Applying to business school on a military timeline (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an incredible guide produced by one of MtB newest consultants, who recently graduated from HBS where he served as the Armed Forces Alumni Association (AFAA) Co-President, and previously as the Club's VP for Admissions. Eric volunteered his time to write a comprehensive long term application strategy for those of you thinking of applying to business school this year, or in the years to come.

The guide is broken into parts:

Part 1: Long Term Planning (6-18 months before applying)

Part 2: Application Prep (< 6 months before applying)
Part 3: Execution Mode (Making it all happen)

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PART 3: Execution Mode

June-July 2014: Begin Your Applications

Most schools release their applications in June or July, using one of a handful of online application programs that require you to fill in an assortment of data fields and upload PDFs of your resume and essays.  You’ll need to create an account for each individual school in order to work on the applications.  You can fill in bits and pieces of the data sections and save your progress as you go.  If you’ve identified your recommenders, enter their contact information to the recommendation section and ensure that they receive the automated email from the application so they can get started with their portion.

July-September 2014: R1 Essays/Resume

Expect this phase to take several months.  There is simply no way to put together good essays in a limited amount of time.  Allow time for multiple edits and rewrites, and possibly for scrapping everything and starting over from scratch.  Refer back to the journal that you hopefully started a few months back if you need help coming up with ideas for your essays.

Make sure you are actually answering the question asked for each essay.  Do not try to shoehorn an essay you wrote for one school into another school’s application.  While there will no doubt be some overlap for something like the general “career goals” essay you’ll write for many schools, you’ll need to tailor each essay to fit the specific wording of the question and the culture of each school.  If you have had firsthand contact with students, alums, or adcom members of a particular school and that contact has positively influenced your decision to apply there, you should mention those interactions in your essays wherever applicable.

For your resume, a general template for all applications is fine.  Once you begin school, you’ll have plenty of time to modify your resume to fit that school’s resume book format.  Regardless of template or style, your resume must be one page.  Length is not negotiable, even if the web application says that resumes may be 1-2 pages.  Ensure that each bullet in the resume describes a specific accomplishment or quantifiable impact you made—do not simply use your billet description for resume points.

Have someone (or several people) proofread your essays and resume; ideally, have someone who knows nothing about the military read everything to ensure that you’re not using too much military jargon.

September-October 2014: Submit R1 Applications

R1 due dates range from mid-September til mid-October.  Keep in close contact with your recommenders and ensure that they submit their portion on time—a late recommendation can result in your application being pushed back to R2.  Get everything submitted a day or two prior to the deadline, then forget about it and move on.  If you look back at your submitted application, you’ll inevitably find a typo that will do nothing but cause you stress for the next two months.  Once an application is submitted, there is nothing you can do to change any portion of it.  

October-December 2014: R1 Interviews

Dates will vary significantly from school to school.  Some schools (like HBS) will put out all interview invitations on one or two dates then hold all interviews within a period of a few weeks; other schools (like Stanford) tend to send invitations and conduct interviews for the entirety of the period until admissions announcements.  If you have not already visited a school, then we recommend rolling your interview into a campus visit.  Otherwise, there is no major advantage to interviewing on campus versus interviewing in a hub city with adcom or locally with an alum.  If you anticipate being overseas or deployed, expect to interview over Skype or even satellite phone.

Do not take interview preparation lightly.  A bad interview can ruin an otherwise strong application.  You should spend hours rehearsing your answers to common interview questions, both on your own and in live mock interviews with another person.  In addition to those generic interview questions, be able to talk in detail about what you find interesting about each individual school.

MilitaryToBusiness and several other admissions consulting services offer interview prep services.

November 2014-January 2015: R2 Essays/Resume

See above notes for R1.  You’ll probably find that you can partially recycle some of your R1 essays, but ensure that you adjust essays to fit individual schools.

December 2014-April 2015: Make Your Decision and Follow Through

R1 admission offers typically go out between mid-December and late January, and R2 notifications are released in March or April.  Specifics vary from school to school, but admits will usually have 6-8 weeks to accept or decline offers of admission—except in the case of “early decision” arrangements such as Columbia’s.  Early decision means that you are obligated to attend that school—do NOT attempt to wiggle out of such an arrangement.  If accepting an offer, expect to pay a deposit of $1,000-2,000.

