There's a significant update I haven't mentioned in my blog for a long time. I dont know what stopped me from doing so, I guess some kind of hysteria for not getting into even one of the six schools I applied to.
But once I became a nominee for ClearAdmit's BoB, I felt I should let it out in the blogosphere. So, here it is. I was waitlisted at two schools - Ross and Tepper (both my R2 apps) Ross - without an interview and Tepper - with an interview. My initial reaction - "Hey..atleast, I wasn't pushed from a cliff right away but kept dangling by a thread to climb back". And I said "was" because I got a reject from Ross already (they cut loose that thread !). But I'm still on the waitlist at Tepper, my last chance for joining the party like the others - him, her, her and him who are already there.
Being on the waitlist has been a really good learning process into each of these schools. I'm not trying to judge a school but here are my observations. Except for one, none of my emails to Ross students went unanswered. Ross' students really seemed to be down-to-earth (you might come across jerks too..but it's probably like 10/500!). But that was not the case at Tepper. MBA students can be really busy and I'm not being rude or anything, just saying what I experienced. But again it was a different thing at Tepper, my contacts actually went ahead and put me in touch with other students who had similar interests as mine. Now, that could be difficult at a school with a large no. of students, but this is the advantage at Tepper, which comes with its class-size. For example, there are just about 25 students in the Entrepreneurship track and everyone gets to know everyone, so it isn't hard to connect with others when you know one, and the whole entrepreneur/vc community in Pittsburgh is linked to Tepper and CMU. It's actually very exciting to think that you can actually get mentored by a successful entrepreneur. And the best part, the Tepper Adcom who interviewed me - he's awesome ! Frankly, I don't think you see such enthusiastic people in Admissions Committees very often :P
Inspite of a lot of interactions with students/alumni/adcomms in events/visits, what I realized was that these subtle differences can let you know the culture of the school very well - what the school is about and how the students are. Being waitlisted has helped me understand my fit even better with these two schools. And if some one asks me if I'd apply again to Ross and Tepper (if Tepper feels otherwise), it's a resounding YES!
