By Jeremy Dann
Setting aside time to read over the next few months is one of the smartest things you can do to enhance your candidacy for top-flight MBA programs. Many candidates have not read a book for personal enjoyment or education for years, and they often don’t consider the busy summer and fall before MBA application season a good time to start up again. But when you examine the list of reasons for diving into some good books over the next several months, it really seems like a no-brainer. Reading can:

• Improve your vocabulary and mastery of grammar: reading is a change of pace from GMAT prep, but can still help you in this area
• Improve your writing: your b-school essays will represent one of the biggest and most important writing projects of your life. Getting ideas about interesting sentence structures and storytelling methods will be invaluable
• Give you more to write about: you may think of whole new essay ideas or refine ideas about certain sections of essays
• Give you more to talk about: business school interviewers want to learn about the “full you.” Many interviews go into current events, history, politics, etc., so if you can demonstrate that you’ve kept aware of the world outside of your cubicle, you’re a step ahead of the game.

Demonstrate your passions
By no means is it necessary to plow through a stack of the latest business books so that you can drop buzzword after buzzword in your essays and interviews. And you shouldn’t feel obligated to round out the “weak” areas of your business experience by hitting the local bookstore to get “Stocktrading for Dummies” or “Marketing for Dummies.” After all, we go to business school in order to learn about disciplines that are new to us.

The most important thing is to further develop your own interests and passions, not demonstrate that you are a member of the “Warren Buffett Book of the Month Club.” If you are interested in art, read about that. If you are intrigued by the history of baseball, immerse yourself in it. If medical science advances fascinate you, find some gems in this arena. Of course, it never hurts to develop some form of “business perspective” on the subjects you feel passionately about. For instance, if you love reading about medicine, mix in some books about, say, the economics of the healthcare system in the United States or the behavior of the global pharma industry.

If you wish to transition to a new sort of career after business school, demonstrating this kind of commitment can be particularly important. If you have been an IT consultant for the last five years, but want to become an entrepreneur and launch a new restaurant concept, you should show a commitment to the area that goes beyond spending your $50 consulting per diem in the finest restaurants your client’s city has to offer. Reading about consumer trends, restaurant/retail entrepreneurs or the organic food movement helps show that you follow your interests, you don’t just talk about them.

Some ideas about what to read
To reiterate: read anything, just read! That’s the key element—thinking about words, structures, ideas and storytelling. Even John Grisham’s latest paperback helps with that.

But, if you wish to assemble a reading list with a little more of an application and interview preparation agenda, here are some ideas. First of all, I recommend that all my clients read selections from Songbook, by Nick Hornby (the fellow who wrote High Fidelity and About a Boy). This is an entertaining book featuring essays about the author’s favorite songs and the impact they have had on his life. Hornby uses music as a “door” to enter into discussions about some very serious issues, like his son’s autism. Since his essays are of a similar length to some you’ll be writing for your applications, you can really get some strong ideas about structure and storytelling.

Here are some other books that are not only entertaining an interesting, they might just influence your ideas on business without pounding you with a hail of buzzwords (Please click here to check out the reading list on Amazon):

Powerful ideas from science and history
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
You’ve heard the term “paradigm shift” a thousand times. Read the incredibly persuasive book that essentially coined the term.

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond
Learn why some societies thrived while others vanished.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright
Illustrates how certain ideas, philosophies and cultural institutions come to the fore; argues that one of the main motive forces of human history is a drive toward more cooperation.

Viewpoints on the economy and society
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
A must read in an era of increasing globalization; illustrates the technological and societal forces that make the world a smaller place everyday.

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
Isolates the reasons why certain trends becomes phenomena.

Freakanomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Strange viewpoints and sometimes counterintuitive analyses of critical economic and societal issues

Costing the Earth, by Frances Cairncross,
A little outdated, but this is the most compelling economic analysis I have ever read about the true impact of economic activity on the environment, and the impact of environmental health on the economy; by a former Economist editor

Business books that make you think
The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen
Illustrates the organizational impediments to innovation faced by industry leading companies.

