Wharton Admissions Blog

Wharton has launched an Admissions Blog that you can see here:
http://adcomblog.wharton.upenn.edu/

I have to say that I'm really impressed with their approach to admissions. They really try hard to make sure that we have what we need to know when it comes to applying. If you read the comments on the first post, you can see my overly effusive praise of Wharton. I guess my only saving grace is that I'm hidden behind a pseudonym. I probably praise Wharton too much, but honestly their approach is impressive. I wish the other schools would follow their lead.

Force over time

Probably the most powerful force on earth is the geologic force. When we look at the vastness of the grand canyon, or we gape in awe at the sheer majesty of the alps, we are marveling at a process that took tens or hundreds of thousands of years to create. Not created in a singular burst of energy, but rather through a sustained pressure that is maintained for eons.

I have been dealing with an infestation of weeds in my yard for the past couple of weeks. They are a nasty type of sand bur. They have the little barbed heads, so that when you pull it out, it hurts. Even after you pull out the sticker it leaves a poison in the wound that makes it hurt for hours. To get ahead of these weeds I need to pull three to four buckets of weeds per week. There are so many weeds that if I tried to pull all of them at once it would just burn me out. Towards the end I would become shoddy in my work, and miss many of the weeds that I should be getting. Not to mention I would miss all of the seedlings that haven't sprouted yet. Instead of taking that approach, I have taken a more sustained approach. By spending thirty minutes three to four times a week I allow myself to make significant progress on the problem without burning myself out. I accomplish much more over time than I could in a short period of time.

There is a great analogy here to the application process. Instead of trying to jam through the essays and the recommendations in a couple of days or a week, it's better to make consistent progress over time. This approach allows you to be much more thorough and gives a better polish to your application.

By doing a little bit of work every day on your application you can make a huge amount of progress over a few weeks. It helps with the feeling of being overwhelmed at all of the work you need to do, and I believe it yields a vastly superior work product.

Added Wharton s2s feed

Thanks to Hella, I've added an rss feed to the Wharton s2s boards. I have found these boards incredibly helpful during the application process. If you haven't had a chance to check them out, I highly recommend you take this opportunity to see what they are all about.

School visit the last week of September

I secured some buddy passes this week for JetBlue airlines. My wife and I will be heading back east during the last week of september to check out some of the schools. My preliminary list of schools to check out are: Wharton, Columbia, Harvard, Babson. I have been contemplating checking out MIT as well, but their requirement of a full year of Economics and a full year of Calculus prior to attending their program probably rules me out. I called their office to double check that requirement, but I haven't received any call back to date. Sadly this has re-inforced an already negative impression of that school.

Business Discussion on NPR

My local NPR station carried an excellent discussion on business today. The discussion included a venture capitalist from Boston, a law professor from the local area, and a vice president of the Albion group. The discussion was very wide ranging, but primarily covered the governance of a corporation. Who has the power, and what is the most efficient way to control american business.

Of particular interest was the type of structure venture capitalists look for in companies, and how much control / interest in the company they require. For initial start ups they are looking for a sales / marketing CEO, whereas as the company grows they often explicitly define when it is time for the initial CEO to step down and for a professional to step in.

Gmail account *finally*

I finally got my gmail account today. I've been trying to get one ever since the service launched. So far the service seems really nice, hopefully they have fixed some of the spam problems that plague yahoo and hotmail. Currently I have two yahoo accounts, one hotmail account and a gmail account. I'm not going to post my gmail address at this point in time, because it uses my real name. I'll post updates on how I like the service though.

Marketing and its application to Applications

I have been planning to sell my Honda Accord for several months now. I bought a cheapo car that I paid cash for so I could get rid of my expensive car payment and reduce my debt. We put for sale signs on the car with my cell phone number, but we received very few phone calls. Of the phone calls we did receive they were very poorly qualified prospects, typically they had no idea how much a 2000 Honda Accord went for, and when they learned the price that was all they needed to know.

