Sorry for not writing in a while. I’ve been interviewing for various jobs during the past month. It’s weird thinking that just two months ago, I was in this mode where I was wracked with anxiety, constantly checking the BW forums, MBA blogs, etc. every five minutes.

I’ve accepted an offer to work at a leading enterprise search software company which was just reported to be the fastest growing private company in Massachusetts. Everyone I talked to during the interview process is really psyched about the company and its future. It’s hard for me to express how excited I am about this new opportunity.

With regards to the MBA, I’ll probably reconsider applying in two to three years, but probably not next year. I know that’ll put me on the high end of the age range of MBA applicants, but if things go well in this new job, it would be silly to leave after being there for just a year. I’m also going to consider the part time MBA more seriously since I wouldn’t mind staying in the software industry but moving into product management or marketing. I’ve come across a number of people recently with MBAs (even HBS MBAs) who are doing pretty uninteresting things, which made me realize that getting an MBA does not necessarily guarantee that I’ll land a great job for a great company afterwards. It might not be worth forgoing two years of salary (and a pretty darn good salary in a favorable job market like this) and going into six figure debt just to risk ending up getting a crappy job that isn’t any better (or is even worse) than what I did before.

But to those of you preparing for business school this fall, I sincerely wish you the best of luck! Even though my situation turned out great, I still wouldn’t mind being in your shoes right now, getting ready to go back to school. Good luck! Go out and conquer the world!

Sex, religion, and politics are supposed to be the three topics you stay away from in conversations with strangers. Some might say it would be good to stay away from them in business school applications too. It’s difficult because business schools claim to want to know what really makes you tick. Why do you want to get an MBA? What are you passionate about? What are your long term career goals?

For some applicants, it is impossible to honestly answer some of those questions without going into personal values, which might extend to religion and politics. The problem with doing so goes back to the reason why people suggest not talking about those topics with strangers—people may take offense to what you believe and make unfair judgments of you as a result.

One of my commenters asked if there was a reason why I said I wanted to get involved in “non-church related” volunteer activities and if I found that being a Christian hurt my chances as an applicant. An applicant can never know whether the adcom member reading the application has some personal antagonism against Christianity or some other religion. If you are really paranoid about it, it may be good to avoid talking about religion. My perspective is that you can’t live in fear of how people might react to who you are. That philosophy may hurt me in some instances in my career, but I believe the best thing I can do is to always be honest about who I am. This doesn’t mean I’m looking out to convert everyone I meet; it just means I shouldn’t feel like I have to hide the fact that I have a set of values (in my case, Christian values) that motivate what I do in life. I know people who got into Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton who shared very personal things about their religious commitments in their essays so I know for sure that it is not necessarily a deal-breaker to write about such topics.

I said I wanted to be involved in a non-church related volunteer opportunity because I think there are a lot of secular non-profits doing great things to help the poor and underprivileged. I also want to show that my intent is to not live my whole life in a Christian bubble; for some people, everything they do outside of work (or maybe even including work) has to be explicitly Christian in some way. I think more Christians need to be spending time outside of their safe, Christian subculture.

To update you on my job search… I interviewed with a great software company for a technical consulting position on Monday. I think that went okay. That’s my top choice right now. I had an interview today for an internet consulting company for a more straight forward engineering position and I have more interviews for that company on Monday. I’m supposed to have interviews scheduled some time next week for another web consulting firm. So the job search is going pretty well; my hope is to be employed at a new company within one to two months. I have been leaning more towards not reapplying next year and continue working while the economy is still in good shape. We’ll see…

So this year’s attempts to get into a full-time MBA program have ended in failure.

Next steps:

- Find a job that allows me to grow in areas of current weakness. Until now, I’ve worked as a software engineer with very little client interaction. I’m going to pursue job opportunities that will give me more face time with clients while allowing me to utilize my engineering expertise.
- As painful as this will be, I should study for the GMAT and retake it to shoot for a score in the mid 700s (my current score is 700).
- Talk to people in various careers that I might be interested in to get a clearer idea of what I want to do post-MBA.
- Find a non-church related non-profit to volunteer my time with.

Where to apply next year:

- Columbia Business School ED: I will apply early decision, since I will be working in New York anyways. Hopefully getting my application submitted early decision will boost my likelihood of getting admitted.
- Georgetown McDonough R1: I was actually planning on applying to Georgetown this year but didn’t go through with it because my wife’s career pursuits did not allow her to move to DC. This may change next year though. The good thing about applying next year is that if I get admitted, I’ll get to have at least a year in their new building!
- London Business School R1: My wife and I spent a few months living in London this past year and fell in love with it. We want to live and work abroad, so perhaps a non-US MBA will be good for me.
- Cambridge Judge: Same as above.
- Oxford Said: Same as above.

