Monday, December 25, 2006

Happy Holidays!

I missed an opportunity to wish everybody Merry Christmas, but it's not late to say Happy Holidays! :) Have a good time and make wishes for next year :) For many of us, applicants, this new year will bring great changes - new location, new friends, recruiting rush and so on. Let it be a productive year. And to others, who won't win a place in business schools, I wish that in the new year life will confirm to you that it is great, in school or not :) I wish everybody all the best.

I had rather untraditional Christmas Eve in the Cabaret Lido. Rather puritanical show in my modest Russian opinion :)) Paris is Paris - it takes your anxieties away the very second you step on its streets. I love this city. If not for climate (I suffer from dank European winters), I would love to live here. Probably, it was my wish to settle in a place like Paris that catalyzed my decision to apply for MBA. That's the ways through which life brings us to its new stages.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Denied Admission to Chicago

So, the answer is 'no'. Of course, I feel very sorry - sorry of missing this great opportunity to get in one class with people whom I've got used to through blogs :) Congratulations to you all, guys and girls - Alex, Iday, Juggler! I am looking forward to hearing good news from those who have not updated their blogs yet :)

When I received denial from Wharton, I said: well, I have four schools to get all possible options of feedback - DWI, denied after interview, WL and, finally, accepted ;) Two options are realized. Some area for optimism! :)

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Chicago Releases Admission Decisions

Chicago has started making admission calls on December 18th. Best luck to everybody!

Representative of GSB reported in BW forum that status of applications online will be updated at 9:00 am CST on December 20th. Adcom will keep trying to reach all admitted applicants by phone till the end of the same day.


Saturday, December 16, 2006

One Week Before Vacation

Next Saturday I am leaving for my Christmas vacation that will smoothly turn into winter holidays. No matter what news will arrive from Chicago, it's great I will learn it right before leaving, as I am going to use vacation time to relax and temporarily forget about all kinds of unsettled questions. I will spend Christmas in Paris, and I believe that the city won't let me stay upset, whatever happens :)

Applicants to Stanford and Harvard who has not received interview yet: don't lose hope, leave it for January ;) People keep getting invitations. One important factor to consider: these two schools have R1 decision after R2 application deadline, and it is believed that they use two weeks of intersection to compare batches of R1 and R2. Which definitely means that there will be interview invitations in January, it happened every year before. Come on, why give up, is there anything you can do about it before final deadline? :)

Off topic: a famous Russian business news agency recently published online an article that referred to Financial Times ratings of MBA schools. There were several points in the article that I found very funny: the author said that there are so many applicants, that many top schools, such as Harvard and Wharton (which she spelled in Russian as [varton]), currently admit people only for classes to start in 2009-2010. Obviously, the ground of mistake is that the author was confused by the fact that many schools call their future classes per year of graduation, not matriculation. I sent her a note pointing at this funny error, and you guess what :) Her reply was sort of 'ha-ha, caught ya' - she said that even if 2009-2010 is year of graduation, it means that schools admit for 2008 at earliest. So, she did not even know that duration of MBA classes in USA is two years.
The weird thing is that length of my service in MBA marathon is as short as five months... I knew almost nothing about business schools before I went to take GMAT preparation class this summer. And now it feels like I know the process inside out. We are all MABs now - Masters in Application to Business Schools ;)

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Stanford delivers interview invitations to R1 applicants from Russia

Two days ago a Russian applicant posted news on BW forum that he'd got interview invitation from Stanford. His stats:

25 y.o. / GMAT 740 / Employed in Internet business

He is the only one I have heard of, but I assume it marks the beginning of Stanford R1 interview season in Russia :) Good luck to everybody.

Update
Stanford's newsletter of December:
Q: I've heard that Round One interview invitations have already gone
out. Does that mean I won't receive one?

A: It is true that we have sent many interview invitations already, but we
still have many invitations to extend for Round One applicants. We send
interview invitations after a thorough evaluation of your application. For Round One, we anticipate extending invitations through early January 2007.

Friday, December 08, 2006

Another Week Passed

Time goes by :) New Year is forthcoming. News of this week:

Congratulations to
MBABlogger with admission to Darden! Hurray!

It must be a wonderful moment - to receive the first admission :) I don't know if it will happen with me this time, but I am looking forward to learning this feeling, when you get a phone call from an Adcom telling you that The School Wants You :)

This week was full of doubts. Suddenly, I started recalling things I wrote in my essays, and the more I think about what I said, the more I question myself, did I use the room to express myself at full? I feel like now, two months after submission, I can write a book about what I am and what ideas I have for my present and future :)


This week I went for rock-climbing with my new colleagues. I have seen rock-climbing in movies, but it was my first time in a climbing gymnasium. I chose a track and started ascent, making long pauses to find a right support for my palms and feet, and at two meter height realized that my hands became so tired that I could not make a centimeter progress. I was hanging on a rope like a pear on a branch and whining "I'm gonna down!" :) My experienced friends said "Nope, you have to reach the summit first", but my reaction was "You either take me down or I jump on your heads" ;))

Disclaimer: 10 minutes later, after I was debriefed about my mistakes (such as taking too much time to decide about next step and not giving my hands any rest), I reached my first modest summit, and then repeated that personal achievement several times to get the feeling what this rock-climbing is about. But at that moment when I felt I could not make a single step forward and could only retreat, I caught myself on a thought: that's the case of facing a failure that verifies that I am just a feeble girl who cannot push herself to overcome her weaknesses. If I cannot climb a wall, can I be the one among many hundreds of applicants to be selected for a school like Harvard, for example? Very pathetic, but it helped me to conquer the next track. Something to describe in my applicant's memoirs, too ;)

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Three Weeks Before Decision

It's been another quiet week in R1 applicants' life. In the meantime, guys, it's December! R2 deadlines are coming! :) After early denials in Chicago and Wharton, many applicants return to considerations of applying to safety schools in R2. In my case, I cannot say I am thinking about safety options, but still my R1 pack was a small one and there are several schools beside S-W-H that I am interested in. Returned to thoughts about Europe. I just checked information for applicants in LBS and was surprised to learn that only one recommendation comes from a supervisor, while second is requested from academic fields. That's good news for me, because I feel uncomfortable about asking a supervisor from my 2 years ago job about a recommending favour second time. I guess it's a major problem for all applicants who consider applying in two rounds in a row - chasing recommenders to do their job for a second time.

My cordial congratulations go this week to
Kor Al and ScareCrow, who received their first admission decisions from, respectively, Columbia and Cornell. Great news! I wish you that it's just a start! :) Don't stop blogging, we're waiting for more news!

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