Instead of putting a hand written note on the window, which looks cheap in my opinion, we put up professionally made stickers that said For Sale, and had my number. That marketing effort was abysmally unsuccessful. The signs themselves cost about $20, and led to very poor results as stated above.

The next step was to put an advertisement on autotrader.com. I paid for a premium listing and a thumbnail image, but I didn't opt to put multiple images up. The listings are a bit unfair though because dealers get the most prominent listing, and typically there is at least a full page of dealer listings before the premium private party listings. I used a somewhat unusual strategy in my advertisement though. I started the advertisement with "I'm headed to graduate school so I need to sell this beautiful car." I proceeded to explain how much I loved this car, and that I hated to part with it, but it was necessary. My thought process was that people want to know why you are selling the car, and if you have a really good reason that doesn't involve a problem with the car, you should state it up front.

I created the advertisement on friday ( 8/06/2004 ), and it started showing in the system later that night. By sunday night I received my first phone call. The caller knew the price of the car, knew all of the features, knew why I was selling it, and had seen a picture of it. In other words, he was an extremely well qualified prospect. Monday night he came and took the car for a drive, and we struck a verbal agreement that night. We finalized the deal on tuesday, and he is now the proud owner of a 2000 Honda Accord V6.

The interesting thing about this process though was the role of the advertisement. In more ways than one it reminded me of the Essays for the application process. The car had the right stats, and the right fit for what he was looking for. The advertisement prompted him to call me for an interview and the interview closed the deal.

The key point for differentiation in this process though was the advertisement. Because there were at least twenty other cars that were the exact same price and were similar in model year and features. Why did he call me then?

The buyer told me on Monday after the test drive that my ad had really struck him. He said he has been looking for about ten days for a vehicle, and he has looked at many different makes and models, and read a lot of different ads. He said that my ad was completely different than any other ad he saw, and that it really intrigued him. He said it conveyed that I wasn't selling the car because it was beat up and tired, but because I'm headed to graduate school (exactly what I intented to convey). He said further that it told him the car had a young owner, someone who probably didn't have many, if any kids, and that the car was probably in good shape (un-intended positive conveyance).

Selling this car has really confirmed to me the importance of admission essays. There are a lot of qualified people applying, the vast majority of them would be successful in the program. I believe the vast majority of them would also make the school proud. Ultimately though, they have to have some criterea to determine who they want to look more closely at. Since the stats are just a starting point, and at this level most of the applicants applying have phenomenal stats, you have to have something else to differentiate the candidates. Interviewing all of the candidates would be a lengthy and expensive proposition, just as a car buy can't physically test drive every car for sale. The car itself was in wonderful shape, and we went to great pains to make sure it was immaculate for the test drive. Although in the case the test drive was probably the most crucial element of the sale, the advertisement was the gatekeeper to that next step.

So it comes down to the essays. Writing clearly and concisely is a highly valued business skill anyway, why not use it as a differentiating factor in this process? The key then for us as applicants is to find some positive factor, something that will weigh heavily in our favor, and then differentiate ourselves with it. I believe if we can do that in the essays, we will be successful in getting into the best schools.

Response to Brit-Chick on statistics

I wish I could do a Trackback on blogger (if anyone knows how please leave a comment). I want to respond to one of Brit-Chicks posts.

Let me start by saying that this post is quite good, and that overall I agree with much of what she is saying. However I think there is a subtle point about the statistics that she didn't get quite right. :)

You can read the article here, it's the post with the heading "Lies, damn lies and statistics".

The point I want to address is the concept that if total applications are lower then it's easier to get into business school. Her thought was that unless the total number of applications drops below the number of open positions for the school, she didn't see how it would be any easier to get into school. I want to show that a simple decrease in applications can increase your chances of getting in.

