Tomorrow is the final notification deadline for Cornell Johnson. Since they require an interview of everyone who gets admitted, if you haven’t received an interview invitation at this point, it’s probably going to be a ding. I thought I would at least get an interview since my stats fall in around their median and I said I’m super interested in their sustainable global enterprise initiative. There are lots of people interested in social enterprise in general, but much fewer are knowledgeable and passionate about *sustainable* global enterprise; I would have thought they’d be all over someone like me who is specifically drawn to Cornell because of that program.
Oh well, it’s more evidence that the bschool admissions process is a mystery in many ways. Here is my opinion on the whole process. I think most of the top bschools will find that at least 50% of their applicants (maybe even 75% or higher for schools like Harvard and Stanford) are sufficiently qualified to handle the workload at their MBA program. But they have to find some way to narrow down that large group of qualified students into the class of students that they think they want. A lot of this whittling down is probably based on seemingly arbitrary factors. One adcom member might find it interesting that one applicant loves to skateboard. Another might find it interesting that an applicant lived aboard for a year.
Look at the four schools I’ve applied to. The two sure dings at the moment are the two schools that are supposedly ranked the lowest and the two schools where I at least got interviews and have a decent shot at getting in are the two highest ranked! This shows that it’s important to apply to a lot of schools; School A that’s ranked #20 by some publication may reject you but School B that’s ranked #10 may find something they like about you that School A didn’t see in your application.
Update on the NYU Stern drama. 
I’ve been trying to rationalize why it would be taking them so long to come to a final decision. Now I don’t want to have a debate on the following since I think it’s stupid to debate things that are completely speculative anyways. I’m just sharing what’s been going through my mind in order to try to make sense of what’s going on.
Here’s my theory. Unless Stern is intentionally trying to cause me emotional distress, there should be no reason why my final decision should not be an admit. Why?
- Argument for why it is probably not a ding: Since Stern has historically admitted roughly between 70-90% of the people they invite to interview, there’s gotta be something that they perceive to be obviously lacking in the application in order to ding me. It has to be a clear deficiency to them to ding me. And if it was an obvious deficiency to them, they probably don’t need longer than the three week period to issue that ding.
- Argument for why it is probably not a waitlist either (this argument is probably more of a stretch): As much as I’d like to think I’m an extremely unique inidividual who would add something very “special” to the NYU Stern Class of 2009, there are probably hundreds of other just-as-qualified and very unique and special people applying to Stern. I don’t think they would ever delay a notification because they were going back and forth on whether to admit or waitlist someone. I don’t think anyone is worth going through the trouble of doing that for. For Stern, there is very little cost to just waitlisting someone if they are not absolutely sure that someone is the candidate they want since there are plenty of other similarly qualified and unique candidates.
- Therefore, it MUST be an admit, right?!?!? As I said earlier, the admissions process is a big black box. Who knows what’s going on behind the scenes.
Ok, well thanks for waiting with me and wish me luck!
