Wharton's admissions office may be in transition, but it's not missing a beat when it comes to the 2009 application. It posted the 2009 Wharton essay questions and deadlines on the adcom blog today. Here they are:

Wharton Fall 2009 Admission: Application Deadlines

• Round 1: Thursday, 9 October, 2008
• Round 2: Thursday, 8 January, 2009
• Round 3: Thursday, 5 March, 2009

Wharton Fall 2009 Admission: Application Essay Questions

First-Time Applicant Questions

 

1. Describe your career progress to date and your future short-term and long-term career goals. How do you expect an MBA from Wharton to help you achieve these goals, and why is now the best time for you to join our program? (1,000 words)

 

2. Describe a setback or a failure that you have experienced. What role did you play, and what did you learn about yourself? (500 words)

3. Where in your background would we find evidence of your leadership capacity and/or potential? (500 words)

 

4. Please respond to one (1) of the following questions:

a. Describe an experience you have had innovating or initiating, your lessons learned, the results and impact of your efforts. (500 words)

b. Is there anything about your background or experience that you feel you have not had the opportunity to share with the Admissions Committee in your application?  If yes, please explain. (500 words)

 

OPTIONAL: If you feel there are extenuating circumstances of which the Committee should be aware, please explain them here (e.g., unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, TOEFL waiver request, inconsistent or questionable academic performance, significant weaknesses in your application). (250 words, maximum)

 

Reapplicant Questions (for candidates who have applied for admission for Fall 2008 or 2007 only)

 

1. Describe your career progress to date and your future short-term and long-term career goals. How do you expect an MBA from Wharton to help you achieve these goals, and why is now the best time for you to join our program? How has your candidacy improved since the last time you applied? (1,000 words)

2. Describe an experience you have had innovating or initiating, your lessons learned, the results and impact of your efforts. (500 words)

 

3. Please respond to one (1) of the following questions:

a. Where in your background would we find evidence of your leadership capacity and/or potential? (500 words)

 

b. Is there anything about your background or experience that you feel you have not had the opportunity to share with the Admissions Committee in your application? If yes, please explain. (500 words)

OPTIONAL: If you feel there are extenuating circumstances of which the Committee should be aware, please explain them here (e.g., unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, TOEFL waiver request, inconsistent or questionable academic performance, significant weaknesses in your application). (250 words, maximum)

 

I will post tips later. 

The best letters of recommendation come from persons who have seen you perform in some capacity – student, student leader, employee, researcher, volunteer. The weakest letters are of the “character reference” variety (from the clergy member who knows you only as a person who attends weekly services, for example) or come from influential persons (your mother’s college roommate’s sister, who is on an admissions committee) who barely know you. A letter need not be lengthy to be effective, and the writer need not know you well. An instructor’s letter which describes the content and difficulty of a course and rates your performance as much stronger than that of many other students tells an admissions committee something significant about you.

It’s important to avoid repetition and duplication in your letters. “Only one recommendation per single source” is a good rule of thumb. Each letter should highlight a different facet of you and your accomplishments and, ideally, present you from a different vantage point. If you have a job in which you report to more than one person, don’t ask each person for a letter. Rather, ask your supervisors to collaborate on a single letter. Similarly, if you’re a Biology major, don’t ask three Biology professors for letters. Granted, each may be able to speak highly of you; however, they all will be making similar observations from a single frame of reference. Your goal should be a mix of letters from a variety of experiences and perspectives.

Last but not least, request your letters in person whenever possible and give everyone you ask for a letter a copy of your resume and your personal statement. Ask the person if s/he is able to write you a strong letter, and offer to provide any additional material the person requests.

 By Joan Davis, Accepted Editor, who would be happy to mentor you through the medical school application process.

The Wharton Adcom Blog announced today that

"After three years of service, Thomas Caleel (WG’03) will be vacating his role as Director of Admissions and Financial Aid as of 30 June, 2008.  In his role as Director, Thomas has been a passionate ambassador of the School and the MBA Program, and Wharton faculty, staff and students alike are enormously grateful to have had Thomas serve the School in this important role."

The post also announced that "Anjani Jain, Vice Dean and Director of Wharton's Graduate Division and Adjunct Professor of Operations and Information Management, will serve as Acting Director until a permanent Director is named."

The blog described Thomas superbly when it said he was a "tireless ambassador" for Wharton. I personally wish him well in all future pursuits.

I hope that Wharton finds a full-time director quickly.  I am sure that Vice Dean Jain already has a full plate, and the Wharton admissions office alone is a full-time job.

A few 2009 MBA applications have recently been made public:

• Haas' 2009 MBA essay questions and deadlines are now on its web site.  I will comment on Haas essay questions later, but here are the deadlines: Round 1 --November 4, 2008; Round 2 -- December 9, 2008; Round 3 -- January 30, 2009; Round 4 (Final) -- March 11, 2009
• Kellogg published its 2009 essay questions, but has not released its deadlines yet. I will provide tips in a later post.
  
• Harvard Business School, which previously posted its 2009 questions and deadlines, just announced that its online application is available.