Ok, let's consider a typical application process. Wharton is good enough to post this information for us, so I'll use their numbers. You can find them here. In 2004 there were 7200 total applicants to Wharton of which they admitted 1,130. This number works about to be 15.694% of the people who applied were admitted. However of the 7200 people that applied roughly 20% to 30% of them were not academically qualified to attend Wharton (According to FF and Alex Brown). Let's take the 20% number just for the sake of argument. That means there were really only 5,760 qualified applicants to Wharton, of which 1,130 got accepted or 19.618%.

Wharton is shooting for a class size of around 800, by managing their wait list properly and by understanding yield, they successfully crafted a class of 799 students.

Now let me present the crux of my argument. Let's say for the sake of this discussion that Wharton ranked all graduates from top to bottom with no ties (they don't do this from what I understand). So we now have a ranked list from 1 to 7200, anyone with a number above 5760 wasn't academically qualified to attend Wharton. However the people with numbers 1 through 1,130 were the best qualified (again for the sake of argument only) and thus were offered a spot in the class. Let's further assume that Wharton is aiming for a fixed class size of 800, and they know that traditionally about 29% of the people offered a position will go to a different school. To arrive at the number of offers the school should place we use the following equation (100% - 29.20%) = 70.8%, plug the percentage in as follows: .708x = 800 and solve for x. x is approximately 1130 in this case. Now let's assume that in this particular year you were ranked 1131, and just missed the cut.

Now to illustrate my point, next year lets say only 6,000 people apply to Wharton instead of 7200. Assuming 20% of the applicants were again not academically qualified, we have a list of 4800 applicants that are qualified to attend Wharton. Again for the sake of argument, Wharton is using the same ranking methodology, and again they expect the same yield so they know to issue 1,130 offfers to craft a class of 800 people. Based on this we can see that if 1,130 people out of 4,800 are accepted, the acceptance rate is 23.541% versus 19.618% for the previous year. We can see that the odds of getting accepted are now higher than the previous year.

The crux of my argument and perhaps it's weakest point, is that people are ranked for admission. From what I understand the process of admission is much more complicated than this. However if you assume that there are more qualified applicants than there are slots, the admissions committee uses *something* to make a determination about who will get accepted and who gets rejected. This means that somewhere along the line they are saying I like candidate X better than candidate Y, even though both of them would fit at Wharton. If however candidate X doesn't apply, then canditate Y gets admitted instead.

Another problem with my argument could be the distribution of the candidates that don't apply. For instance if for some reason all 1,200 of the people that didn't apply were ranked below you on the list, it wouldn't help you to get accepted. I don't know what the breakdown is, but I would expect that at least some of the better applicants won't apply, therefore increasing your odds, if not exactly by the numbers shown above.

My point isn't that decreased applicants necessarily increase your chance, but that it can increase your chances depending on the situation. This post is in no way meant to slam on Brit-Chick. I enjoy her blog immensely, I just wanted to clarify this one point. :)

Liars Poker

I finished reading Liars Poker last night. I really liked this book. The author has a very engaging writing style, with clear and lucid prose. The book covers investment banking primarily from the trading side. I would like to find a book that deals more with Corporate Finance, and some of the other aspects of investment banking. The author is very down on the investment banking industry as a whole, pointing out that people are paid beyond any proportion to their contribution to society. Not that I actually believe people are paid based on their contribution to society. If that were the case, teachers, nurses, police and many other professions would be paid far more than they are. I think pay is a much more complex issue than that.

In this book Michael Lewis covers the story of getting a job with Salomon brothers. He covers what life is like for a trainee, and his transition to the trading floor. He gives a lot of insights about the mentality of this particular investment bank. He does stress that Salomon brothers is a great deal wilder than the other IB's like Goldman Sachs and Drexel. For those of use who are pursuing and MBA and considering investment banking as a career, I'm not sure how directly applicable it is. If you are interested in bond trading this book is tailor made for you. If you are interested in other areas of investment banking, it won't be as directly applicable. This book is worth a read, just to get a glimpse of what the inside of an investment bank looks like.

Doom 3!!!

