Not every strong MBA applicant gets admitted on the first try, but a rejection does not mean that the door to business school is closed. In many cases, not being accepted the first time around gives candidates the opportunity to reflect, improve key elements of their profile, and come back with a stronger, more compelling submission when they reapply.
In this episode of The mbaMission Podcast, host Harold Simansky is joined by mbaMission Founder Jeremy Shinewald and mbaMission Managing Director Debbie Choy to discuss what separates successful business school reapplicants from reapplicants who simply resubmit the same materials. Together, they explain how MBA programs evaluate reapplicants, what kinds of changes admissions committees hope to see, and why authenticity is often the key to a stronger second attempt.
The conversation covers a range of important topics, including refining career goals, addressing weak test scores, strengthening school-specific fit, and deciding whether to broaden one’s school list. Harold, Debbie, and Jeremy also share stories of past reapplicant clients who ultimately earned admission to top MBA programs after taking a more thoughtful and strategic approach.
If your first MBA application cycle did not go as planned, this discussion offers both practical advice and reassurance: A rejection is not the end of your MBA dreams; a second application can absolutely lead to success.
New episodes ofThe mbaMission Podcast are released every Tuesday on all major streaming platforms, with full video episodes available on . Sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with Harold, Jeremy, Debbie, or another member of mbaMission’s admissions team.
Table of Contents
Success the Second Time Around
Harold Simansky: Today, we’re here to talk about what it means to be a reapplicant—some do’s, some don’ts. And helping us today is our colleague Debbie. From what I understand, you help people with a lot of reapplications. That’s something that, to some degree, all of us do, but the reality is I think you have some really unique insights. Also having some insights today is my co-host, founder of the firm, Jeremy Shinewald.
Jeremy Shinewald: I want to ask off the top if I can, and I don’t want to put anyone on the spot, but were any of us reapplicants?
Harold Simansky: I was a reapplicant at MIT Sloan. I got waitlisted. In actual fact, things weren’t quite working out for me on the personal side; it wasn’t quite the time to go. I then reapplied, and at the end of the day, I got to where I needed to be.
Jeremy Shinewald: I only applied once, and I’m very happy with where I went and how my life worked out. But I think I had a lot of the preconceived notions that people have about reapplications, that it was like a scarlet letter and that you would never get in as a reapplicant. Not true.
Debbie Choy: Actually, the good news is [that] schools welcome reapplicants. In fact, at HBS [Harvard Business School], 10% of the class are reapplicants. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy. And I think that is the tough part that I always try to level set with my clients who are reapplicants. It’s that you may have been through the process, you may know what it’s like to write essays, put your application together, or even go through the interviews. But the second time around, it’s actually harder.
Jeremy Shinewald: A quote that I love to use is from MIT Sloan’s former admissions director, Rod Garcia, who was there for, I don’t know, 700 years or something like that. And he once said to me, “A rejection is not a life sentence.” He said, “People have to have to change their perspective on it.” Yes, there might be a small group where you have to look at the tea leaves and say, “Maybe I’m looking at the wrong schools or maybe it’s unrealistic for me.” But there’s a good swath of people where they [the school] just made a choice among very competitive applicants. For whatever reason, you didn’t make it this year, but it’s not a repudiation of you as a human being or as an applicant, and you very well might get in next year. It’s as simple as that.
Refining Authentic Career Goals for Your Reapplication
Harold Simansky: But to be a reapplicant, what does it actually mean? Does that mean copying and pasting last year’s application and just sort of hop[ing] that the world has changed a little bit? Which it does. Or is it a full teardown? Think about everything from goals to future career path, whatever it might be. How do you recommend that?
Debbie Choy: That’s a really great question. And I never recommend cutting and pasting from your past application. Think about, they want to see reflection. Schools want to see that you have reflected on this setback and that you have identified ways to move beyond it, to improve. So think about the three big areas that schools are looking for in terms of improvements. Think about your career goals. Of course, they want to see refined career goals. They want to see that you have actually done some work, talked to alums or mentors as to whether your career goals still make sense. And I would say 99% of the reapplicants that I work with refine or polish or tweak their career goals in some way.
Harold Simansky: Debbie, I think that’s an important point. We’re generally talking about tweaking. We’re not talking about going from “I want to be X” to something that is anti-X, that is completely different.
