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.

MBA & OTHER GRADUATE PROGRAM RECOMMENDATION ADVICE

I wanted to provide a brief guide to my primary posts on recommendations.


For overall advice, I would suggest beginning with 10 KEY POINTS FOR WRITING AN EFFECTIVE RECOMMENDATION: WHAT EVERY RECOMMENDER SHOULD KNOW, which provides core advice for what recommenders need to know.  Applicants can use this post to help educate recommenders.  While it is primarily focused on MBA recommendations, the overall advice provided is applicable to all sorts of graduate school recommendations.


In Further Comments on Selecting the Right Recommenders, I provide applicants with some very detailed advice on how to select the right recommenders. This post addresses the most common kinds of questions that my clients and blog readers have asked me about selecting recommenders. 


In HBS MBA Program Class of 2015 MBA Essays and Recommendations, I provide my analysis of the four questions that HBS requires recommenders to answer.  I do intend, at some point, to analyze other schools' recommendation questions. 


My guest blogger, Steve Green, prepared a post specifically focused non-MBA graduate school school recommendations, Letters of Recommendation for Academic Graduate Degree Applicants.   He also did a post on recommendations letters for MPA and MPP programs, Letters of Recommendation for Public Policy Programs.


Recommendations can be a particularly difficult part of the application process for many candidates, so I hope the above posts are helpful.


-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.

Know Your Audience: Three Things You Should Know About Admissions Committee Members

I am pleased to introduce a new guest blogger to my site, Jessica King. Jessica and I have been working together since 2002. She brings a unique perspective to her work as an admissions consultant because she holds a degree in higher education administration from Harvard, is a professional interviewer, and has previously been a professional voice actress. Over the past year, she has assisted my clients with interview practice who were admitted to HBS, Kellogg, Stanford, Tuck, and Wharton for fall 2011. Her comprehensive service clients will be attending Columbia, Kellogg and Wharton, among others. Below, she provides a great perspective on a subject that she has true expertise in. For more about Jessica’s services, please visit http://www.king-consulting.org.

-Adam Markus

Know Your Audience: Three Things You Should Know About Admissions Committee Members

by Jessica King

Over the past nine years, I’ve had the opportunity to consider the application process from a variety of perspectives through my experience as an application consultant and work as a recruiter in the higher education sector. Additionally, during my graduate work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I spent an intensive year studying the field of higher education with professionals from top institutions around the country and I was delighted that a large number of my classmates had come to the program with backgrounds in admissions. During this time, I had the opportunity to participate in a seminar class that was focused on admissions policies and principles at selective colleges and universities. The discussions and debates that were such a vital part of this seminar, as well as those in my other classes, offered me invaluable insights into the world of admissions.  

In any form of persuasive communication, the most important factor in successfully communicating your ideas and eventually winning over your audience is presenting content in a way that is both compelling and easy to understand. In order to do this, there is one piece of advice that is likely familiar to you: know your audience. In the MBA application process, your audience is, naturally, the admissions committee (adcom).

Obviously, every member of the adcom is different, but in this post I’d like to introduce three things I’ve come to learn about adcoms in general that every MBA applicant should keep in mind when preparing his or her application.

1. It is highly unlikely they are experts in your field or specialization.

While there are a number of adcom members around the world that entered the field of admissions after having spent time in business and/or receiving an MBA, the likelihood of their having the detailed knowledge that you do in finance/supply chain management/software engineering/pharmaceutical sales is slim-to-none. This is extremely important to take into consideration when writing your essays. It is your job to present your experiences and goals in a way that is detailed and compelling, yet easily understandable for someone who does not know your field well.

2. It is entirely possible they have no business experience whatsoever.

Many adcom members are career academic administrators, some of whom are so committed to the field that they have received advanced degrees in higher education administration (like many of my classmates!). I can think of a number of adcom members at top programs who have spent their entire careers in academic administration and for whom their only knowledge of business comes from personal study or auditing MBA courses at their institution. This is important to take into consideration because their perspective of business and even the function of an MBA may be markedly different from yours (more on this in a future post). You cannot assume that the adcom shares the same assumptions and attitudes about business that you do.

You not should try to second-guess them – instead, just be sure that you explain yourself as thoroughly as possible in your essays. It’s possible that the first reader of your application will be a first-year adcom member who’s never worked outside his/her institution. A great question to keep in the back of your mind when drafting your essays is, “Would someone with no business experience be able to easily understand the point I am trying to make?”  

2. They are trained to consider your application in a holistic manner.

Something that is often difficult for many applicants to understand – particularly those accustomed to a quantitative, test-based approach to admissions – is that the adcom’s most important concern is generally not your academic ability. Of course, the adcom wants to know whether or not you will be able to successfully complete the academic component of the MBA program; however, they have been trained to evaluate this aspect of your application very quickly and this becomes a kind of “gateway” criteria.

Once they are satisfied with your academic ability, they move on to other considerations and these are often evaluated in a very qualitative, often imprecise manner. They will evaluate qualities such as leadership, teamwork, motivation, tenacity, and potential for future success … all of which are impossible to quantify in any sort of accurate way. The different pieces of your application – the application form, resume, essay questions, recommendations and interview – offer them “pieces of the puzzle,” so to speak. As an applicant, you must first know what holistic image you want to convey to the admissions committee, then provide them with the pieces necessary for them to see that image.

This is why it is so incredibly important for you to take the time at the beginning of the applications process (now!) to determine exactly what kind of picture you want the adcom to form of you while reading your application. By first determining your selling points, you can then maximize your usage of the different parts of the application to present yourself to the adcom in the best possible way.

I welcome questions/comments about this post. Please feel free to email me at jessica AT king-consulting DOT org. To learn more about my application consulting services, please visit http://www.king-consulting.org.