Mission Admission: Leave Your Parents At Home!
June 19th, 2009
Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.
While this MBA admission tip will probably seem obvious to most, with the arrival of “Gen Y” or “The Millennials,” more and more parents, who grew accustomed to helping guide high-school and college choices, are getting involved in the MBA admissions process and they are forcing admissions officers to shake their heads.
Of course, having a parent call to see if an important document was received, because an applicant is on the other side of the world and can’t call during work hours, is certainly not the same as having a parent call to ask why his/her son or daughter hasn’t gotten an interview invitation yet. Unless, the matter is entirely practical, candidates have nothing to gain by having parents act as their agents. On the contrary, they have everything to lose. An aggressive parent can reflect badly on an applicant for a variety of reasons, but of course, the most obvious is that it suggests that the candidate may not be mature and may lack the ability to make independent judgments.
Think very carefully before involving your parents in any aspect of the application process – applicants succeed all the time despite their parents sitting at home and waiting for great news.
Posted in Blogroll, Mission Admission