Trading Up: The New American Luxury, by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske
Isolates the trend of affordable luxuries, a force behind many of the top consumer brands of the last two decades

The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, by Frans Johansson
Illustrates how the most compelling innovations come at the intersection of diverse disciplines

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, by Donald Norman
Design is a huge part of major recent success stories such as I-pod and Target stores; read a great book about what makes great design

Business History
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., by Ron Chernow
Compelling business biography.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Daniel Yergin
Yeah…more oil, but it’s important stuff and this was a Pulitzer Prize wining book on the rise of the commodity to its current place of prominence in the world economy.

Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell, by Nancy Koehn
Sweeping intro to the discipline of business history, cutting across a wide variety of industries.

Please click here to check out the reading list on Amazon

Applicants frequently ask me, “Here are my numbers, here is a copy of my resume. Do I have a chance?” That’s always a difficult question to answer because the resume and numbers are really only the tip of the “application iceberg”. There is so much more to this process. Reapplicant Chillpill clearly “gets” it as she frets over how to stand out and states that the GMAT is the easier part of the process.

The Outlook in Higher Education published an article in April about Business School Admissions, featuring Stacy Blackman Consulting and some recent clients. I am reprinting the article below because I think the client case studies do a good job of illustrating how numbers and resume do not get you in. It is true that extremely low numbers and a very poor resume can keep you out. However, stellar numbers and work experience on their own will not get you in. Read on…

GRADUATE SCHOOLS
Getting into Top B-schools
Success Requires a Strategy
April 10, 2006

by Sandra Gardner

There’s no question that getting an M.B.A. (master’s degree in business administration), especially at a top school, is expensive. Out-of-state tuition and fees can range from about $35,000 to nearly $40,000 a year, plus living expenses, for the top four schools. And for full-time students, in what is generally a two-year program, there’s the added cost of lost wages.

Is getting an M.B.A. really worth all that time and expense? The answer is: definitely, if you want to more than double your income, according to surveys of M.B.A. holders salaries. For M.B.A. holders from the top four schools – University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton, Northwestern University’s Kellogg, Stanford University and Harvard University – the salary levels spiral to upwards of $165,000 a year. Not only that, but acquiring an M.B.A. can provide additional benefits of greater compensation growth, more stable long-term employment, and a higher likelihood of participating in the work force, according to ”The ROI on the M.BA.,” an article by Antony Davies and Thomas K Cline, published by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. (R0I is “rate of investment.”) Since 1993, the authors report, expected wage growth for workers with professional degrees, including M.B.A.s, exceeded inflation by more than 2 percent. The wage growth for those with only undergraduate degrees averaged 1 percent above inflation.

Graduates with professional degrees have had 25 percent lower unemployment, and 81 percent have been work force participants, compared to 78 percent of those without professional degrees.

But being accepted into a top school program isn’t easy. The average GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) score was at least 700; undergraduate GPA (Grade Point Average) was more than 3.50, for the top four schools. In 2004, Kellogg took only 23 percent of applicants; Wharton, 16 percent; Harvard, 13 percent; and Stanford, 10 percent, according to Business Week’s “Best B-Schools of 2004.”

Hooking up with an M.B.A. admissions strategy firm like Stacy Blackman Consulting, based in Los Angeles, Calif., can make it all possible. Her success rate? She says that 97 percent of her clients are accepted at one of their top four choices. This includes clients with low GMAT and GPA scores and a lack of extracurricular or leadership experience. Blackman came to the business from a background in marketing products such as securities – and ice cream – at such companies as Charles Schwab, idealab! and Haagen-Dazs. Five years ago, she took that experience and translated it into business school admissions strategy, as one of the pioneers in the field.

Blackman, who holds an undergraduate degree from Wharton and an M.B.A. from Kellogg, believes that marketing people isn’t that much different from marketing chocolate chip cookie dough. How does she do it?

