With a January 19th deadline, Harvard Business School (HBS) is one of just a handful of top schools whose round-two deadlines haven’t already passed. In blog posts yesterday and today, HBS Admissions Director Dee Leopold offered some advice for applicants who are still working hard to finish up their applications.
For starters, she tackled the question of how rigid the word-count restriction is for the essay portion of the application. According to Leopold, she and her admissions team hear this question often from applicants.
“Your essays do not get cut off if you go over the word limit,” she wrote in response. And her team is not sitting there counting words as they read. But they do expect a candidate to be able to edit effectively, and they also have a feel for whether an essay is running long from having read so many of them. So you should make every effort to craft a response that falls within the word-count limit, “but don’t stress over a few extra words,” Leopold advised.
She added that it’s fine if recommenders have more to say than the suggested word-limit for letters of recommendation. HBS suggests a word limit equivalent to roughly a page of text. “We do this to give those not familiar with writing recommendations a sense of an appropriate length of response,” Leopold wrote. But their file doesn’t get cut off after a single page or after a certain number of words,” she assured.
In a subsequent post today, Leopold addressed the question of whether it’s advantageous to submit your application early for a given round. Her answer: “No, not really.” For this year’s second round, her staff will begin to print and distribute applications to the Admissions Board on the night of January 19th, but the board doesn’t begin to read applications until after the application deadline has passed. “Contrary to lots of speculation, there is absolutely no correlation between when an application is submitted and when, or if, a candidate is invited to interview,” Leopold wrote. “Applications are not reviewed in the order in which they are received,” she stressed.
That being said, it’s never a good idea to wait until just minutes before the application deadline to press submit, she cautioned. “We anticipate that server traffic will be high and you will be frustrated and anxious with the time it will take to have a successful submission,” she wrote.
HBS will be closed on January 18th, the day before the round-two deadline, in observance of the Martin Luther King holiday. But the admissions office will be open that day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Eastern time) to answer last-minute questions, Leopold wrote.
Finally, Leopold reminded applicants that technical questions about the online application should be addressed to ApplyYourself. To reach ApplyYourself, click the online support button in the application itself of call (800) 526-3313. ApplyYourself will be available for support on January 18th from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. (Eastern time).
Read the full article: Last-Minute Advice for Round-Two Applicants from Harvard Business School Admissions