Jeremy Shinewald: Right, but I would say, yes, if you were in the financial services world and you said, “I want to move into hedge funds” one year, and the next year, you’re like, “I want to be in product management at Apple,” it would be really radical. But I think there is room to say in an optional essay or in your career essay, “Over the last year, I’ve done some soul searching. I’ve refined my career goals.” You don’t need to explain why you don’t want to go into hedge funds. And you could say, “I’m now interested in an internal corporate development job. I’ve got this experience. I’ve been in banking. I want to go work in the internal MA function, be tactical, and here’s why.” And that’s okay. You could theoretically have gone into either path. And now you’ve got a more thoughtful path that ideally you’re saying because you feel like it’s true to you and you’ve got the experience, and that’s fine. It just shouldn’t be radical.
Debbie Choy: Absolutely, Jeremy. And what’s even better is if you have made some step towards your future career goals, whether you are getting a promotion, you got a promotion, whether you’ve shifted your role somewhat or taken on an external project with somebody or a firm—a side gig in that new career goal.
Jeremy Shinewald: Right, there’s a catalyst. Something has excited you in the last year, and now you’re like, “I’ve done some thinking about it, and I did some project or there was some experience that I had”—in my theoretical world, [this is] someone moving into corporate development—“and now I’m really turned on to this idea, and it makes sense for me.”
Harold Simansky: I actually see it saying the same thing but slightly different. And what I mean by that is I will see people who come back as reapplicants, I will read their application, that first application, and I say, “Well, that’s not authentic. I understand why you were rejected, because you tried to craft a career goal that you think they wanted to hear, that you thought the admissions committee wanted to hear.” You know that a lot of people after business school go to private equity. At that point, you said, “Well, I want to go into private equity,” even though it made no sense.
Jeremy Shinewald: I dealt with that this morning. I had a brainstorm with someone this morning. This person kept saying, “Is this enough? Should I be saying private equity?” Like, you’re not on a private equity track. You’re in finance, but you don’t have to think this excites the admissions committee. They want to know what works for you. You will be a reapplicant if you keep going down this path.
Debbie Choy: Exactly.
Harold Simansky: Yeah. Product management is the natural thing for you. Guess what? You actually like it. Tell that story. Don’t start creating a story that you think someone else wants to hear. Or worse, and I’ll sort of put in a slight criticism, I would say, to a lot of people who come back as reapplicants. They say, “But I listened to my friend. I just did what he did or what she did.” And immediately, that’s a red flag. You’re not living your life.
Debbie Choy: And for Stanford, a lot of people write about entrepreneurship, even though it has nothing to do with their background or what they want to do. So that is not authentic.
Variations in Reapplication Policies
Jeremy Shinewald: We should do an episode on how to become a reapplicant. Because these are the mistakes you will make. Just in terms of the application process itself, there’s a lot of variation from school to school. Some schools will make you complete an entirely new application a year later.
Harold Simansky: That’s right.
Jeremy Shinewald: Others will ask you to write one reapplication essay. You could almost, this is unconventional, but sometimes almost lobby a little bit and be like, “I’d like to complete the entire new application if you’d allow me to.” I’ve had an applicant do that.
Harold Simansky: That’s happened to me as well.
Jeremy Shinewald: An applicant at one school is like, “I feel like I’ve got more of a story to tell. I don’t want to just write one essay.” So at Harvard, Stanford, you’re applying all over again. New slate. Columbia typically has had a reapplicant essay. Some ask for both. Some will say, like Wharton will say, “Complete this entire application and a reapplicant essay.”
Harold Simansky: Yeah.
Whether Schools Review Your Previous File
Jeremy Shinewald: One thing applicants really, really worry about is are they going to go back to my old file?
Harold Simansky: That’s right. That is always a concern, absolutely.
Jeremy Shinewald: What do you tell that applicant?
Debbie Choy: I think the best plan is to expect them to go back to your old file. And of course, the hope is they don’t. We cannot control what schools do, even if their policies say, “We don’t,” right? So you want to make sure that your new application adds new data points if they do go back to the old file. And at the same time, make sure that your new application is relatively standalone, so that if they don’t go back to your old file, they’re not wondering, “What is she talking about?,” right?
Harold Simansky: We’ll sometimes talk about reapplying as you’re writing a sequel. The bottom line is they already know something about you. Maybe they’ve already gotten some element of the origin story. It’s like, okay, what happens next?