Basically, by a technique she calls “people branding.”

”It’s positioning people by thinking about the target market: what do they want and how can I appeal to those interests,” she says.

Grant Allen is a good example. Even being a cum laude graduate of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering didn’t work for his initial application to a top B-school.

“I didn’t even make it to the interview,” says Allen, one of Blackman’s clients, now in his first year at Wharton. “Before I talked to Stacy, I overemphasized my job achievements.” These included developing his own Web-design company as an undergraduate and working as an analytic and problem-solving consultant with Bates White, LIE, an environmental and product liability consulting practice; and a senior analyst for Dean & Company, a strategy consulting practice, both located in Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, Allen’s marketing of himself to business schools didn’t differentiate him much from the pack of accomplished achievers with whom he was competing.

“You’re a smart person who’s done well at a job, and so has everyone else,” he says wryly. “Stacy helped me bring out my unique story.”

Blackman looked at things other than Allen’s G.P.A. and work history. Since 1998, he’s been traveling to South America, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean on behalf of a family foundation, International Cooperating Ministries. The Ministries is a church-building foundation started by Allen’s grandfather that has facilitated construction of 1,800 orphanages and churches in 35 countries.

“We work with the people in the country, providing overhead money and bridge loans for materials to build a place where people can worship and come together in a community center,” Allen explains.

Allen also co-founded with his father, a retired ophthalmologist, the Ocular Melanoma Foundation, a nonprofit education and research advocacy group for a rare type of Cancer.

Blackman helped Allen weave these threads into his essays so that his application told a unique story to admissions officials. As a result, he was accepted not only at Wharton but also at Kellogg.

“She acts as a coach, helps you clarify your thoughts, keeps you on track and enthusiastic about the process, and brings out the unique story you have inside you,” Allen says.

Though Blackman’s comprehensive marketing plan is custom designed, she and her staff, which includes 10 trained consultants, follow an overall schema. They conduct an initial conversation with the client about his or her background, M.B.A. admission goals, resume, and “numbers” (GMAT and GPA). The client then fills out a “Brainstorm Survey” Blackman created to identify achievements, goals, strengths, and challenges.

“The survey covers personal background and challenges, things that are not on the resume,” she says. “Schools want to know who you are as a human being.”

The client’s challenges and “holes” are assessed regarding B-school admission, and an action plan to meet these needs is put together. These include developing a school selection and target list, selecting and preparing recommenders and strategizing essay questions and an overall marketing plan. Support is provided in completing essays and resumes; planning school visits, interview techniques and preparation; and dealing with school decisions and enrollment.

Blackman will help a client find a GMAT tutor or volunteer opportunities, in addition to the motivation to go through extra rounds of essays, address areas of weakness and apply while working full-time. Clients work with the firm anywhere from a month to a year or something in between – however long it takes to complete the application process.

Her clients’ job history before business school ranges from investment banking to computer engineering to teaching and music.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make is the idea that someone who has a low G.P.A. or who is not an investment banker won’t get into business school,” she says.

That’s exactly what Janet Zhou had thought, even with her summa cum laude degree from the University of Memphis and years of working as a senior software engineer and technical product manager at Avolent, a leading enterprise application software provider.

“I was a software engineer for a long time,” Zhou says. “It was a difficult proposition to take my credentials and make them appeal to business school, to find the right way of describing myself so as to stand out from the very qualified applicant pool.”

Blackman noted that Zhou had emigrated from China at age 15 with no knowledge of English.

“Stacy asked me, what did I learn from that experience, the process of learning to speak English, learning about a different culture and finding an identity for myself with a blend of my cultural background and the U.S. culture,” Zhou explains.

Blackman added to this the fact that Zhou is fluent in Mandarin and volunteered at the San Francisco Asian Women Shelter, providing support, advocacy and Chinese language interpreting for domestic violence victims.

