About a month ago, we wrote about the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management’s effort to use social media tool Twitter to attract applicants, through a pilot program they called the “application tweet.” The business school asked applicants to explain — via a tweet of 140 characters or less — why they thought they would be a good Tippie candidate and future MBA hire
Today, the school announced the winner of the contest, John Yates, 33, a Texas applicant who currently provides cultural and language training to international diplomats and business executives in Houston. He’ll start attending Tippie later this month, the school said.
Yates’ tweet for the contest took on an unusual form, the haiku, a short form of Japanese poetry that typically consists of 17 syllables arranged in a five, seven, five pattern.
Here is his tweet:
“Globally minded (5)
Innovative and driven (7)
Tippie can sharpen (5)”
Yates’ unusual approach to the contest managed to convince the judges that he was worthy of the contest’s prize, a tuition scholarship valued at $37,240, the school said.
“Mr. Yates had the discipline and creativity to submit a Tweet by writing a Haiku,” wrote the Tweet judging committee. “He has taken one of the newest modes of communication in Twitter and one of the oldest forms of poetry in haiku and combined them into one winning entry.”
Overall, the school received 58 entries, or tweets, for the contest, the school said in a press release. Of those, only eight were accepted for admission to the MBA program Tippie said. Some of the applicants didn’t meet the school’s admissions qualifications, while other people who submitted tweets either weren’t considering applying or had already been admitted to the school. The school convened a committee of alumni, business faculty and staff to judge the tweets.
Read the full article: Texan Twitters His Way to Free MBA