My Visit to the INSEAD Singapore Campus

I had the pleasure of visiting the INSEAD Singapore campus last week.  INSEAD's Deborah Riger,  who I have previously interviewed, was kind enough to give me a tour of the campus and arrange a visit to a class.

The Singapore Campus is a pleasant urban campus located within a research park.  While I have not been to the Fontainebleau campus, clearly there is a marked contrast between the two campuses. As one of my former clients explained to me over lunch in Singapore, the campuses each have their own distinct culture. Singy is the classic urban campus effect with students being able to access a great international city, whereas Fonty offers the classic college town effect. My former client had actually started at Fonty, is now at Singy, and will be going to Wharton.  She is taking full advantage of a total set of very distinct experiences, which is certainly one of the great advantages of the program.  Now adding Kellogg into the mix and the possibilities for experiences extremely different campus cultures is really quite amazing.  In the case of this one former client, she appreciated the opportunity to do more intensive bonding in Fonty, which, given its location has significantly less distractions than Singy. She said that in either case, students find themselves traveling extensively with friends on the weekends.  With Singy you have access to Asia via cheap flights and an amazing international airport located very close to campus. 

Compared to US business schools that I have visited (Booth, Haas, HBS, Kellogg, MIT, Stanford, and UCLA), the extreme internationality of INSEAD's students is an obvious and yet completely worthwhile point to mention.  Singapore itself is so international, but by contrast INSEAD is even more so.   The number of foreign languages spoken in the hallways and the accents I heard in the classroom were simply amazing. 

I attended an introductory class, Uncertainty, Data, and Judgment, and was impressed by the amount of material covered in the course.  I could see immediately why INSEAD's TOEFL and GMAT minimums would be effective ways to guarantee that potential students could keep in class.  Talking with a second former client who has just begun the program, I gather that the workload, while intense, was manageable.

The second client I talked to, by the way, was one of, what she told me, a number of moms with babies.  She told me that she thought the access to relatively daycare (she has a nanny for her baby) made Singy a better choice than Fonty, especially if one has a working spouse. Unlike my other client, she planned to do the straight ten months at Singy. 

I want to thank everyone at INSEAD for really helping gain a deeper understanding of the program.   For those of you considering INSEAD, if you do have the possibility of visiting prior to application, I do recommend it.

-Adam Markus

アダム　マーカス
I am a graduate admissions consultant who works with clients worldwide. If you would like to arrange an initial consultation, please complete my intake form, which is publicly available on google docs here, and then send your completed form to adammarkus@gmail.com.  You can also send me your resume if it is convenient for you.  Please don't email me any essays, other admissions consultant's intake forms, your life story, or any long email asking for a written profile assessment. The only profiles I assess are those with people who I offer initial consultations to. See here for why. Please note that initial consultations are not offered when I have reached full capacity or when I determine that I am not a good fit with an applicant.

Decrease in total applications, but increase in applicant quality

The new GMAC 2011 application trends survey is now being reported on (See Inside Higher Ed and Wall Street Journal) because there was decrease in the total number of applications to MBA programs.  While Melissa Korn at the Wall Street Journal concludes correctly at the macro-level that "Thinking of applying to business school? Now may be a good time," the picture is a bit more complicated.  I think it worth pointing two key findings in the GMAC report:


"46% of all graduate business programs saw growth in international applications, with China and India topping the list of foreign applicants, especially for full-time MBA programs."

This means that while there has been an overall decrease in applications to US programs, the number of foreign applicants has increased.   If you are an international applicant, things have not gotten any easier.


"Among MBA programs, the majority reported decreased volume in 2011, but candidate quality and academic credentials are higher than last year."

In other words, there are fewer, but better candidates competing for admission. So while in the aggregate it has gotten easier to get in, that does not necessarily result in a less competitive climate.  And it is true that the acceptance rate for the HBS Class of 2012 was 11%, but actually, the "normal rate" appears to be 12% because the acceptance rates for HBS Classes of 2013, 2011, and 2005 was 12%.  We are back to the norm.


It is always worth keeping in mind that ultimately the success of any particular applicant is a result of their efforts and their realism in the school selection process.

-Adam Markus

アダム　マーカス
I am a graduate admissions consultant who works with clients worldwide. If you would like to arrange an initial consultation, please complete my intake form, which is publicly available on google docs here, and then send your completed form to adammarkus@gmail.com.  You can also send me your resume if it is convenient for you.  Please don't email me any essays, other admissions consultant's intake forms, your life story, or any long email asking for a written profile assessment. The only profiles I assess are those with people who I offer initial consultations to. See here for why. Please note that initial consultations are not offered when I have reached full capacity or when I determine that I am not a good fit with an applicant.

If you don't believe in your goals and story, no one else will!

When I help a client craft their essays, resume, and other application components and/or prepare for interviews, one thing I am constantly asking myself is whether I believe what they have written or said.  If I don't I let them know. Then we work on making sure that not only I believe, but my client does too. Here is some general advice the importance of belief as it relates to the MBA admissions process.
 

Believe in yourself.  If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.   "I Believe in You" from the musical "How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying" gets at the essence of this.  If you have confidence issues, you might want to make this song your own personal mantra:



If you can't say it with confidence when you look into the mirror, what will happen in an MBA admissions interview?  If the content in your resume and essays would not be something you would like to be questioned on by a person looking into your eyeballs, there is a problem with your content.


Assume the admissions committee member reading your file, as well as the alumni interviewer, student interviewer, and/or admissions officer meeting with you is no fool.  Assume, instead, that they have highly developed bullshit detectors.  No one likes to be lied to, especially a gatekeeper at an elite educational institution. So whatever you write and say make sure you believe it. That probably means it is some believable variation of the truth.  

There is the world of facts and there is the world of interpretation.  Successful business school applicants connect those worlds together in a way sufficient to be convincing.

-Adam Markus

アダム　マーカス
I am a graduate admissions consultant who works with clients worldwide. If you would like to arrange an initial consultation, please complete my intake form, which is publicly available on google docs here, and then send your completed form to adammarkus@gmail.com.  You can also send me your resume if it is convenient for you.  Please don't email me any essays, other admissions consultant's intake forms, your life story, or any long email asking for a written profile assessment. The only profiles I assess are those with people who I offer initial consultations to. See here for why. Please note that initial consultations are not offered when I have reached full capacity or when I determine that I am not a good fit with an applicant.