As a result of Blackman’s marketing, Zhou was accepted at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, the University of Michigan and Kellogg, where she is now completing her first year.

“She helped me design a strategy as to what to emphasize in my background and helped in writing the essays,” Zhou says.

Being a minority, from another culture or an immigrant family, provides an applicant with a unique perspective that can be an advantage, Blackman says. Even a not-so- perfect GPA doesn’t have to deter a business school hopeful, as was the case with a Hispanic client who’d failed a class in college.

“He grew up with a lot of challenges, in a poor family in a terrible gang neighborhood,” Blackman recalls. “But he’d developed so much as a human being, his essays reflected his accomplishments and maturity. He got into Harvard Business School and Wharton.”

Relating personal challenges that have been overcome is a big plus on an application essay, Blackman maintains, as is identifying a weakness that has been dealt with.

“For example, if you had low grades in college, business schools will question how you would handle their curriculum. Identify this as a weakness and let them know that you’re taking a calculus or accounting course to overcome this,” she says.

Blackman’s services aren’t cheap: her price for the first school is $2,750; the second school, an additional $1,500; for the third school and beyond, $1,000 per school; and a four-school package for $5,750. She also offers a $250 hourly service for clients who need specific help with a particular aspect of their application.

But her clients feel that the success they have hoped for is well worth the price. So much so, in fact, that the majority of her clients come to her through word of mouth.

“Don’t be afraid to expose a weakness. Sometimes a weakness can be turned into a strength. A ‘perfect’ person can show a lack of self-awareness,” Blackman advises.
“The key is to look at what you have going for you, who you are, what you can bring to the table. Market yourself.”

In other words: think of the nuggets that make up the unique product that is you. Just like Rocky Road.

By Jeremy Dann

Jack Kerouac kept a notebook before he went On the Road. Larry David’s notebook of wry observations and embryonic comedy routines was lost and then found by annoying fans on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now, YOUR notebook should play a big part of your business school admissions process.

This spring and summer, commit to carrying around a notebook to scratch down your thoughts about your applications. Some of these might be random ideas that come to you while you’re working at your desk, sitting on a plane or braving the morning commute (if you drive, however, please keep two hands on the wheel at all times). But you should also plan to spend, say, half an hour of scheduled quality time per week with your notebook for the next several months. You may choose to use your notebook computer as your notebook in order to more easily reformat your thoughts into essay outlines.

Applications have not been distributed yet, but most of the themes are universal from year to year and should not come as a surprise to applicants. Take time to write down your preliminary ideas relating to:

1. Your main career accomplishments to date: not responsibilities or your job description, but your achievements
2. Examples of your leadership abilities
3. Your outside interests and passions and main achievements you’ve had in your “extracurricular” life
4. People and events that have influenced you
5. Your career goals after business schools…and your life goals
6. Areas in which you need improvement or personal development: these may be demonstrated skill or personality weaknesses you’ve committed to improve on. Also, these may be areas you have just not had a chance to develop yet.
7. How business school will benefit you: everyone benefits from “the diverse student body, world-renowned faculty and active alumni network”; you need to move well beyond this level of analysis. What specific things do you want to learn? What classes do you want to take? What would be your ideal summer internship?

Don’t settle for writing down your general thoughts. Be specific. As a matter of fact, be incredibly specific. I encourage my clients to employ what I call “microexamples” to bring their essays to life. That means finding those discrete moments that encapsulate major experiences in your life. That one negotiation session where your idea led to a breakthrough…the discomfort of the first time you had to fire someone…that phone call where you lost an important customer’s business…the “ah-hah” moment when you decided to invest in a certain entrepreneur’s company.