Jeremy Shinewald: I think a great point to make is that I’m not even sure that many schools go back, and they’re not transparent about these things. It’s really hard to know. If you ask an admissions officer, a lot of them say, “Yeah, we might.” I remember you [Harold] and I were chatting with Dawna Levenson about that. Dawna Levenson, the MIT [Sloan] admissions director. But I think you should just approach this as if they are. And that’s not dreadful if you did a good job of it. But my inclination is that a lot of these admissions officers are busy, they’ve got a big caseload, so to speak. It takes a lot of extra effort to go back and read a whole bunch of old files. My sense is that they’re not maybe meticulously looking through. They might quickly look at a report that was done at the very end of your previous application.
Harold Simansky: I always get the sense that if anything, they’re looking at recommendations.
Debbie Choy: Exactly, right. And I think that they might do it at a later stage. So when you get to the interview stage, for example. We know Harvard definitely does at the interview stage, or in the final look of the file. They might refer to some things to see what really has changed.
The Different Types of MBA Reapplicants
Harold Simansky: And in fact, we’re talking about reapplicants as if it’s simply one big thing. Every reapplicant looks the same. But there are many different types of reapplicants. There are folks who, they’ve got to fix something. If you fix it, it works well. If you go in there and get a terrible GRE or GMAT score, we know what the problem is. Go ahead, fix that. At the same point, if everything is sort of mushy, if the story again isn’t authentic, if there are things so that it just doesn’t feel like it’s coming together, by all means, you can be a very successful reapplicant. You have to work hard at it, though.
Jeremy Shinewald: Right. And we always, at the end of the year, we always send out an email to our database. So sign up for our emails, and you can take us up on a free consultation. At the end of the year, we have this kind of goodwill gesture to the community out there. Anyone who hasn’t worked with us, who’s received a rejection, we’ll do some free what we call ding reviews. So you’ve been dinged by the admissions committee. And inevitably, when you have those conversations with the applicants, 9 out of 10, 19 out of 20 of them know where they went wrong. They’re like, “Okay, my GMAT didn’t work out. I couldn’t get it done in time. I tried.” Or, “Yeah, I recognize now, looking back, I didn’t have much beyond my professional experience. I’m now building my profile,” or some other version of that story.
Harold Simansky: Taking HBS CORe, taking MBA Math, something like that.
Jeremy Shinewald: Usually there’s a lot of awareness of why one didn’t get in. Every once in a while, someone’s quite crestfallen about the whole thing, and they just might be in that category of like, hey, it didn’t work out for you, and there’s nothing wrong with you as an applicant. I once asked Harvard’s Dee [Deirdre] Leopold how many more people she could admit from the pool. And I wish I could remember… I think she said maybe a little more than half of a class. She had basically said, “There are probably 500 more people in the pool who I could admit and not water down our quality.” So you could be one of those 500 people.
Debbie Choy: Yeah.
Jeremy Shinewald: And so you might not have done anything wrong; you might have done a lot right.
Debbie Choy: Sometimes it is a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Harold Simansky: That’s right.
How External Factors Can Affect Admissions Decisions
Debbie Choy: I had a client a few years ago in the blockchain industry, and that happened to be a time when [it was] still pretty new; it was unproven, so to speak, right? So, fast forward a few years. If he had applied now, being in the blockchain industry, I think that would have gotten a lot more credibility and a lot more understanding.
Harold Simansky: I think we may be at one of those situations right now with international students. There’s chaos out there, to be honest with you. It’s just a very hard time to sort of read the tea leaves. Maybe it’ll be working for international clients great this year. I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s better next year, when some of the visa issues will be worked out a little bit more.
Jeremy Shinewald: And what I would say is that where there’s risk, there’s reward. So I think if you’re applying this year, you’re probably applying to a thinner international applicant pool. All the applicants this year, I don’t think we have anyone from the mbaMission world who couldn’t get a visa this year. Everyone arrived on campus. And so by next year, maybe that situation has calmed down. I think another good example of sort of like your blockchain issue on a macro level, sometimes, the year’s just much more competitive. Sometimes you have a COVID year or something like that, or a financial crisis year.
Harold Simansky: Or the Meta layoffs, the Meta-tech layoffs. Half a million people out of work is crazy.
Debbie Choy: Yeah, and the tech pool has suddenly doubled, right?
Jeremy Shinewald: And deferred applications are becoming more popular, they’re eating up portions of the class. So even if the number of applications is held constant, there’s sort of fewer available seats in the class. Let’s talk about those deferred applicants. So what happens if I applied and got rejected as an HBS 2+2 or a Schwarzman applicant at Wharton or whatever it might be? It’s four or five years later. I’m applying now. Do I care about that application I put in with them when I was a senior?
