Differences in Preparation – Overview of preparation for US MBA - II

Here is the second post (Completed). Again, the disclaimer holds true - My opinions are not unquestionable. These reflect my understanding and not the view of admission officers.

Before I start, let me tell you two major points that get ignored -

1. MBA selection is as much about you selecting a school as much about the admission committee selecting you! If you dont like the school or its culture, DO NOT apply for it. If you do, you would not feel part of it and will regret that. You might take a year off and prepare better for a school that you are a good fit for. If a school is not a good fit for you, the ad com also can read this from the essays and will figure this out.

2. Be yourself. It is difficult to lie and keep it consistent across all the application materials - Beliee me, if you lie in an essay, the other essays, the recommendations or the interview will let your lie out. All the application materials need to be consistent with each other - whatever your essay says should be tied with what your recommender tells about you with what the interviewer perceives your persoanlity is.

The goal of this post is
1. to outline the documents/things needed for application for a top - B School ( read top 15 B schools) in US
2. what the admission people look for

At the end of this article, I hope you will also get the differences between the US admission system and the Indian System. Most importantly,

Let me start with Part 2 - what the admission people look for as I can emphasise the things to be highlighted in the context of what is a good application when we discuss the various documents required.

Part 2: ( what the admission committee looks for )

The admission committee tries to maximise the diversity of the class, ensure that you have high chances of succeeding in your career and finally are fit with the culture.

1. Diversity: All the top B - schools in US want to have a class that is as diverse as possible in terms of profession, education, background, attitude, gender, race etc... This is encouraged so that every person gets a multi-faced experience and hears the diverse opinions of fellowmates, which enriches the class-room discussions and the whole MBA experience. This can be seen during study groups too. Each study group contains maximum diversity - No two people in a study group ( generally a team of 6 ) would be from the same country or same gender or same backgroud. This brings in varied perspectives and diverse opinions - which is a tough challenge to work with, but a great learning experience. Hence, to summarise, if by being a part of the class room, you bring more diversity, you are in. Otherwise, no!. So, for example, if you are a painter or if you are a theatre artist, you have higher chances of admissions in a top B School in US. Yes you guessed it right - hailing from software field is a bane becuase most of the people who apply from India, would be from software. ( But dont worry guys, it is because of software industry and the high salaries of software that you can dream about doing MBA at US! - atleast thats what I told myself and its true though - Imagine belonging to a non-software industry - would you dream of spending fortune to do MBA in a top B school in US? I would definitely not! ).

Anyway, the good thing is that although we all come from software, we will definitely have different unique personality and experiences. Try to show that out - For example,in my personal case, I showed how I was diverse as I came from a small town background who had to work hard to get to where I am now. I also showed them that though I was in software field, I was differnet because of my experiences.


2. Success Rate: The admission committee wants people who are not only worthy enough of representing the school name, but also can enhance the credibilities of the school in the long term. Network in a US top B School is a major investment and a major leverage too! Each school wants its alumni to rise to top positions - this not only builds the alumni network apart from bringing in more contributions, but also is important for the credibility of the school!

Obviously, each school definitely has its own set of metrics that determine whether you would succeed in the long run - although its not a formal system, they would have an informal evaluation mechanism. Some of the common ones are 1. Analytical Skills 2. Team Skills 3. Leadership skills ( and style ) 4. Passion about what you want to in your career 5. Values.

3. Culture: Each school has its own style and culture - some might be a 'friendly' culture, while for others it might be a 'team culture' and for others it might be 'uptight'. The admission committe wants to ensure that you are a good fit for the culture - they want you to fit well so that you can have a great time at the school. For example, some schools like Tuck, Stanford, Berkeley are small in size, which means each person would be familiar and be close to the other students and more like family-oriented culture.The culture would generally be a friendly and warm culture (I am no where mentioning that the other schools are not friendly, it is just that some emphasise on one aspect and some dont). On the other hand, some schools like Duke focus on team work a lot ( The people are friendly too - no doubt, I cant doubt it, as my husband is a Dukie :)- ). The location also affects the culture -some schools are in a small town, which means the studetns have high chances of hanging out together and hence get closer more and some are in a city giving each student higher chances of hanging out far away from each other.

Part 1: (the elements of an MBA application)
The goal of the entire application is to see the above qualities - the diversity you bring in, the high rate of success you would have in your career and the fit with the culture - the things part of an application procedure are

1. Essays: Generally, each application contains 5-6 essays that need to be composed. These essays are typically to showcase your personality - your passion about what you want to do with your life - the clarity of long term and short term goals is used partly to determine that-, your team work, leadership style, your diversity and your values.

