Harvard discusses post-interview essay - 工管

Harvard Business School (HBS) Admissions Director Dee Leopold recently
discussed HBS's plan to pose a follow-up question to its interviewees.
According to Leopold, all interviewees will be asked the following question:

"You've just had your HBS interview. Tell us about it. How well did we get
to know you?"

HBS has not set a word limit on applicants' replies to this question, and
Leopold stressed that the exercise is NOT another essay. "We want your
response to be much more like an email," she said. The hope behind this
new element of the HBS application process is to give applicants an
opportunity to interact with the HBS admissions staff in more of a real-world
scenario than what traditional application elements have offered.

"In the real world, it is unlikely that you will be given months and months
to craft essays of any sort. It just doesn't happen," Leopold said. "In
the real world, it is almost a sure thing that you will be asked to write
emails summarizing meetings and giving your opinion in a short time frame,"
she continued. Noting that HBS tries to be as "close to practice" as
possible, Leopold called this shift from essays to more real-time writing
appropriate.

Leopold added that this new requirement "should not be a cause for anxiety,"
stressing that HBS is simply looking for applicants' genuine reaction to the
interview experience. In fact, Leopold said, her team will even be much more
generous in its reaction to typos and grammatical errors in this element of
the application than in others.

Hope this helps! Feel free to contact us to learn more about how to navigate
this part of the HBS application process.

Best,
Kevin
[email protected]


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Kevin Chen
Senior Admissions Counselor, Clear Admit LLC (http://www.clearadmit.com/)
Stanford Graduate School of Business, class of 2005
Harvard Kennedy School of Government, class of 2000
Princeton University, class of 1994
Previous work experiences: McKinsey; NBA; Reuters

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