Round 2 Application Advice

For many people around the world, the holiday season means spending time with family and friends. While this is also true for aspiring business school students, those of you applying to Yale SOM in Round 2 may be busy putting the finishing touches on your applications in advance of our January 5, 2012, deadline. With that in mind, I want to share some tips to help you put your best foot forward in the application process.

General application advice

• Be yourself. This sounds obvious, but many applicants get tripped up trying to get inside our heads. Don’t outthink yourself. Tell us about what you care about, not what you think we want to hear.
• Don’t ignore your weaknesses. There’s no such thing as a perfect applicant. Everyone has weaknesses. We’ll see them, so you’re better off acknowledging them and incorporating them into your application than hoping we’ll miss them. If you don’t do so, we’ll wonder how introspective and self-aware you are.
• Don’t stress about (insert application element here). Grades matter. Test scores matter. Essays matter. Everything in the application is important, but nothing more so than anything else. Do a good job and take everything seriously, but don’t let it overwhelm you—no element by itself will make or break your application.

What to do in the coming weeks

• Reread your essays, and then ask a trusted friend or family member to read them, to be sure you’re hitting all of the points you want to cover. Having a second set of eyes is helpful, but please remember that your essays must be entirely your own work.
• Follow up with your recommenders to make sure they’re on target to submit their letters by the application deadline. 
• Proofread your entire application to make sure there are no spelling errors or missing or incorrect information. 
• Have Pearson Vue or ETS send official copies of your test scores to us if you haven’t done so already.

I hope these tips give you helpful guidance on how to frame your application and what to do between now and our Round 2 deadline. If you have additional questions, you can email us at mba.admissions@yale.edu, and we also have a handful of 10-minute telephone Office Hours spaces still available for last-minute questions.

Finally, if you would like to learn more about the Yale SOM community over the holidays, consider attending a Winter Break Social. These informal gatherings are hosted by current students, and are a great way to hear first-hand about the MBA experience.

On behalf of the Yale SOM community, we’d like to wish all of our readers happy holidays and best wishes for the new year. Please note that the University will close for winter break on Friday, December 23, 2011, and will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2012.




Bruce DelMonico
Director of Admissions
Yale School of Management
mba.admissions@yale.edu  
203.432.5635