I finally got past my computer problems ( I bought a new motherboard with good onboard sound and returned the Audigy 2 card), and got into Doom 3 tonight. HOLY SHIT!! That is one scary game. I watch the occasional horror / terror flick for the fun of it, but this game is *intense*. I was sweating and twitching as I ran through the first part of the game. The music is intense as well, of course it didn't help that I had my speakers turned up to an earth shattering level and all the lights were turned off. Hehe, my poor wife is trying to sleep in the other room as people are screaming in horror and I'm blowing zombies away. Time to go watch some cartoons before I go to bed so I can try and fight off the night terrors.

More computer problems

Doom 3 came out today, so I went and bought a new video card and a new sound card yesterday. The new video card (ATI Radeon 9800 Pro) was a good deal and is working spectactularly. The sound card (Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS) has turned out to be a royal pain in the ass. It has been causing my computer to hang, to crash, and to emit these weird crackling and popping noises. I have been trying everything in order to get this sound card working. I have some very nice speakers (Klipsch Pro media 5.1) that I want to play Doom 3 with, but the built in sound card in my computer isn't 5.1. That's why I decided to get the Audigy card. Of course it isn't working though, and nobody carries anything but Creative Media cards!! When I called Creative for tech support, I told the guy all of the things that I'd tried, and he offered me a job. He said I'd already done more trouble shooting than he knew, and he would like me to come work for them. *sigh*

So now, I'm sitting here brooding about how to get my sound card working. Either that, or I have to go back to the crappy two channel sound of the built in sound card. What to do, what to do? If anyone knows how to fix the crackling problem with the Audigy cards, I'm all ears.

Brody Admissions Article

I have been reading some articles on brody.com. Before I post the link, let me just say that I'm not endorsing brody, I haven't used their services, nor do I intend to. I think this article does have some relevant information though, much of it is along the lines of Montauk. It's worth reading through this article and some of the linked articles.

Crafting a Winning MBA Application: The Nuts and Bolts

Bachelor Party

I went to my friend's bachelor party on friday night. The plan was to do a poker night, no naked women (my wife double and triple checked that). My wife went to the bank to get fifty dollars in cash for me, and she asked for thirty dollars in ones and twenty dollars in fives. The teller said, "wow, thirty in ones? That's an odd request." My wife responded that I was going to a bachelor party that night. The teller raised an eyebrow and said "Oh!", clearly she thought there would be naked women. My wife blushing furiously said, "they are just playing poker!". The teller looked at her doubtfully and said "uh-huh". Needless to say she double checked four more times when she got home that there wouldn't be any strippers there.

The poker itself was pretty interesting. It was the first time I had played Texas Hold-em. We each put in about forty dollars, and played all night long. I ended up with $46.50 by the time we were done. At one point I had been up to about $70, and then down to $15. It was pretty fun, and something I wouldn't mind playing every now and then, provided we don't start playing high stakes games. I hate throwing my money away, and I feel bad when I take someone elses money.

Saturday we went and saw the Manchurian Candidate. That was a pretty interesting show. The plot was a little far fetched, but getting more realistic every day. The acting was decent and it had a decent ending. I enjoyed the movie.

We went golfing this morning. We had planned to hit the swap meet before our 7 am tee time, but the swap meet wasn't running yet, so we grabbed a bite to eat before heading to the golf course. The plan was to do 18 holes but two of the guys only wanted to do 9, so we wimped out and only did 9. :( I did ok, shooting a 50 for 9 holes. I would have been quite happy with that at the beginning of the season, now I'm only marginally satisfied by that score. I got some nice long drives that landed right square in the fairway though, finally all that time at the range is paying off a bit.

After golfing we headed to the swap meet. It was painful watching two of my friends pay full price for things. They were practically afraid to negotiate. So we ended up by them telling me what they wanted and me negotiating the price for them. That arrangement seemed to work out better. They paid less money, and I got to have fun haggling the price down.

After that I came home and just lounged around for most of the day, reading a book and watching golf. Back to the grind tomorrow.