Days Off

With my Tuck interview tomorrow, I'm caught up between wanting to work all night and drive my applications to completion and just chill for the rest of the day. It's quite a conundrum. I've found that when I try to relax like that I feel guilty that I'm not making progress on my applications. At this point, I've updated all my essays for Tuck and I think I'm almost ready to call it complete (I'm nervous to say that). With that, I can focus my attention on bringing the content and adapting it to the other four schools. Since I'm a reapplicant, this mean Haas is almost complete, Kellogg just needs me to tailor my Tuck essays to them, Booth needs a ppt and Anderson wants to know more about my character. Doesn't sound too bad considering I have just over three weeks to go. I think Tuck, Kellogg and Haas could be complete in the next week and a half. Then I'd still have a couple weeks to bang out the last two. Not a bad place to be.

This weekend, I actually was able to accomplish a good bit without locking myself away until I came out productive. One of the things I realized is that it's important to read each essay independently. By taking a step back and asking what does this essay say and how does it say it without another essay clouding your judgement you can get a better read of the content. By doing that this weekend, I was focused on the task at hand. Today, in beginning my Booth ppt, I began to look at my application as a whole. What are the messages I'm trying to communicate to the adcom. What did I tell the Tuck adcom through 4 essays and a couple short answer questions. By looking at the messages, and ensuring there isn't too much overlap in specific content, I was able to quickly pull the headlines for my Booth ppt. Simultaneously, this enable me to ensure I was "on message" for Tuck. Overall, it proved very useful to ensure that both the big picture and specifics were coming through in my application. It may not be the easiest thing to do, but I don't think I did a great job with that piece last year. Hopefully this year that and adding specifics to the essays will make a difference which leads me to...

my Tuck interview tomorrow. As an aspiring consultant, I am trying to remember a couple of key things. First, take a minute. Silence is ok (in moderation) as long as you utilize the time to clarify your thoughts and come with a structure answer on point. Next, not every answer needs a detailed personal story of how I reached my answer. Ok, this does kind of contradict my specifics point earlier. It's close but it's a fine line. I need enough specifics to get the point across without burying my interviewer into a convoluted story that doesn't really bring him to a clear point. If I can do that, I'm confident. I know the school, I know my reasons for a Tuck MBA and future goals, I know how I'll contribute and be involved as a Tuckie. What more is there...? Not cocky, just trying to be confident.

Ok and with that, I'm basically done for the day. A last minute review is likely and a relaxing evening.

Reapplicant

It's about time I start working on my reapplicant essay, you know the one where I saw here's ALLLL the amazing things I've done to further myself as a candidate, and more importantly, a person since we (adcom and I) last spoke. This always seemed pretty formulaic to me for some reason. You gave me feedback (or didn't depending on the school) which came down to four areas: essays/career goals, involvement/leadership, quant abilities and GMAT. Out of those categories, I decided to work on 3. I left the GMAT alone as I had a 700 (90th percent) with roughly an even split with both above the magic 80th percentile that seems so critical. So that's the outline for the essay. Now it's just plugging stuff in, right? Wrong as usual. I'm once again overthinking it and trying to word each achievement or piece perfectly. Instead, I should just block an hour and bang it our (remember my earlier post on this, just get it on paper then edit, much easier).

With this in mind, here we go:

Goals/Essays - worked hard but also talked to lots of students and alumni to understand what the life is actually like. Through this I learned more about the schools and career path I'm hoping to achieve (please see essay 1). It solidified my interest in the career and school since all your alumni are amazing at continuing the dialogue and explaining the positives and negatives of their choices.

Involvement/Leadership - this is the place I have the most fodder: joined two sports leagues (an old passion), took on nearly double the number of client assignments which forced me to become a project leader, was more client/market facing over the past year, developed several large internal projects (one global in scope), joined another volunteer activity (great cause my friend introduced me to), became much more involved in my undergrad alumni association (including two new events linking current students with alumni to create a local mentorship network), couple more things I believe but you get the idea

Quant - took an online math for management course and earned an A-; ok, not the A I was aiming for but considering all the distractions, I guess it'll do

So there, now I have it and just need to plug into essay format. Done.

Feeling behind here

It's been a while since I've posted and I think I've promised a couple of posts at this point (which I promise I will make up eventually). Among work, applications, networking, school events, family and friends, gym and everything else I feel like I'm constantly running and tired. Needless to say this blog has been neglected. On a positive note, I'm made great progress and am closing in on finalizing my Tuck application (yea, I don't know if I believe it either). From there, I'm confident I can pull together the rest. Next Tuesday I'm heading up to Hanover for my interview. Although it's a stressful event, I'm really excited since I'm going to see a couple people I've had multiple conversations with, plus the beauty of the upper valley. Finally, I think I've made some good connections at all the schools, more on this to follow (I promise).

I know this is really jumbled and quick, but I'm tired and need to wake up early to write another piece of my application.