If I find a great job at a great company, I might even decide to forgo the full-time MBA path and go the part-time MBA route.

Don’t get me wrong—I am quite disappointed with the outcome of this year’s admissions process but I have no other choice but to remain hopeful about my future. Thanks to those who have walked with me through this process. Congrats to those who have admits and will attend business school this fall! Maybe I will join you next year.

I got the expected ding from Columbia. This means the game is over for this year.

Am I the last person to discover that, in many cases, the phrase “good work/life balance” is a euphemism for “we don’t consider our work important or meaningful enough to work any harder than we have to”? Maybe I’m still young, naive and idealistic, but I want to be in a job where I am utterly passionate about the work that I do. One of the major reasons why I want an MBA is to have it open doors to those sort of jobs.

What exactly are we working for? Are we working simply in order to support what we can do with our time outside of work? I’ve come to believe that spending 40, 60, or 80 hours per week (or however much our job requires) doing something we’re not passionate about is a waste of time, regardless of how much the job pays. Life is too short to be wasting it doing things we don’t care about.

For those of you in the process of entering MBA programs this Fall… Pursue something you love. Pursue something meaningful. Pursue something that will make you overflow with joy.

Got the expected ding from Cornell. Columbia, you are my only hope!

This week has really sucked but in some ways, I feel freed. My wife and I started thinking about what to do for the next year until I reapply… we realized that nothing is really preventing us from doing and going wherever we want. I’d love to move to New York City but we could also go to London or maybe even the Middle East! I started sending out a few emails to some former coworkers to see if they know of good job leads (in case Columbia doesn’t work out); it looks like the job market is pretty good, so I wouldn’t mind making a good deal of money this next year instead of being in school.

Congrats to all the admits!

So I guess Stern really was out to torture me. If they were going to ding me, not even waitlist me, why would they take so frickin long to let me know? Oh well. I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

Columbia is my last shot at going to bschool this Fall. I’ve been trying not to talk up Columbia too much because I thought it would be the least likely school to accept me. It would obviously be the best school of the four that I could attend, so if by some miracle, they decide to accept me, I would be the happiest person in the world.

I’m going to start looking for software jobs in New York City in case things don’t work out with Columbia since the wife and I were planning on moving there anyways. If anyone knows of any cool software companies in NYC looking for Java developers or entry-level product managers, let me know!

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!

I had my re-interview with Columbia this morning. It’s a long story which I’ll tell in detail when this process is all over, but basically I got a re-interview because of “complications” with the first one. It went well and definitely helped re-establish Columbia as a solid fit for me in my mind as I consider my potential options.

Three weeks PLUS one day since my interview with Stern. Still waiting to hear. Trying to keep myself humored by looking at my blog stats. Someone came to my site after searching for the phrase “who is anonymousmba”. I’m sure anonymousmba will get a kick out of that—someone’s trying to figure out who you are! Someone else came to my site searching for “NYU Stern Interview Three weeks after”. Maybe he/she is in the same position as me.

These are times when you wish you had friends on the inside to find out what’s going on. Maybe adcoms hold their student assistants to a vow of secrecy. I actually have a friend who has a friend who works in Stern admissions but for their PhD program. If a few more days go by with no word, I might be tempted to use that connection.

Update: It’s 6:00pm EST. Still no update. I’ll shoot off an email to my interviewer tonight to see if she has any clue as to why my decision is taking so long.

Another day goes by in uncertainty. I’ve seen the words “Your application is in the final stages of review by the Admissions Committee. Please allow up to three weeks from the date of your interview to receive a decision.” spit back at me about a thousand times now. Maybe God is testing my patience. Or maybe Stern is playing hard to get. Why are you messing with me? I want you Stern!

It’s now 6:03pm at the end of the three-week “deadline”. The admissions office is closed. Unless someone is working overtime, I won’t hear from them today.

Maybe this is a good sign. 100% of the applicants I know of who had to wait longer than three weeks got admitted. But unfortunately, that’s with a sample size of 1.

Thanks to all of my readers/supporters across the globe for waiting with me (I now have a sitemeter script on my blog, so I know I have readers from all over the world: Canada, Greece, Italy, Germany, India, Korea, Australia and the Netherlands). I hope to have good news tomorrow!