Riding the College-to-Business School Express

High school seniors weren’t the only ones waiting by their computers and telephones over spring break for their admissions results: the undergraduates who applied to Harvard Business School’s second-round admissions found themselves in the same situation.

The Business School received approximately 8,500 applications in total for all three rounds this year, according to HBS admissions director Deirdre C. Leopold—roughly a 14.5 percent increase over last year’s total of 7,424 applicants.

Of those 8,500 applicants, 320 of them were current undergraduates applying to become members of the MBA Class of 2010.

Though Leopold declined to give numbers specific to the College, several of those undergraduates submitted their application forms from the Cambridge side of the Charles River.

A FOOT IN THE DOOR

After meeting stringent admissions standards, the lucky crop of admits faces a difficult choice—studying in Baker Library next year or spending time in other fields before coming to Cambridge.

The road to HBS is hard enough for the average applicant, but for a college senior, it becomes far more difficult.

In gauging applicants, the Business School focuses strongly on the sense of “organizational context” that a student can offer his or her classmates, according to Leopold.

“What kinds of organizations have they worked with? Have they been with organizations over a sustained period of time, so they’ve had the opportunity to struggle and succeed?” she said.

In this setting, people seeking admission from the business world have an advantage over applicants from college campuses, many of whom have been exposed to business only through a summer internship.

Even after HBS decides a candidate is deserving of matriculation, the school can choose from several different types of offers.

If the admissions office feels that the applicant will be strong enough to attend after some time in the workforce, the applicant can be granted “deferred admission”—saving the student a spot in the class two years ahead while helping him or her plan a set of work experiences for the interim.

According to Leopold, deferred admission is part of the normal admission process and does not include applicants to the “2+2” program announced last September.

If the person brings enough experience to bear on their MBA application, Leopold said, “We can admit them directly to the Business School, meaning that they could arrive in Cambridge that September. However, we would have a follow-up call where the senior could defer if they wanted to, based on wanting work experience or participating in a joint program with another graduate school.”

Getting to that point has recently become even harder. The number of applicants this year is the highest since 2004, while class size has remained roughly constant at around 900 students.

Harvard isn’t the only MBA program seeing a boom in applicants. On the application-editing Web site Accepted.com, Jennifer B. Barba, the assistant director of MBA Admissions at MIT Sloan, said that the school’s applications had increased by about 30 percent.

Sanford Kreisberg, an independent consultant who runs the business school admissions blog HBSGURU.com, speculated that the increase may be tied to falling financial markets.

“Applications are up this year because of the worsening economy,” Kreisberg said, “but they’ll be up even more next year as the economy continues to weaken.”

Harvard MBA figures seem to support Kreisberg’s statements. Applications peaked at 10,382 for the class of 2004; candidates for that class submitted their forms around late 2001, when the U.S. economy suffered two quarters of negative GDP growth.

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS

So what makes college seniors who apply to HBS stand out from the rest of the pack?

“We look for very strong academic performance, but there’s more than that. What do these applicants bring to the case-method classroom if they choose to come right away?” Leopold said. “We want...to measure maturity, agility, and the ability to think on your feet.”

Kreisberg and Leopold both noted the importance of diverse interests in an MBA applicant.

“The admissions committee is looking for students that have an impact beyond themselves,” Kreisberg said.“Many successful applicants participate in political and ethnic-identity clubs. Helping your own ethnic group [and] political campaigning are well-regarded activities. Health-related organizations are also popular—organize breast cancer walks, or help bring awareness to some specific disease.”

But Kreisberg said that for younger applicants with less work experience, statistics like GPA and GMAT scores become more important.

“To its credit, HBS will blink at a lower GMAT score, as they feel that the GPA is more important,” Kreisberg said. “They will rarely blink twice, however. They won’t blink at both.”

THE DIRECT PATH

This year, after the completion of the second round, 21 undergraduates have received offers of direct admission, while 15 have received offers of deferred admission, according to Leopold.

Harvard students in the former category have approached their choice in different ways—some choosing to cross the Charles in 2008 and others opting to wait.

Ronald K. Anguas, Jr. ’08 received an offer of direct admission to HBS in the first admissions round and has decided to attend this fall.

Anguas also earned admission to Harvard Law School and will be completing both his MBA and his JD over the next four years.

But the plan to attend business school was not always in the cards for Anguas. The government concentrator said he’d been active in Harvard Model Congress and was a legal research director for the Small Claims Advisory Service, which provides legal aid to low-income residents of the greater Boston area.

“I came into the College interested in law school, which seemed like a natural progression for me,” Anguas said.

But an internship with Goldman Sachs’s portfolio advisory group during his sophomore summer caused Anguas to change his thinking.

“We were the link between the teams that ran the funds and the teams that distributed the funds to individual private clients or to institutional investors, like pensions and endowments,” Anguas said. “That really gave me an opportunity to learn more about investments.”

In that setting, Anguas—a member of the Phi Beta Kappa “Junior 24”—realized that he could combine law with business.

“I saw that there was an area in the law with a fusion of securities regulation, looking at the legal part of [mergers and acquisitions],” Anguas said. “The MBA gives you the knowledge of management and how these companies run, and the JD [teaches you] what legal devices might be most advantageous to them at a given time.”

After another internship at JP Morgan’s private bank unit the following summer, Anguas said he made up his mind to pursue the MBA.

TAKING TIME OFF

Carolyn A. Sheehan ’08, another of the 21 students granted direct admission so far, has decided to defer for two years, making her a member of the MBA Class of 2012.

Like Anguas, Sheehan was “an adamant pre-law when I got to Harvard.” But also like Anguas, things changed after an internship with Goldman Sachs during her junior summer.

“I realized I liked working with finance, numbers, and deals during that summer,” she said.

Sheehan, an economics concentrator and another member of the Phi Beta Kappa Junior 24, wrote her senior thesis on rating agencies and their role in the sub-prime markets. In her spare time, Sheehan was president of the Seneca, a women’s non-profit organization; a Peer Advising Fellow; and a member of Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business during her freshman and sophomore years.

Ironically, Sheehan said that her co-workers at Goldman recommended that she skip business school because of the great network available to Harvard undergraduates.

“I listened to what they said, but I thought there was great value to an MBA,” Sheehan said. “It forces you to make decisions which you don’t necessarily get to do at a junior level at these banks. Maybe a person at Goldman doesn’t have to go to business school, but that might not be where I want to be long-term.”

Sheehan also said that, as a woman, there was particular value to the MBA.

“If I decide to have children, I think that getting an MBA would help me get back into the workforce at a later time,” she said.

Despite feeling so strongly about the MBA, Sheehan said she deferred admission because more experience would make her a better, more-directed student.

“I don’t think I could contribute as much to the classroom as I could two years from now,” she said. “I think that these two years will help me decide if [finance is] the direction I want to go.”

—Staff writer Prateek Kumar can be reached at kumar@fas.harvard.edu.