Debbie Choy: Well, technically, a lot of schools will ask you, “Have you ever applied before?” So technically, you should check the box on the application form. The good news is that so much has changed that I wouldn’t worry too much about what I wrote four or five years ago. I would worry more about crafting that new application. What we see anecdotally, and also I think it bears out in some of the statistics, is that deferred applicants actually tend to be more successful when they do reapply four or five years down the road. It could be that they’ve been through the process before, so they know what to expect. It could also be that when you applied four or five years ago, you know what the admissions officers were looking for. So maybe you crafted your career in a way to look for recognition, to look for promotions, to work closer with future recommenders. You craft your career in a way that sets you up better as a reapplicant. So that’s kind of my take on it.
Harold Simansky: Right. And listen, what I also say to folks is once you’ve been through the application, you just learn so much, just going through that process. So almost because of that reason alone, you’re going to have a better application as a reapplicant.
Debbie Choy: You learn so much about yourself.
Harold Simansky: That’s right.
Debbie Choy: Right? That self-reflection of thinking about your future career goals, imagining five, ten, fifteen years out, what you want to be. So I think that really helps.
Harold Simansky: Let me just mention one other piece of it, which I think is important, where you almost lean into the reapplication process. And what I mean is there are folks who say, “I’m going to give Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton a try.” And the reality is you feel comfortable doing that, knowing you can apply the following year, because at that point, you’re on this 18-month process. You’re really embracing this notion of reapplicants actually enhance their chances, and you’re saying, “Okay, I’ll shoot for the moon this year. If it doesn’t work out, I’m already so much smarter, I’m going to go right back at it.” [You’re] going to get that marginal benefit of A, being a reapplicant, that boosts things. B, actually having gone through the process once, that boosts things. Maybe moving from a Round 2 to a Round 1, that boosts things. And at the end of the day, being a reapplicant and thinking very strategically about it is something of a great approach.
Real MBA Reapplicant Success Stories
Jeremy Shinewald: So let’s talk about, let’s make it real. Why don’t we all go through, and we’ll talk about a favorite reapplicant or two? You’re our guest, Debbie, why don’t you go first?
Debbie Choy: Well, actually, I have two examples, but I’ll talk about the first one. One of my favorite clients—in oil and gas in the Middle East and a very strong applicant. As I read through his past application, I noted that his career goals were not as crisp as I would like. He had a lot of leadership experiences in extracurricular activities, and he focused a lot on that in his narrative, his storyline. And I said, “Look, at the end of the day”—Harvard, he was reapplying to Harvard, his dream school—“Harvard is looking for professional achievements. So why don’t we focus more on that? Why don’t we talk more about your leadership and the impact that you’re making at work?” Because of the work that he does, which is super technical, I really served as that bridge between what he does and translating it into something in the essays that even the layperson can understand. So that’s where we spent a lot of time. And also on his recommendation letters; he didn’t even have access to his recommendation letters the last time, which is something of a blind spot for a lot of reapplicants. Whenever I ask them, “Hey, can you share with me your recommendation letters from the last time?” And they say, “Well, I don’t have it.” So that’s an area that I see a lot of success in helping reapplicants kind of work through and improve.
Harold Simansky: Let me share maybe my favorite reapplicant story. A guy reapplying to Harvard, he had reapplied to Harvard second round, really a strong applicant, really a strong person, had been at a company for quite a bit of time. At that point, then, didn’t get in, and he actually said, “Let me change up some things in a very dramatic way.” He switched jobs. He then applied Round 1. And what I always tell people, you can switch jobs. You have to explain why, and then why you want to go to business school six months later. And he was very clear about that.
He made it very clear in his application: “I am switching jobs in preparation for me to go to business school. I am taking a new job for me to learn X, Y, and Z, which I can learn in six months. That’s all that I need.” In fact, it actually made the length of his job, meaning as short as it was, something of almost an advantage. So he was very thoughtful. It also laid the groundwork of “I’m doing this now to test it out, and then I’m going to business school to really double down on it.” And he got one new recommendation, which I think was really important, from the company he had switched to. I think that was really important. But then he got into Harvard, wonderful experience, and in candidly being a reapplicant, he understood what he needed to do to make himself a much better applicant, which he did.
