Are your odds better or worse if you are one of those ‘last’ 50 HBS interview invites?
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010If you’re one of those “last 50″ interviews (invited a month after invites went out) does that mean your chances of getting in are better? Obviously they spent even more time debating your application and decided to extend an invitation to you, is that an “we decided we like you, you’re in if you don’t blow it” situation or is it more like “ok, let’s try to give you a shot and see what you’re about”?
hmmm, not really either, you can speculate on this 12-ways to Sunday. About 20 of those last 50 invites are falling fruit from bigfoots shaking the tree (e.g. bigshots calling up and saying take a close look at this kid), the rest are more random than you think, and a bunch could just be logistical (someone was late handing in stuff). The adcom likes to nurse the delusion that they are reading folders night and day, right to the end, and going over every last folder 3, 6, 9 times to make sure that no poor soul has slipped thru the cracks, so you imagine that every folder gets an independent rejection from 4 different readers, and every day, some new, last, ‘never-say-die’ reader finds an interview-making piece of DNA in YOUR folder that every other of the 3, 4 5 prior readers has overlooked, like the innocence project on TV, and then the call goes to the governor to stop the execution at one-minute to midnight. The reality is, after first wave of invites went out, there may have been some reserve pile of 200-300 folders which they just put off, for one reason or another, and at that point, ALL THE OTHER NON-INVITES WERE BASICALLY SENT TO SIBERIA NEVER TO BE LOOKED AT AGAIN. Of those remaining 200-300 folders, HRH Leopold just keeps some running, macro mental track of how round 1 replies are shaping up, in terms of kids accepting etc., what emerging demographics are, etc. How Accepted Week-End for Round One Went, etc. After that, everyone likes to be mercurial a bit (calling Derrick Bolton!!), so over the next x weeks, when she wants to give herself some cheap thrills, she ( or some bunch of inner adcoms) just read over some bunch of folders, and keeping in mind the running tallies & the micro theme de jour/ de week, she/they find a few they like, and reach out and give quite an exciting email goose to some lucky, formerly doomed person. Another way it works is that HRH or some other Officer level adcom read a story in New York Times etc. about X (some new initiative, industry trend, organization), and say, “Dont we have some kid like that in the 300-limbo folders ?” And just to test their memory and office search capabilities, they locate the folder, re-read it, and all of a sudden, it is just a bit more interesting. Poof, another zombie brought back from the dead. Maybe.
But whatever triggered your escape from the Limbo 300, it was not really some compelling, lost jewel of overlooked accomplishment, it was just some demographic or topical hook, or 2nd look, or even late look, and after your Interview, you are just in the Big Ol Interview Pile O’Kids. I’d be surprised if accept rate of the Last 50 was diff than first Wave.



