Guess Who's Coming To A Top Business School This Fall
It’s been a month since MBA Watch debuted at Poets&Quants. In that time, more than 90,000 different users have either participated in the social platform for MBA applicants which has racked up well over a quarter of a million views.
That’s not surprising. After all, it’s a safe place to share your profile and get immediate expert advice on how to improve your odds of admission to the top MBA programs. In just four weeks, nearly 300 current MBA candidates have shared their details on MBA Watch.
Altogether, it’s a revealing portrait of who applies to the top business schools and how they’re currently faring on waitlists, rejections and admits. The profiles show a remarkably diverse and highly accomplished group of candidates. Would-be applicants can gain a sense of the kind of competition they are facing at each of the leading business schools in the world.
HARVARD, STANFORD & WHARTON ARE THE MOST POPULAR FIRST-CHOICE MBA PROGRAMS OF THE MBA WATCH CROWD
The expert commentary–provided by consultants at mbaMission, Stratus Admissions Consulting, The MBA Exchange, HBS Guru Sandy Kreisberg, and P&Q Founder John A. Byrne–has included lots of insightful opinions on what admission directors are looking for in an ideal admit. Our experts are suggesting ways that candidates can improve their chances, along with much-needed tough love at times. And they are also providing realistic odds of getting into their first-choice school.
All the top schools are well represented. It will surprise few that Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business are the first choice schools of the largest number of MBA Watch players. Roughly 14% of the applicants say that either HBS or the GSB is the No. 1 MBA program they’ve targeted for admission. Wharton is next, with nearly 10% of the candidates making the school their first choice, followed by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (8%), Dartmouth Tuck (5%), MIT Sloan, Chicago Booth, and Duke Fuqua (4.6% each).
The most popular international school is INSEAD, followed by London Business School, HEC Paris, Cambridge Judge, and SDA Bocconi.
FAVORITE CANDIDATES OF EXPERTS AT HARVARD, STANFORD AND WHARTON
The odds-on favorite candidates currently at Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton? Our experts (you can search by school to see expert and community odds) give Ms. Software Accessibility, a college senior applying to Harvard’s 2+2 deferred admissions program, the best chance for an admit at HBS. The 22-year-old Duke University undergrad is majoring in computer science and has a perfect 4.0 grade point average and a 770 GMAT. She also has a three-month internship as a software engineering intern at a global tech company on her resume. Super impressive. Even though HBS admits just 12% of its applicants, MBA Watch experts give her a 70% chance of admission.
The favorite of experts at Stanford GSB, meantime, is also a young woman. Ms. Test Engineer has nearly five years of experience at two Fortune 500 companies. Originally from Austin, Texas, the 26-year-old woman now lives and works in Seattle. And her stats are in nosebleed territory: A 750 GMAT with a 3.74 GPA in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas. While Stanford GSB boasts the most selective prestige MBA program in the world, with an admit rate of under 7%, our experts give her a 45% chance of getting in.
For the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the candidate attracting the best odds right now is yet another woman. Ms. General Motors is a systems analyst at a Fortune Top 10 company, with five years of work experience, a 330 GRE score and a 3.2 in computer science from Northwestern University. Her goal: To pivot to product marketing management at a FAANG-level firm, continuing her woman-in-tech representation work. “I want to sell apps to real people, not just fellow geeks,” she says. Our experts say she has a 53% chance of getting accepted into Wharton’s MBA program.
MOST POPULAR PROFILE: MR. LOW GPA PRODUCT MANAGER
So which profiles are getting the most attention? At the very top of the list is a candidate who reflects a frequent challenge applicants face when applying to a highly selective school with a low-grade point average. Viewed by more than 1,200 P&Q users, Mr. Low GPA Product Manager may sport a 3.1 GPA but it is in a difficult subject–computer science–at a public Ivy–UCLA. More importantly, perhaps, he offsets his transcript with a jumbo GMAT score of 780. An aspiring venture capitalist and current product manager at a tech company in San Francisco, he’s hoping to get into Harvard Business School. What do the experts and the community think? You’ll have to find out.