In addition to our regular menu of services, Accepted offers a few extras to those ready to start the MBA admissions process now:

• Early Bird Special: 10% off Accepted's regular (non-rush) essay services and school packages if purchased on or before July 31, 2008.
• The last MBA Admissions Telethon for 2009 applicants will take place on Tuesday July 15.  During the 2009 MBA Admissions Telethon, Accepted.com MBA admissions consultants will be available to provide free, 15-minute consultations.
  

One would think that after responding to thousands of posts on the BW Forum, Accepted forum, Facebook, and this blog, not to mention hosting  approximately 200 chats and several telethons, I would be keenly aware of the importance applicants attach to asking questions of impartial, experienced admissions professionals, like the members of Accepted's staff who will take your questions during the telethon.

But the value of such opportunities was brought home to me once again during  my recent evening at Manhattan GMAT in Santa Monica where I presented "Bold and Brilliant Essays" to a group of roughly 55 applicants. They then peppered me with questions for about 90 minutes first in a sweltering room where the air conditioning had broken and later on a much cooler and pleasanter patio. If the airless room was uncomfortable, why was the evening enjoyable? I enjoyed interacting with a really nice group of applicants, and they stuck it out both through the presentation and the Q&A until their questions were all answered.

I hope that wherever you are on July 15, it will be at a agreeable temperature so that you will have your free, mini-consultation in comfort. Sign up for the free MBA Admissions Telethon to reserve your spot.

And if you are ready to start work on your applications and want the assistance of Accepted's top-notch MBA admissions consultants, don't delay. Take advantage of the Early Bird Special. Save money and gain the competitive edge inherent in starting your applications early."

It’s nearly July, and many business schools are already starting to release their new or revised essay topics for the coming admissions season. During this pre-season warm-up period, many applicants seem to feel a strong temptation to grab those questions as soon as they come out, paste them into a Word file and just start WRITING, but even though this may produce an initial "rush" of accomplishment, it isn’t always the most efficient approach. A little bit of preliminary organization can go a long way towards helping you keep track of deadlines, set reasonable schedules and priorities for your work, and make the writing process much more manageable.

When I start working with applicants, one of the first things I ask them to do is put together a "master list" of the essays for each school they plan to apply to, so that we can come up with a strategy for our work together. Often, at the end of the season, people  remark to me that this task—which many of them admit that they initially perceived as irritating "busy work"—has actually been one of the most useful elements of their application process. Over the years, I’ve seen many different versions of these lists, in Word, Excel, pdf and even Notepad files, but one of the most effective, and certainly the most colorful, came from someone I worked with just last year.

When my client first emailed her master list to me, I opened the document and thought "Wow, she has sent me a rainbow!" Her meticulously-organized spreadsheet contained a separate column for each of the seven schools on her list, along with the first- and second-round deadlines for each school. Below each school’s heading, each essay topic was color-coded, cell by cell, according to each unique type of essay. The “goals” essay topics, for example, were highlighted in purple, while the “leadership” essays were blue, the “background and values” essays pink, the “accomplishments”  essays, red, the “failure” essays, for those schools requesting them, green... and so on.

Sure, the document was the Excel equivalent of spilling a couple of pounds of M&Ms across someone’s desktop, but my client’s colorful approach made it incredibly easy for us to pick out which types of essays she would have to answer for multiple schools, and then discuss both the overall topic AND the nuances of each school’s specific essay prompt.

At a glance, for example, we could see that this applicant had to write “goals” essays ranging from 500 – 1500 words, and that some of these essays required an in-depth assessment of the career path she had taken up to that point, while others placed minimal emphasis on the past, focusing mostly on her future plans. This, in turn, helped us figure out that in some cases, she would have to find another place to include important information that she had originally hoped to put into the goals essay.

Under the broad “umbrella” topic of the goals essay, some schools also asked how the applicant would contribute to the learning experience of her classmates, while other schools reserved a separate essay topic for those details. She had assigned the same shade of purple to those separate prompts, knowing that she would probably be able to pull some material out of the longer essay to create her responses.

Essentially, this color-coded document—which probably took her no more than a couple of hours to prepare—was a fantastic visual tool that consolidated everything we would need to know for our work together, helping us cut straight to the core of what she needed to put together for each program. Then—cross-referencing length restrictions and deadlines—we figured out how to prioritize each document.

In this case, we decided to deal with the longest and most inclusive “goals” topic first, reasoning that it would give us more to work with when it came to choosing which elements of the original piece we could trim down for shorter essays, and which sections we might be able to re-work for essays that took a slightly different slant on the topic.

This color-coded approach also helped us to identify the “outliers”—those essay topics that truly were unique to each school, and that she would have to set aside extra time to work on; this minimized the chance of nasty surprises and last-minute panic! My client started work on her applications in mid-August of last year, using this document as a starting point, and she was able to put together terrific applications to all seven schools before the first-round deadlines.

Naturally, there are as many different ways to set up an application strategy as there are applicants, and I’m certainly not prescribing this as THE way to do it, but I wanted to share it as a great example of how a little bit of pre-planning can streamline the entire process. So... what are your favorite colors?

By Sonia Michaels 

Sonia would by happy to help you too with your "master list" and  MBA admissions strategy .