Follow up on Wharton Interview Tips

Below are some discussions I had with other Whartonites about the application in general on ChaseDream.

Q: Is Wharton looking for certain types of candidate?
A:No. Wharton is looking for good candidates in every industry. As Ialways say, if you have unique background/experience, you are likely tohave better chance to get in than typical consultants/bankers as a lotof them are applying and every school is trying to diversify itsstudent pool.

Response from Vickiyan, class of 08:

I would like to elaborate this point a little bit more:
I'm not quite sure that Wharton is looking for candidate in every industryintentionally, but I believe what Wharton is looking for are goodcandidates. No bias on the background, and I don't think the diversityis intentionally designed and picked out: good candidates happen to bespreading out in every industry. What impressed people most are alwaysthe personal qualities: achievements, solid skills (hard+soft) andpersonality.
For your reference.

Response from Jason, class of 10:

To elaborate even further, I'm not sure that there even exists a 'typical consultant/banker'. Everyone has had such a variety of experience, growing up in different places, attending different schools, and many have a lot of different jobs in addition to being a consultant/banker. Indeed, even within consulting/banking, there are so many ways to distinguish yourself, to seek out your own path, and etc. At the end of the day, what it really comes down to is who you are: which is why I'm always against someone using a 'profile' to determine whether he/she is suitable for a school. Indeed what is most important is not your profile, but the stories that you can tell about your life! For your reference as well :)

Response from myself:

Jason, it's great to see current student being active and help prospective students here on CD. Your background is impressive, too.
Let me elaborate more on what I meant about "typical consultant/banker." For consultant, if you join those big consulting firms right after college, it is a natural or sort of mandatory move to apply business school after 2 to 3 years of work because those big consulting firms need you to have a MBA degree to move up. Also for banker, even though you don’t need a MBA to be promoted from analyst to associate, many analysts tend to go to business school to 1) take a break 2) try something else after work 100+ hours per week for 3 years.

From my observation, 5-10 years ago, you can see many top b-school students with this type of “typical” background/experience”. 3 years in consulting/banking and then go to top b-school. However, I do see the percentage of this type of students is decreasing, especially for candidates with pure banking/consulting experience. Two main reasons:

1. Average age or years of working experience to enter business school becomes higher. (You are an extreme case which is very rare. The average age for class of 07 is 28.6 and average year of working experience is 6 years.) Understand HBS and Stanford started to look for young talents these years but you can see the average year of working experience is still higher than say 5 or 10 years ago. Having said that, people with 3 year pure banking/consulting experience need to try hard to persuade adcom to admit them.
2. Bankers and consultants are too busy to work on GMAT and application. Imaging if a person works till mid-night everyday, has almost no weekend and travel every week, it will be tough for him/her to focus on application and we both know MBA application is not just filling the forms.

However, from my perspective, consultants are at better position than bankers to apply business schools. Few reasons

1) The firm will prepare and sponsor them to go to business school. For Mckinsey, they have very comprehensive training and materials to help BAs to apply business school. Also their senior people all have MBAs and know the application process well.
2) Consultants tend to have more diversified working experience from and hours is not as crazy as bankers.
3) Many consulting firms have the policy “up or leave.” You need to have an MBA to move up.
4) Bankers were paid too well before. If you can earn +200K (USD) a year, spending 70K to go to business (a year) means your yearly opportunity cost is 270K.

I can’t agree more on there is no typical candidate/career path to promise you to get into top business school. The most important thing is you need to tell and persuade adcom why you need a MBA and why you.