporate finance, or healthcare? Then feel free to apply in whichever round you like. If you apply early, all the spots will be open to you, but you will be competing with the most prepared and impressive applicants. HBS usually places some Round 1 applicants under “further consideration” each year, bumping them into the Round 2 applicant pool. It can be nerve-wracking waiting for months while your application collects dust, so if you apply early you need to prepare yourself mentally for this possibility.

Round 3

As for Round 3 – it’s not just for super impressive Olympic athletes and ex-presidents. Spots in the class are in short supply, but then again the applicant pool is much smaller too. More volatile industries like start-ups give less runway for employees to make important decisions like returning to business school. Accommodating those candidates are the reason why MBA programs have later admissions rounds. It is perfectly fine for those individuals to apply with confidence in Round 3; they should just make sure they’re applying then because that is the right time, not because they were lazy.

What Stonecutters know about writing a compelling MBA admissions essay

Harvard is home to a famous allegory often attributed to the late management guru Peter Drucker. The fable initially came to my attention from an address Harvard University President Drew Faust made in 2008 on the future of business education. It is The Parable of the Three Stone Cutters and while many versions of it exist, this one is mine:

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The Parable of the Three Stone Cutters

A rich nobleman was on a journey far away from home, when he encountered three laborers toiling away in the quarry by the side of the road. When his caravan stopped for a rest, he called out to them and asked each what he was doing.

The first rested his arm on his pick, wiped the sweat from his brow, and replied, 'I’m making a living – as honestly as I can.'

The second stood tall, puffed out his chest and replied, 'I’m working hard to become the best stone cutter in all these lands.'

The third barely looked up, instead pointing a finger skyward. 'I’m building a cathedral.'

The question that often follows this parable is which of the three stone cutters is the most compelling? Let’s put it another way. If you were an MBA admissions director and had one final spot in your class for a stone cutter, who would you admit? Are they all the same, or do their answers reveal something important about their work and motivations? Let’s examine them in turn.

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The First Stone Cutter is transactional. He is providing for his family and the nature of his work is ancillary. He provides no reason as to why he is a stone cutter instead of some other profession. Maybe his true calling was to be a brick layer. He doesn’t bring any passion to his description of his work and so we’re not that excited about it either. If we were to consider his future, what would we expect his next career move to be? We really have no idea. His vision offers no roadmap of where he’s been and where he is going. We really know nothing about him.

The Second Stone Cutter is professional. He is motivated to become the best version of himself. With confidence, we may assume that his current job is a necessary step on his path to become a better stone cutter. We can imagine a set of follow-on jobs – surveyor, foreman, architect – that he may pursue once he has learned everything he can at his current job. Sure, stone cutting may not be that interesting to us, but we can admire someone’s dedication to their chosen profession. Yet somehow his story is still lacking. His vision starts and ends with himself. He sounds like he is gliding through the world, not improving it. He offers no “cause” that we can be behind if we were inclined to support him, except perhaps a scholarship for stone cutter school.

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The third stone cutter is aspirational. He tells us nothing about his specific work or how he came to pursue it, yet we understand him instinctively. We know why he is doing what he is doing and have a clear road map of where we think he will go. He offers a mission that is audacious, concrete, and larger than himself. It’s a vision we can root for and one large enough for us to imagine concrete ways of helping.

What makes the Third Stone Cutter so much more compelling than the other two is his narrative. Though he may be engaged in the small work of cutting a single stone, he vividly shows us how it fits into a greater mission. His purpose in life has shocking clarity. In our hearts, he is so much more than just a stone cutter. He is a “cathedral builder”.

Now, think about how you can apply this parable in your MBA application. How can you become the Third Stone Cutter?