STANFORD NEW YORK PRESENTATION.

The next post is a very thorough recap of Stanford’s New York City presentation, QBed by the main man himself, Derrick Bolton, and a bunch of oh-so-typical alums, e.g. guy who founded a pants company after making $$$ in IB, and just another poor hack who is head of marketing of NBA, etc. etc. This is all in line w. Stanford’s major smoke and mirror mantra: ANYONE CAN APPLY, WE LOVE ODDBALLS, GMAT DOES NOT REALLY COUNT, HEY, IT’S JUST A LOVE FEST OUT HERE AND ANYONE CAN GET IN. ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS BARE YOUR SOUL AND WE WILL LOVE YOU.

Folks, this is not total b.s., it just needs to be given a reality check. The fact is, Stanford alums are impressive and they often do have interests in quirky areas, and do seem, according to numbers cited by Bolton, slightly less likely to wind up in finance than dudes from HBS or Wharton. But that does NOT MEAN THEY WERE THAT WAY WHEN THEY APPLIED.

In fact, if you do the math, the stereotype Stanford successful applicant begins to emerge, and it is quite different than the jive put out on their forums: a successful Stanford applicant is a a highly pedigreed dude or dudette, from top schools and job feeders (widely defined, including NGO’s etc) WITH HIGH GMAT SCORES.  Bolton keeps stressing that gmats do not make a difference, and in this gab fast went so far as to say, that “he can only recall one or two incidents when the decision to admit someone came down to the GMAT score.  He advised candidates to “do their best” and “not worry so much about scoring 50 points higher.”  I giggle. How does he explain that 720, Stanford’s average gmat score (which I believe is in fact higher!!!) is higer than every other school, and in fact, not only getting higher every year (it was 710 a while ago, in statements not audited by Andersen consulting) but I think the diff. between Stan and HBS on gmats is ALSO WIDENING.   

Other things worth noting: his remarks on Question 2 (not fully reported here, but I followed up w. poster):

In response to a question from the audience on “Essay B: What are your aspirations? How will your education at Stanford help you achieve them?” Derrick noted that the question does not specifically ask about “career aspirations” even though one may choose to discuss career aspirations. 

What Bolton said was that every word of this question was carefully considered, and so writer should do the same (thanks, next time you apply to Stanford have your lawyer there w. you, say, what a minute, have dudes like me there with you!). That means to me, that you SHOULD WRITE ABOUT MORE THAN SIMPLY YOUR CAREER ASPIRATIONS. When Stanford posted this question in July of this year, as poster notes (in full post), the question read, “What are your career aspirations?” and consultants who publish Stan questions on their websites, including me, accept.com, etc.  still have it listed that way, since they picked up the early versions, or they did, when I looked yesterday (of course they may change after reading this). At some point Stanford changed the question, THANKS, and did not tell anyone (change people, change orgs change the world, and also change your essay questions) , so if you if you had downloaded an earlier + kind of got it in your head that they were asking for career aspirations, you might easily neglect to discover the dropped word in the new and silent version on MisApplyYourself. FYI, HBS asks for ‘career vision’ and feel free to intrepret that broadly as well.  I like Stanford and Bolton, from afar, but at bottom, you can take the boy out of  the adcom room for an evening at Goldman’s million dollar auditorium, but you cannot take the adcom out of the boy.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 7:49 am and is filed under HBS Forum Reports: What Adcoms are Saying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.