Typically, one question would ask you about what your long term and short term goals are and how an MBA from the school would help you attain that. In addition to being clear about your short term and long term goals, your story has to be practical, passionate and of course should demonstrate how you value the school ( Dont think the admission committe is doing that to read good things about their schools and be flattered ;) Apart from that( now, dont tell this to any adcom:) ), it is a way to understand whther you really wnat to be in that school or are you to "apply just in case" to the school ).

Another question would be to see your team skills and another would revolve around leadership style.

Go through the list of questions for each school and you will get a sense of what the school is looking at. A school that gives a lot of importance to leadership might focus on more leadership in its essays, whereas a school that focuses on team work might emphasise on team skills ( Eg. Duke School of Business)

The word limit depends on the school. Some schools have explicit word limit ( +/- 10% of the word limit is acceptable ). On the other hand, some schools dont - It becomes tough in those cases - look for sites like admitted.com and others to see what the consultants say as an acceptable limit.


2. Resume: The resume needs to be 1-page , unless you have a work-ex of 10 years and too many accomplishments. A CAR format is preferred - Each bullet point should start with Context, Actions that you took and the result that you achieved.

The best thing is to show your resume to a totally new person and get him/her to explain what he sees when he reads the resume. This way you would understand how an admission committe would be reading it.

Generally, your most recent experience goes first.

Some points to consider:

1. If you have made good progress in career, its a great place to show that - Again,by showing that you have consistently progressed, you show that you have high rate of succeeding in the future.
2. If you have any extracurricular/diverse skills/ know several languages - you can write it down in the Misc part of your resume - This will definitely get read. For example, if you have trekked a mountain, won awards in sports or even if you are a band member - dont forget to mention this.
3. Maintain a balance between work and education. For those, with fewer years of experience, dont focus too much space on education - there are chances that people consider that you did that becuase you dont have many accomplishments at work.
4. If you have done charity work, make sure you write about it.

Finally, dont underestimate the work on resume - It would dfienitely take several versions especially if it is the first time and might take atleast a week. Plan ahead.

In some yahoo groups ( sept-intake-2006 or in the archives ), you might find resume books of students from different schools. Use that to understand how a resume should look.


3. Recommendations: Generally, almost all the schools with the exception of Stanford and Harvard( these want 3 recommendations) mandate 2 recommendations ( another one is optional, however not generally advised to do so).

Again, the schools want the recommenders to provide ratings of some qualities and description of your personalities in some of the questions. The questionairre is a mix of ratings and description oriented. As you probably guessed, though the questions to recommenders are not the same as those in your essays, it would be a good mechanism to see the consistency across all the elements. The recommender's viewpoint about your leadership style must be the same as what you have written. Or for example, if there is an outstanding accomplishment in your resume, say related to work, and the recommender does not even mention it directly. It rings bells that there is something fishy going on.... There should be consistency of personality across essays, recommendations and resume.

The recommendations should ensure that 1. it helps the adcom to evaluate consistency ( mentioned above ) 2. it gives more additional information not already given as much as possible. So, each recommender must be chosen with respect to the above perspective. After you choose your first recommender ( generally immediate supervisor), the second recommender should be chosen so that he/she underlines a different side of you or different things that you have done which is at the same time consistent with your resuem nad essays.



Coming to the most important question of whom to choose - the most common mistake people make - they higher the recommender's position, the more the recommendation carries weight! I cannot imagine something more glaringly wrong than this. The criteria should be how well the recommender knows you and not what his/her title is. Title is important too ( dont discount it), but the first priority is what I said above. For this reason, the best person (and most valuable person) to take one recommendation from is your immediate supervisor. If you have shifted jobs or you have joined a company recently ( in which case, the immediate supervisor does not know about you a lot), then you might want to consider an ex-supervisor. Unless you have a solid reason not to choose your immediate supervisor, you should always take one from an immediate supervisor who knows you a lot. Now, you must be thinking, oh shit, I never knew I had to maintain good relations with my ex'es too :) I hope not.

Forgot to add, if you are an entrepreneur or into non-profit, if there is an investor or a top client - you could take from them. You could take from your partners/other primary equity holders in the firm.

The second recommendation could be from someone with whom you have dealt outside your primary work responsibilities. This might be related to some extra curriculars that you involved with in your work or if you had a part time job/were trying to start something, a person who is in a higher position of authority and can write for you.

The third one ( mandatory for a few schools ) again would be to show a different side.