Jeremy Shinewald: I’ll share a war story, too. I had an applicant who was just fantastic, just everything about her, just did everything exceptionally well. She was from a slightly different industry—nothing that unusual, but I don’t want to discuss it, because it would be revealing of her personal details. And everything she did just oozed confidence. She always did everything a little better. But her GRE was middling to low, and it drove her bananas. And I said, “You know what? Apply.” Like, we’re all the way there. She was working on it, just apply. And she got interviews, and she didn’t get in. And she was very disappointed. But she reapplied, we worked together, and lo and behold, her GRE score went up a few points into a competitive range, had the same heart and soul in the application, the same individual, slightly refined goals, but it wasn’t like she copied and pasted, but to her, it was fairly obvious that everything was really strong except for her score. And again, so much effort, and she got in, she went to HBS and is now a consultant at McKinsey and is very, very happy. And she looks back on that time in that first year and is just like, “God, I was so stressed out, and I was so worried about this test, and it felt like such an obstacle.” And at the end of the day, she overcame it, and she’s there. She’s wonderful.
Harold Simansky: Just again, somewhat parenthetically here, if someone is going to be a reapplicant and has really struggled with their tests, that’s the time to really think, “I took the GRE. Let me switch to the GMAT; let me switch to the executive assessment.” This is the time to do that, and that maybe gives you that little bit of boost that you need to actually get in.
Following Up with Admissions and Reiterating Fit
Jeremy Shinewald: One reapplicant strategy that I remember using with this applicant is—she was so disappointed—and I said, “You know what? It’s okay. You’ve developed relationships with the admissions officers. Just reach out to them and say, ‘It was disappointing to go through’”—like in a positive way—“I was ultimately disappointed not to get in this year, but I really appreciated the interest you took in my application over the last year. And I just want to let you know that I will be reapplying in the fall next year, because I’m determined to be at your school.” And then when she reapplied, she sent them a note saying, “Just following up on this email. I have reapplied. I just want you to know, and I’m looking forward…” And she just found a small way to ensure that she was relevant, that she wasn’t lost or forgotten in this process. And that can go a long way. I don’t know that that made the difference for her, but I believe that someone had to have said, “This is a good, thoughtful, conscientious, dedicated person. She will accept us if we accept her.” I think it made a very subtle, important difference for her.
Debbie Choy: I think that’s a very smart move. I’ve had clients that have followed up on relationships with admissions committee officers at Columbia, for instance, and even had some feedback as to what aspects of their candidacy to improve. In some cases, the adcom person even suggested, “Hey, have you thought about the J-term program or other programs that might be a better fit?” In this case, they decided to reapply, but to the regular program. And I said, “Look, you’ve got to follow up with the admissions officers and explain a little bit why you decided to reapply as opposed to switching to another program.” But keeping that relationship going, I think, is super important.
Harold Simansky: And actually, sometimes I look for that. I had a woman applying to Tuck, and Tuck is a school very focused on the “why Tuck?” piece of it. Very, what I would say, personal. The application is very personal. And I read her application. It was good in some ways, but it could be written for any school. So the key to her successful reapplication strategy was to really go and visit, make personal connections, drop even some names in the application itself, talk about those things [that] are only Tuck. And again, that’s the only way she changed her application. And she was successful in the end.
Debbie Choy: I had a reapplicant at Tuck, same thing. He spent most of the year networking with Tuckies and really got that firsthand knowledge about the Tuck culture and what it’s like and really demonstrated it in his reapplicant essays. And I think that made a ton of difference.
Harold Simansky: I don’t want to be flip here, but I’ll be a little flip. Like Jeremy said, we do a lot of ding reviews, and I’ll look at things. I’ll talk to the person first, look at their resume, then I’ll read their application. And sometimes I think to myself, “I have no idea who this person is.” I’ve just gotten to know a person, I read the application, and I’m like, “What just happened here? There’s a short circuit.” I think when you reapply, really think to yourself about how to be authentic. How do I tell my story, not the story that they think I should tell? I think that that is a very powerful way of getting a much better application.
Debbie Choy: And also just in terms of the general strategy, as a reapplicant, don’t be afraid to cast a wide net. Include some schools that you haven’t applied to before, and you might be surprised at the results.
Jeremy Shinewald: Great point. Thank you for being here, Harold. And Debbie, so nice to see you. Glad we came out here. Best of luck if you’re a reapplicant!
