Dig Deeper!!!

Unlike trying to woo a girl/guy that you think is the love of your life, persistence is key to making it in this game of getting into a business school.  After a girl tells you she's just not that into you, it's time to call it quits and move on, but when a business school tells you that, its your job to convince them they are really madly in love with you...that is after re-working your game for the next year.

After being rejected for a second year (especially when I thought I had everything figured out), I was shaken, but not broken.  I gave myself three days to experience frustration, depression and anger.  After that, I was ready to work.  No school was going to call me and magically admit me after I was rejected. I needed to look for holes in my application and fill them in if I was going to stand a chance in the coming year.

As I stated in my post about essay writing, I knew my story and thought I had all my ducks in a row so it was tough for me to see my flaws.  I immediately reached out to my network to see if they could review my profile and give me tips to improve. Thanks to those friends, these points were brought to my attention:

1. 690 GMAT- My friends said that overall, this was a good and respectable score.  However, when broken down to each of the separate components, what my buddy said might have hurt me for NYU was the 77% percentile score in math.  Because NYU is quant heavy, this could have raised a red flag in ad com's eyes.  

2.  Essays- Of my essays, I should be able to nail an interview and entice ad com to want to meet me after my first essay (for most schools, it is usually the essay about why mba, why "x" school, and why now). However, when my friend (this guy attends NYU btw and is ridiculously smart) read it, he said he had mixed feelings about it.  He didn't think I did a good enough job explaining why I wanted to do marketing and brand management.  The essay made it seem as if I just got bored with accounting and just decided to switch careers into something that seemed fun.  My passion for the field wasn't explained so ad com could have been confused about my motive to switch careers. This and the fact that in the prior year, I said I wanted to do social entrepreneurship, my story seemed fickle. Once you get into school, you hit the ground running with finding an internship and building the skills you need to thrive and flourish in your chosen career.  There is little time to lollygag if you don't know what you want to do so I could definitely see how this was a huge fault in my essay.

It sucks to know that one of my two points of improvement was immediately within my control. I felt like I was right on the cusp of being interviewed for the schools that didn't extend me an interview offer. I just needed to be positioned a bit better and I would have gotten that extra face time to shine. 

Either way, I understood my faults and would improve on these points for the coming year. Once again, it was time to get serious.