Use the optional essay if you think that there was some side of you that did not come across in the recommendations and you want to show it. ( Do not use it generally, unless the "added-value" is significantly higher )

Some points to remember

1. Dont go for a generic recommendation and go for school-specific form: The schools give an option of writing a generic recommendation that talks about all the qualities instead of answering the specific questions the school asks. Unless the recommender is extremely busy, my personal opinion is do not go for it. It either decreases the quality of the recommendation because obviously there are chances that certain things get missed as each school looks for different things or the recommendation is too lengthy that the adcom has to do a lot of work in figuring out the answers to the questions they want to find out. In additon, that would show that the recommender cannot spare time for you.

That is also the reason why you should not apply to schools just for sake of applying.

2. Give advance notice to recommenders and set milestones from him about deliverables: This might seem simple, but believe me, almost every MBA applicant faced a problem related to this. Either the recommender would postpone until the last minute and finally, in the last minute, fill out some junk without thinking through or would ask you to write and he would endorse. Now, you do not want the former route but it is not bad, but the latter is definitely the worst possible option. So, set milestones accordingly to the recommender.

3. Ensure that you help and set tone for the recommenders when writing a recommendation: Writing recommendations is not an easy task. Especially for 5 or 6 schools. First of all, the recommenders need to think about what your accomplishments were. Secondly, writing is a pain especially amidst their crazy schedules. Thirdly, 5-6 schools is a lot unless they have been doing a lot of writing! Anyways, let me give you things that worked well with recommenders for me ( I can say that I was quite successful not only because I am in a top 3 B-School but also because one of my recommenders reviewed his grammar book for writing recommendations).

How to get the max from recommenders:

a. Most importantly, it is a relationship building process not necessarily for the sake of MBA. You need to invest in it continuously and over a long term period. I just cannot overstress the importance of this one. The recommenders need to put in a lot of effort to deliver a quality recommendation.

b. Finish your resume and at least the major long term/short term goals essay before you talk to the recommender. You would identify the theme for your essays. Then, if you show them your resume and goals essay, they would get an idea of what your essays theme is. Also, by showing the resume, you would help them recollect your accomplishments.

Also, set the tone for them - the major things tha tyo uare emphasising in your application, the achievements that you would like to talk about and the stereotypes that you would like to ask their help to overcome. For example, in my personal case, as I had 3 years of experience only by the time I applied to B-School, there is the general stereotype that it is too short a time and people are quite "immature". I needed to consciously eliminate this stereotype. So, I told my recommenderst hat this would be one area where the admission committee would be keen about and requested the recommenders to pro-actively include about this.

c. Even before you start your resume and essays, be open about your MBA plans ( unless it hurts your career progress ) and keep them updated about your MBA application process. When you finish giving your GMAT, update them and keep telling them what hte next steps are at every stage of the project.

d. Offer help about the recommendation process, but leave the whole process upto them in whatever way they wanted to do: Some recommenders take the rules very strictly and would like to do everything themselves, but do offer help and dont hesitate to do a couple of errands for them.

4. GMAT Score : As mentioned earlier, being Indian sets high expectations especially if one aims for a top school - at least above 700s. Now, if you are a s/w engineer, you better have even higher. The expectation from everyone ( not necessarily Indians ) is that worst come worst, you would have at least 90% in Analytical section. ( Refer to my ealier post on GMAT preparatin for a detailed one).

Some schools dont mind if you take them 2 or 3 times, some do and some take the best score in each section. It depends on the school. Ask them for inputs about this.

Now, I know how different the Indian schooling is - applicants who did hteir schooling in cities have edge in english scores, while those who did it in towns or villages might not. But then, the best thing is to try your best and after that, use your background as a differnetiating point and use the fact that you should have overcome several obstacles because of that as a point of advantage.

5. Interview : Some schools have a mandatory interview along with application (Duke Fuqua, Michigan). Some schools have it on invite basis (like Harvard, Stanford, Wharton etc... ) and some schools like Tuck leave it up to you ( for Tuck, if you visit the school, you can give an interview , while if you are not, then you need to get an invite). It depends on the resources the school has - the admission committee strength, the alumni size in the place etc....

The questions that would be asked would be generally around the ones that you answered in your essays and resume. Now, the interviewers in most of the cases ( I dont remember that any school shows your entire application to them), have not gone through your application. Again, by reading the kind of essays and the stress, you would get an idea of teh questions the interviewer woudl ask and the qualities on which he would be rating.


The book by Richard Montauk "How to get into a top MBA school" is a worthy investment! I can vouch for it.

Differences in preparation between Indian System and US System: Obviously, needless to explain more, the US B-school selection mechanism is more well-rounded, looks at your personality rather than scores, takes into account lots of differnet factors - your leadership style, your team skills, your career progress etc.... and is more comprehensive. I definitely prefer the US system than the Indian system. In short, the indian system selects people based on number-crunching and analytical skills, while the US system based on your personality