MBA

Well, I dealt with the aftermath of the transparency about interview invitation numbers in Round 1 today. Someone called and asked directly why we couldn't send out all the invitations on one day. Good question. Here's the answer:

We could..but it would be February 13, not January 31. Maybe that would be better...a later date, but just one date. The way we've structured it now - 3 waves - is to accommodate the reality of a (human) Admissions Board trying to give thoughtful attention to a lot of applications. And each application needs to be reviewed twice. So we have to have a little bit of flex in terms of the notification dates. The senior team in Dillon does (a lot of) other things besides reading applications. Board member X may be pulled into an IT crisis. Board member Y needs to pull together the budget for the next fiscal year. I went to NYC last week to do an admit event for Round 1 admits. All these things can throw off an application-reading timetable, so we build in those extra two weeks (two waves) to make sure we've got bandwidth to make careful decisions. We're not doing this by machine. It's just us.

As always, hope this helps.

I realized that I had promised some news about this on January 15 and didn't want you to have to wait over the long weekend to hear this (Note: We are closed on Monday, January 16 in observance of Martin Luther King Day).

Here's the story:

Round 2 interviews will be conducted between February 15 and March 9. We will be in London, Paris, Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and New York in addition to the HBS campus. Skype interviews may also be an option for candidates located outside the United States who are unable to travel. Full details will be available in the interview invitations.

This is our plan for timing:

We will send out email invitations on the following 3 Tuesdays - January 31, February 7, and February 14. On February 14, all candidates not invited to interview will be notified of their "release."

Now, please pay attention - this is a new level of transparency that I hope is helpful, but I need you to understand that I am talking about what happened in Round 1 vs. telling you exactly what will happen in Round 2 (which we obviously DON'T KNOW now).

The pattern of interview invitation volume in Round 1 was:

• Week 1 (first wave of invitations): 750 invitations sent
• Week 2 (second wave): 80 invitations sent
• Week 3 (third/final wave): 25 invitations sent

Round 2 won't be identical, but I think it will be directionally similar. Please hear me when I say that the timing of the interview invitation is NOT a signal of the strength of a candidate. The only thing that it maps to is the ability of our Admissions Board to move through their (large) reading allocations.

I hope this is clear and helpful - if it's not, call me at 617-496-6835 and tell me so.

Just a couple of bullet points:

• The deadline will be NOON, Boston time.
  • Truth is, we're not going to actually turn the system off at 12:01pm, so please don't panic if the servers are jammed and you're having trouble submitting. Obviously, you'll feel less stressed if you don't wait until the last minute, but I'm a realist.
• You really do need a test score at the time of submission in order to be considered in this round.
  • You can't leave it blank or enter 000s...one thing we just can't do is add score reports once we set the review process in motion. We're printing applications on January 10 and sending applications out to the Board for review right away.
  • This includes submitting a new (improved?) test score mid-round. Can't do it.
• We cut recommenders a little bit of slack.
  • We'll continue to accept recommendations for about a day or so after the deadline. Your application will have started through the review process whether or not all 3 recs have been received. It's your responsibility to make sure all of your recommendations are in - and you do that through the AY system, not by calling our office.

Expect to hear about Round 2 interview dates, locations, and notification plans around January 15.

Happy 2012.

As always, I have lots of New Year's resolutions and a couple of them have to do with this column. I think I'm going to refer to this endeavor as a "column" vs. a "blog." Maybe that's old-fashioned but "blog" seems to imply a level of frequency that just isn't going to happen. Which leads me to my point:

I'm only going to talk about admissions issues here. I could spend all day every day curating content about what goes on at HBS - both in and outside the classroom. It's wonderful. It's amazing. But what I want to do here is to give you as clear and clean a window into the application process and what happens here inside Dillon House (the home of the Admissions Board). I'll tell you about deadlines, procedures for how we communicate on deadline and notification days, talk about the timetable for interview invitations and try to capture and respond to the frequently-asked-questions coming in over email and by phone at any given moment in the cycle.

Please explore every nook and cranny of www.hbs.edu to learn about the School. There's lots to show and tell and I hope that you find this place as captivating as I do. But don't be worried or surprised if days or even weeks go by without anything in this column. As I say (over and over again - with apologies for being repetitive), my hope is to be helpful as you go through the application process and experience the natural curiosity about how we do things. This "curiosity" will sometimes be replaced by "anxiety" as you wait for decisions. We understand. We, the flight crew, will do everything we can to keep you informed of what's going on as we fly the plane.

So, that said, I'll do a Round 2 application deadline update on Friday.