Please join us for a ground-breaking new chat: The Right Way to Use Rankings

Our Special Guests:

• Paul Danos, Dean of the Tuck School of Business
• Kim Keating, Director of Public Relations at Tuck and an expert on the different rankings.
• Della Bradshaw, Editor, Business School Rankings, Financial Times

When: May 4 at 9:00 AM/PT/12:00 PM ET/5:00 PM GMT

Where: Accepted.com's chat room

You will learn how:

• Different periodicals rank MBA programs
• Rankings influence MBA education.
• A rankings editor determines the criteria for her paper's approach.
• You should use the rankings as you prepare to apply.

And more! In addition to a panel discussion at the beginning of the chat, there will be a moderated Q&A when you can pose questions to our panel members.

Rankings, rankings, rankings. Is #1 really the school for you? Is #10 really better than #11? How much better? Considering the controversy swirling around rankings, how can you use them? Make the most of them?

You'll get the answers to these questions at "How to Use the Rankings on Thursday May 4 at 9:00 AM/PT/12:00 PM ET/5:00 PM GMT in Accepted.com's chat room.

Two articles of interest for law school applicants or students to be:

• A proposed ban on wireless at Harvard Law is generating controversy. Apparently students prefer to instant message than pay attention to classroom discussion. The school is considering a ban on wireless in the classroom. Socrates is probably rolling over in his grave. Other law schools may be tempted to follow HLS' lead.
  
• According to The Wall St. Journal, another controversy is brewing in legal academia: To have an undergrad major in the law or not.  A group of professors advocate having a law major focused on broader concerns than are typically considered in law school, such as the place of law in society. This group does not believe that this should replace law school (Heaven forbid!) or that it would become the automatic pre-law major. Opponents, like Professor Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School, fear these undergrad majors may degenerate into "a Cliffs Notes version of law school."

BusinessWeek published yesterday its promised and first-ever undergrad b-school rankings. The top ten are:

1. Penn (Wharton)
2.  Virginia (McIntire)
3. Notre Dame (Mendoza)
4. MIT (Sloan)
5. Emory (Goizueta)
6. Michigan (Ross)
7. NYU (Stern)
   
8. Brigham Young (Marriott)
9. Texas (McCombs)
10. Indiana (Kelley)

Before using these rankings as anything more than a curiosity, please take the time to familiarize yourself with BW's method. They base their rankings on student feedback, a recruiter survey, "educational quality," first-year salaries, and a "feeder-school" measure.

 Undergrads have long complained that they don't received the attention that MBAs do because they aren't ranked. It will be interesting if schools upgrade their undergrad programs in response to the surveys, feedback, and BW's new rankings.

Two unconnected events catalyzed this blog post:

• I had lunch yesterday with Rahul Choudaha , the Admissions Manager at the Indian School of Business. (That lunch will have its own post in the next few days.) He mentioned that ISB wants applicants with a passion for what they are doing, have done, and want to do. At a different point in our lively discussion, he noted that he likes to see applicants with persistence, applicants who have demonstrated the commitment and energy to handle the high demands of ISB's intensive one-year program -- even when the going gets tough. That applicant to him is a person with passion.
  
• This morning at the gym, I listened to a recorded interview of  Carol Frank, author of Do As I Say, Not As I Did!: Gaining Wisdom In Business Through The Mistakes Of Highly Successful People, she spoke about passion too. She specifically spoke about passion as resilience, caring about something so deeply that your commitment and determination carry you through the tough times and ensure you don't give up.

Bingo. "Passion" is one of those terms that applicants use over and over again in personal statements and application essays. It also tends to be equated with pure emotion. But med schools, law school, business schools and actually all programs that value passion, don't really want students and alumni who are passionately flying off the handle and out of control.

Carol Frank supplies a useful understanding of passion and a means of getting away from what my friend and colleague Maxx Duffy,  of Maxx Associates and MBA Admissions Advantage, calls "umbrella terms." Umbrella words bear broad definitions and represent desirable qualities in the admissions process. Consequently, applicants tend to use them repeatedly, sometimes ad nauseum, almost like a form of application essay key word optimization. The result: essays that bore and sound like all the other essays using the same terms.

You need to break down those umbrella qualities into sub-parts and facets. Avoid the dime-a-dozen umbrella terms, while providing revealing evidence of those attributes specific to you and part of the broader category of valued personal traits.

Rahul Choudaha and Carol Frank are coming from very different places, but both recognize that commitment is a necessary part of passion. Instead of talking about "passion" or just showing a lot of emotion, if you want to show the passion that programs say they value,show how you persisted in the face of a difficult set of circumstances. Demonstrate the resilience and maturity to complete an intense program, handle demanding projects, respond coolly to tense situations,  persevere, and succeed.

If you applied to business school, were accepted from the waitlist during the last couple of years, and are willing to share your experience publicly, but without giving your name, please email me ASAP at labrahamATaccepted.com .

Thank you.