You have a 720 GMAT score and a 3.75 GPA. You have made solid career progress and procured glowing recommendations. You have been actively volunteering in your community for years. You worked hard on your application and landed an interview at your target school, where you felt you did well. But… you did not get in. You must have done something terribly wrong in your interview or unwittingly made a mess of your essays, right? Not necessarily.
We recently spoke with the admissions director at a top MBA program who explained that his school does not give feedback to rejected candidates because it is simply a waste of the candidate’s and admissions staff’s time. The admissions director told us that the school would need to nitpick in order to give candidates something to work on and to ensure that they filled the time during these hypothetical feedback sessions. He explained that nine times out of ten, the feedback that they offered to weaker candidates would be patently obvious and that countless strong applicants had done nothing wrong at all. In fact, most candidates create their best applications, but space is simply limited in the class.
Although this may not be comforting if you were rejected, you may just have been the victim of a competitive process during a competitive year. We suggest that you honestly assess your own candidacy and consider staying the course as you continue applying. Spending significant time revamping your applications may be a waste of time and a losing strategy. Patience may prove beneficial in the long term.
In this weekly series, our friends at MBA Career Coaches will be dispensing invaluable advice to help you actively manage your career. Topics include building your network, learning from mistakes and setbacks, perfecting your written communication, and mastering even the toughest interviews.
Once you have refined your understanding of the results you have produced in your work and couched each bullet on your resume in lay terms that a high school graduate could understand, it is time to make sure your bullets pass the Cause and Effect Test. If you have really thought about the impact of your work and ensured each bullet passes The CEO Test, then there is a good chance you are also passing The Cause and Effect Test. But it happens occasionally that even though a bullet delineates a clear result, it is unclear how the candidate directly achieved that result. Let’ consider an example:
Cause and Effect Test Fail:
Improved margins by 26% and created $35M in new profits.
This bullet passes both of the previous tests: it is clear that the CEO would care about this fact, and anyone with a high school education can follow this language. But what is unclear is exactly how the candidate achieved the result. If the reader can’t connect the dots between your actions and your results, then you will at best get partial credit for them.
Cause and Effect Test Pass:
Analyzed daily sales volumes and identified opportunity to increase price point in Midwest, resulting in 26% margin improvement and $35M in new profits.
Now we can see!! The candidate produced this result through her analytical skills – she looked at a big data set, extracted some valuable takeaways, and used those to drive profitability improvements. Now we want to give her a job! Let’s look at a few more.
With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.
I have talked to a ton of students recently who were surprised by some detail of test day—and that detail affected their performance. Let’s talk about what is going to happen when you finally get in there to take the test.
When you arrive
There will be some kind of outer waiting area, an inner office containing the biometric equipment, and finally the “inner sanctum”: the testing room.
When you first arrive, you will be asked to read (and digitally sign) a bunch of legalese and will show your ID. Check the guidelines to determine what kind of ID you must bring.
But wait! You are not done with security yet. They will take a digital photo of you. You will also have the veins in your palm digitally scanned—turns out our palm veins are even more unique than fingerprints. Who knew?
Finally, before you enter the inner sanctum, you will place all of your belongings (except your ID) into a locker to which you will have the key. Everything goes in this locker: your wallet or purse, your money, your mobile phone, your keys, everything. Do not bring any study notes into the test center with you, do not use any electronic devices, and do not write anything down at any time—even on the breaks. Do not give them any reason to think you might be cheating.
In this weekly series, our friends at MBA Career Coaches will be dispensing invaluable advice to help you actively manage your career. Topics include building your network, learning from mistakes and setbacks, perfecting your written communication, and mastering even the toughest interviews.
Once your bullets make sense to a lay person, what you have accomplished can truly shine. Or, if your resume is like most people’s your complete lack of accomplishment will stick out like a sore thumb. That’s not because you haven’t accomplished meaningful things in your career, it’s because you haven’t structured your bullets to emphasize results.
Why does this matter? Again, remember, you are seeking more responsibility; you want to manage and lead; you want to have a bigger impact. Your ability to do each of those things rests on your ability to understand the impact you have already had and how the work you have done has influenced real business outcomes, even if you were the junior-most member of the team (take note consultants, accountants, and bankers!!) Even in a team environment, you need to uncover your meaningful individual contributions to the shared outcome.
So that means that each bullet on your resume needs to contain a result. The outcome and impact needs to be visible and, where possible, measured. Did your work lead to estimated time or money saved? Did the relationship you built result in a quantifiable sale? Did your analysis drive a key recommendation that changed the final result of the project in measurable ways? Your bullets need to highlight your accomplishments.
The GMAT is the sole piece of data that is truly consistent from one candidate to another. Therefore, many MBA applicants get carried away and place undue emphasis on it, when the test is only one of several important aspects of an application. In extreme cases, some applicants consider quitting their jobs to focus on the GMAT full time—not a great idea!
Why is it not ideal to quit your job to improve your GMAT score? Quite simply, it sends the message that you cannot manage what many other MBA candidates can manage quite well. In your application, you will need to account for any time off; if you honestly note that you quit your job to study for the GMAT, you will place yourself at a relative disadvantage to others who have proved that they can manage work, study, and possibly volunteer work simultaneously. By taking time off, you will send the unintended message that you cannot achieve what many do unless you have an uneven playing field. This is not the message you want to send your target academic institution, which wants to be sure that you can handle the academic course load, a job hunt, community commitments, and more.
Regardless of the admissions committees’ perceptions of taking time off, we believe a calm and methodical approach is your best bet. By furthering your career as you study, you will have a sense of balance in your life. On test day, you will have a far better chance of keeping a level head, ensuring that you will do your best—which, of course, was the point in the first place.
A first-of-its-kind, on-demand MBA application experience that delivers a personalized curriculum for you and leverages interactive tools to guide you through the entire MBA application process.
You have a 720 GMAT score and a 3.75 GPA. You have made solid career progress and procured glowing recommendations. You have been actively volunteering in your community for years. You worked hard on your application and landed an interview at your target school, where you felt you did well. But… you did not get in. You must have done something terribly wrong in your interview or unwittingly made a mess of your essays, right? Not necessarily.
