My MBA Journey- Part 6 (Kinds of B-schhol application processes)

Because I had kept the international b-schools’ applications preparation on hold until the CAT 2008 exam, I had taken a very serious risk. Before I discuss the risk, let me spend few lines explaining the application process to international b-schools.

There are 2 kinds of application processes

• Staged process
• Rolling process

In staged application process, the application cycle is divided into rounds and each round has a deadline. If you apply by that deadline, your application would be considered for that round otherwise it will be considered in the next round. For example, ISB Hyderabad (in India) has 2 rounds: Round 1 and Round 2.Application process for admission to session starting in April 2009, opened in July 2008.Dealines for round 1 and round 2 were 15th September 2008 and 1st December 2008 respectively, This means all the applicants applying to ISB between July and 15th September (included) would be considered in round 1 and those applying between 16th September and 1st December in round 2.

Applicants applying in earlier rounds are always at an advantage (in the above case round 1 applicants would have better chances of getting an interview call than round 2 applicants). Reasons for this are:

• There is no fixed percentage of seats that get filled up in earlier rounds i.e. if the school gets high quality of students in round 1, they might end up filling more than 50% of the total seats in this round itself. So round 2 would have less than 50% of the total seats and hence more competition in round 2
• Every b-school has fixed the percentage (not made public) of students they want to select from each category of applicant pool (IT engineers, female candidates, international students, sports persons etc.). And if a b-school happens to get the required number of students for a particular category in earlier rounds, then it is highly unlikely that a student from the already filled up category, applying in later rounds, would get selected

To make my point clearer, let’s take an example.

Suppose total number of seats available in ISB for 2009-2010 session is 500 and ISB wants to select max. of 50 IT engineers. Now say 3000 people apply in round 1 and 3000 in round 2. Of 3000 in round 1, 100 are IT engineers and same is the case for round 2.Now it so happens that ISB is impressed with the quality of the candidates in round 1 and it makes offers to 300 students (i.e more than 50% of the total seats available) of which 30 are IT enginners.So the equation for round 2 changes to 3000 students vying for 200 seats (and 100 IT engineers for 20 seats). While the situation for round 1 comes out to be 3000 students vying for 300 seats (and 100 IT engineers for 30 seats).Even if the quality of students is better in round 2, students in round 2 would have to face a stiffer competition.

So the bottom-line is “Apply in the earliest round possible”.

Other process is the Rolling process which works on the simple methodology of “first come first serve”. There is no such thing as “rounds”. For example applicant applying on ,say, 3rd December will get his application decision earlier than someone who applied on 15th December who in turn would get the decision earlier than the 25th December applicant.

That means in both the processes, applying as early as possible ensures a better chance of getting an interview call/selection.

Few examples of b-schools following different models are (especially mentioned for curious minds :) ):
ISB (staged with 2 rounds)
NUS (2 rounds with rolling approach within each round)
SAID/JUDGE/INSEAD (staged with 4 rounds)
Cranfield/Lancaster/Rotterdam/MBS (rolling process)

Now I return to the risk I had mentioned in the 2nd line of this post. It was already November 2008 and since the application process for admission to the 2009 fall session had already started in September-October 2008 timeframe, I had missed the 1st round of almost all the foreign b-schools. And similarly for schools with rolling admission, I was getting late.

Not to talk of the fact that I had not started preparing my applications (biggest challenge in applying to a foreign-GMAT based b-school) which easily takes 2-3 months depending on the number of schools one is applying to and number of essays per application. To make the situation worse, I had not zeroed in on the b-schools I would apply to (which I realized later to be an extensive time taking task).

All this pertain to the fact that if I put my best foot forward I could be able to apply earliest by January 2009 and that means I would be placed in round 2 or round 3 of the b-school and obviously too late for rolling-admission based schools.

With no choice, I started on my next leg of the journey: selecting the b-schools.

PS: My advice for aspirants taking GMAT is to make sure you take GMAT early enough to have sufficient time to prepare and submit your applications in round 1 itself (Most of the schools have 1st round deadlines in late September/early October for classes starting in the fall next year)