The recommendation letter is one of the more underappreciated sources of anxiety in the application process. It’s not so much the inability to get recommenders to speak highly of a candidate – most people seeking an elite MBA have multiple contacts willing to attest to their brilliance. Rather, the challenge is approaching that individual and...Read More

Applicants Who Are Admitted Everyone who is admitted receives a phone call from someone intimately familiar with the individual’s application. The admissions committee is in California but they must come in early on decision day since applicants report getting a phone call from the admissions committee as early as 9am EST. The admissions committee is...Read More

Applicants Who Are Admitted Booth phones all admitted applicants to let them know that they will be offered a position in the incoming class. Phone calls start at around 10am Eastern Time and go through to the end of the day. The phone calls are time zone agnostic. In the past our international clients have...Read More

North American Applicants Who Are Admitted Those in the US who were accepted typically receive a phone call informing them that they have been admitted. These phone calls typically start around 12pm EST on the day of the decision. So this year, successful Round 3 Applicants in North America should expect a phone call sometime...Read More

While business schools often profess the importance of gender equality and representation, they invariably fail to lead by example. Business schools consistently admit more men than women to their MBA programs. One GMAC survey found that other popular business degrees such as Master’s of Accounting and Master’s in Management have reached gender parity when it...Read More

The Economist wrote a fascinating article on how COVID-19 is impacting business schools. Hit: Employer Demand For MBA Degrees In A Post-COVID Economy The Economist quotes Edieal Pinker, deputy dean of the Yale School of Management, as asking: “Do you think the problems the pandemic created for society and the economy are narrow specialised problems...Read More

At Beacon we’ve developed a pattern recognition system that we use to help clients rapidly improve their GMAT scores. Based on a data set of over 1,500 official GMAT questions, the system has identified several systematic biases in GMAT answers. One of them is the GMAT’s preference for shorter sentences in Sentence Correction questions. Let’s...Read More

The Harvard MBA essay, “What more would you like us to know?” is remarkable for not having a word limit. Which leads to clients frequently wondering what Harvard expects of them. Fortunately, Harbus, Harvard Business School’s independent news organization, published 22 essays of successful HBS applicants. We went through them for insights on the appropriate...Read More

Stern released statistics on career outcomes for the class of 2020. Given this class graduated during the thick of a pandemic that has massively disrupted international commerce, the news was largely positive. Miss: Class Of 2020’s Anxiety Levels Almost a fifth of the class of 2020 didn’t know where they would be working at the...Read More

People writing their Harvard Business School essays see the broad prompt, “what more would you like us to know?”, and often wonder which direction they should go in. We frequently hear questions such as “can I talk about my academic experiences?”, “should I focus on my long or short-term goals?”, and “how much of my...Read More