Axolotl: My Application Is In!!

October 14, 2013 :: Admissionado Team

R1 app is in! It was down to the wire managing my references and proofreading application but hours / days of work and $300 in fees later, it’s done. Quick aside: b-school app fees are no joke! Just based on the pure number of applicants, Harvard collected $2.3M in fees last year while Stanford collected $1.8M in fees (assuming everyone paid full freight and there was no financial aid). Certainly sounds like enough to pay for the admissions department…

Some learnings: when possible get your references to send you the materials to proof. Obviously you can’t write the rec for them but it helps to gently guide them one way or another. I tried to guide my references to show different but complementary sides of my personality. I’m glad I was able to iterate a few times with two of my references because their output looked somewhat raw and required some grammatical and structural polish.

Also, regardless of how far in advance you tell your references, they’re liable to wait until the last minute. Either that or all of mine are as irresponsible as I am. So tell them as early as humanly possible that you’re applying! Months if possible. And check in early.

Now we play the waiting game and prepare for the interview (if I’m lucky enough to get one!).

[Admissionado Note: We don’t believe in luck. But we DO believe in Axolotl… so we can’t wait to hear the good news.]

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Axolotl’s a Finance guy looking for an MBA to make some moves in the Private Equity/Venture Capital world. He’s been documenting his MBA application experience every other week. Catch up here.