INTOTHEBEST's Blog

Last night I attended the Harvard Business School (HBS) information session at Citigroup on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

I attended the later of 2 sessions. Both were packed with 200 to 250 people at each session.

The best part was the panel discussion of alumni from HBS who spoke about their experiences, answered questions, and gave advice.

Here are my notes:

Recommendations:
Send a letter to people you want to write recommendations for you, include a copy of your resume, what you want them to address, and a draft of an essay - Why Do I Want to go to Business School?

What to focus on in your application - “How you as a person can make the school a better place.”

What is the thing about you that your section mates are going to rave about?

Harvard is looking for multidimensional people who are leaders. One panelist, Cabin Kim, wrote about his pro-bono work for 2.5 years in his application and thinks it helped differentiate him from the other applicants that had consulting experience. I think what set him apart is that he worked as a campus minister at Duke, helped a church out with accounting, and wrote a business plan to help the church get $10 million to buy a building.

A panelist from Princeton shared how a few of his HBS classmates got an idea to create DVDs with Choose Your Own Adventure themes. They called the owners of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, were invited to Vermont for lunch, and returned to Harvard with the rights to create the Choose Your Own Adventure DVD series. Coming soon!

Harvard Business School’s goal is developing leaders.

There are opportunities to cross register with classes at the Kennedy School of Government, MIT, and other schools in Boston during the second year of the HBS program.

Each class has 900 students, broken up in to 10 sections with 90 students/section. People become very close with their section mates.

Leaders are responsible for driving the direction of an organization or company.

Katie Solomon of career services at HBS spoke about the use of a program called Career Leader that helps students evaluate their strengths.

What does Harvard Business School look for in applicants?
Academic Ability(school, rigor of classes, GPA)
Leadership Experience (most important, distinguishes who gets in and those that don’t)
Personal Qualities (work, extracurricular activities, activities in college)
The GMAT range of last year’s admitted class was 500-800.
HBS wants collaborative people who contribute and enhance class discussion and those who can learn in that environment.

Essays are the most important part of the application.

For 2 months, carry around a notebook, write down notes of what you’ve done.
Reflection - what you want to get out of the experience and what you’ve done.
Recommendations - people who will take the time to sit down and write you a good recommendation.

Celebrities and people of prominence are less important than having people who know you really well write for you. One or two recommendations can come from people who know you in an extracurricular context from your work in the community.

Interviews are necessary and mandatory.

Interviews may be in 4 different forms:
Boston - with the admissions board
phone interview
local city - NY
alumni interviews in smaller towns

Never let funding be an issue if you are admitted to the college of your choice.

Citigroup and HBS have a deal where Citigroup will provide a loan for the entire amount of HBS. Admissions at HBS are need blind.

Harvard Business School

For more information, write to:
mba_questions@hbs.edu

Other qualities that are important to have: a global perspective, the spirit of entrepreneurship, listening ability, the ability to understand other people’s strengths and weaknesses.