Some other things to scratch on your pad:
1. Your thoughts on what schools are right for you. What departments need to be great? What geography do you prefer? Are programs such as cross-registration important for you? Check out what one applicant did to create the ultimate school selection algorithm.
2. Who will your best recommenders be—and what do you want them to say? We’ll talk more about this in coming weeks.
3. Comments from your friends and family, and colleagues if appropriate. Your b-school application process can be a great time to buff up your ego. Sit down with your buddies and ask them: “What are the best things about me?” Sometimes outside perspectives will reveal things about your character and talents that you weren’t fully aware of. Actually, in addition to buffing up your ego, you should probably also ask these people about their feelings on your required areas of personal and professional development.

Your notes will be an incredibly valuable resource, whether you’re tackling the admissions process by yourself or working with an applications advisor.

Now that many of the admissions decisions have been finalized, many denied applicants are left wondering whether they should reapply. Forrest Gump begins to ponder what to do next in his posting, That Thing Called Hope.

The business school application process is incredibly introspective. While all of the work that you put in to the process may increase your desire to attend, some of the thinking that you did about your career and life plans may actually have led you to agree with the admissions committee – business school is not the place for you.

If you have been denied this year, this is a time to take a break, perhaps briefly wallow in self pity, and then think about whether you really want or need business school. In many cases, if your goals are unchanged, the simple answer to this question is “yes”.

Have I Hurt My Chances?
Many applicants worry that they have a lower chance of acceptance with a reapplication. This is generally not the case. Many schools actually encourage reapplication. For example, Wharton states that reapplicants comprise about 10% of their applicant pool in a given year, and that about 10% of admitted applicants are reapplicants. This indicates that reapplicants have as good a chance as anyone else in the pool. They have also stated that they generally look favorably upon reapplications.

Some schools, such as Stanford and Harvard state that they do not look at the previous year’s application, and require you to submit an entirely new app. This would imply that a new application provides a completely clean slate.

Frequently, over the course of gathering feedback, you can establish a relationship with members of the admissions committee. This is also a way to show your commitment to the school and enhance your chances the second time around. While you do not want to be too agressive, and need to make sure that your interactions are not frivolous, in some cases you can maintain a meaningful dialog that can actually help your chances.

The takeaway here is that if managed properly, reapplication is not a bad thing, and can even improve your chances. Once you have decided that you want to forge ahead, the first step to successful reapplication is gathering as much honest feedback as you can.

Feedback
Many schools will conduct feedback sessions to provide insights for denied applicants. Wharton states that they conduct approximately 1,500 feedback sessions each year. Kellogg and Columbia are two other schools that are willing to provide feedback. Be warned that the feedback is not always entirely helpful. Occasionally you will receive a very actionable piece of feedback, such as “you need more work experience” or “you should raise your GMAT score at least 30 points”. More often, the feedback is quite general and it can be hard to really pin down specific takeaways. You should also know that it is highly unlikely that you will hear, “you really do not have a chance here”. Even if that is, in fact, the case.

When to Reapply
When you actually reapply will depend on the outcome of outside feedback and your personal introspection. While some candidates may be in a hurry to go to school and move on with things, there are many reasons why you may want to wait a year before taking the plunge again.
1) If you find that you have a number of important issues to address in your candidacy, you may need more than the six months you still have to tackle everything.
2) You may be plain burnt out. Applying once is a very exhausting process on many levels. Being denied only adds to that. You may just not have it in you to try again so soon.
3) Finally, and perhaps most importantly – demonstrating progress is key to reapplication success. If you apply with the exact same story, same acitivities, same position…if you show that you really have not done much besides apply to business school in the past year, the likelihood of success is low. However, if you can demonstrate that you have begun to make progress towards your goals even without your MBA, that you have been promoted, taken a board seat, refined your goals…all of this will take you a long way. You may need more time to take action and demonstrate that progress. This would be a good reason to wait an additional year or more before reapplying.

These are things to think about now, before applications are posted. Go through the introspection, gather feedback and make some decisions about what you will do this year. Stacy Blackman Consulting can also provide feedback on last year’s apps to help you figure out what went wrong, and provide actionable advice for how to move forward. Just contact us at info@stacyblackman.com.