Hopefully you’re lucky enough to have the “problem” of multiple offers from which to choose.  I recommend making your decision based on the same factors you used to select your target schools.  I advise against allowing financial considerations to impact your decision—when viewed in the context of the next 30-40 years of your life, a few thousand dollars here or there is not worth worrying about.  The only exception would be if you receive offers from two schools that you like equally, one of which offers you a significant scholarship.  Once you’ve decided which offer you will accept, notify other schools that you are declining their offer.

If you receive an offer from your dream school in December, consider yourself lucky—now you don’t have to worry about R2 applications.  The main downside here is that (in most cases) you must accept or decline R1 offers before learning about R2 admission decisions.  If your dream school waitlists you or will be an R2 application, you should accept the best R1 offer you receive and then await R2 announcements.  If you then receive a better offer during R2, it is perfectly fine to subsequently decline the R1 offer you initially accepted.  Schools understand how the process works and expect to lose a few admits in that manner each year—it doesn’t carry the same negative consequences as reneging on early decision or a job offer.  Just tell their adcom about your decision as early as possible to allow them to offer your vacated spot to someone else, and chalk up the $1,000 as part of the price you pay to attend the school you prefer.

Schools will typically have a lengthy pre-matriculation checklist as well as a process for requesting financial aid.  Submit your financial aid package as early as possible since most schools have finite amounts of aid available.  Complete your VONAPP and submit it to the VA to get the ball rolling on your Post-9/11 GI Bill, and figure out what our sources you will have to access to fund your degree.  Ahron wrote a great blog post about paying for business school here. If you have not already, submit your resignation letter. 

January 2015: Submit R2 Applications

See above notes for R1.

January-April 2015: Attend Admit Weekends

These events are especially important if you are deciding between two or more schools you have not previously visited, or multiple schools that are roughly equal in your eyes.  Use the admit weekends as another way to assess the culture and fit of potential schools, including how well you get along with fellow admits.  If you’re dead-set on attending a particular school then going to the admit weekend isn’t necessary—leave and money factors will likely come into play—though it never hurts to meet some of your future classmates early.

February-March 2015: R2 Interviews

See above notes for R1.

May-June 2015: Begin Terminal Leave

I highly recommend that you do not attempt to continue working until the week before classes start.  Having some time to decompress and adjust to civilian life is far more important than getting a few more paychecks.

If you haven’t already, send a nice thank-you gift to your recommenders, especially if they wrote recommendations for multiple schools. 

June-July 2015: Travel/School Preparation

Travel and spend time with friends and family—your time to do non-MBA stuff will be limited for the next two years.  Take advantage of any opportunities to meet new classmates, either locally or through official or informal travel events.  Some firms will offer pre-MBA internships geared towards veterans—those are by no means necessary, but if you have the opportunity to attend one in an area of interest I would recommend doing so.

Most schools will require you to complete online finance/accounting tutorials—while you may be tempted to get them over with as soon as possible, you’ll be better off doing them later in the summer so the material is fresh in your mind once school starts.  If you don’t have any required tutorials, I highly recommend buying a few basic accounting and finance textbooks to study during free time. 

Get competent with Excel.  Whether you choose to buy a Mac or a PC, make sure you learn as many keyboard shortcuts and functions as possible.  I didn’t, and it ended up costing me an extra hour (or more) every time I had to build a financial model. 

August 2015: Move to Your New City

Hopefully you’ve managed to find a place to live either online or during a previous visit to the city—if not, contact current or former students for advice on where to live for your school.  Veterans clubs often have connections on houses or apartments that are passed down from year to year.  Take advantage of the military’s home of record move, then give yourself a few weeks to get all your household stuff in order and find your way around your new city.  Attend Analytics or “math camp.”

September 2015: Begin School

Self-explanatory.  Enjoy your time in business school.

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Written by Eric (eric@MilitaryToBusiness.com), a former Marine Infantry Officer from the HBS Class of 2013.