With Round 2 applicants anxiously awaiting the imminent release of decisions from Harvard Business School (HBS) today, this post from January seemed worthy of a reprise. Of course, we know you are all very hopeful that Chad Losee’s words below encouraging rejected applicants to reapply to HBS will prove moot when you get your acceptance at noon. But since that unfortunately simply can’t be the case for everyone, maybe it’s nice to be reminded that one in 10 students in HBS’s class didn’t get in on the first try?
Best of luck to you all—whether you’re awaiting word from HBS, Kellogg School of Management or London Business School. It’s a big day. We look forward to seeing your results stream in.
The following post was originally published here on Clear Admit on January 31, 2017.
HBS Admissions Director Encourages Reapplicants
As the hours slip away before Harvard Business School’s final Round 2 interview invitations are slated to go out, HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Chad Losee once more took to his Director’s Blog to help give anxious applicants a sense of what to expect.
Confirming what most still awaiting word probably already know, Losee wrote that his team is preparing to send out the final interview invitations this Wednesday, February 1st, at 12 p.m. ET. “For this wave of interviews, the online interview scheduler will go live immediately (not the day after),” he noted. He again encouraged applicants not to read into which wave their invitation came in. “We are equally excited about all our interview invitations!” he said.
Those who don’t get one of the final interview invitations this week—Losee did not offer a sense of how many would be going out—will instead get the dreaded “release” notification, letting them know that HBS has made the decision not to continue to consider them as candidates.
But wait. All is not necessarily lost, Losee stresses. “Let me just plant this seed as you think about things over the next few months,” he wrote, before hitting the caps lock button to add, “HBS IS A REAPPLICANT FRIENDLY SCHOOL.”
It’s really true. Losee’s predecessor Dee Leopold was even known to share the same statistics when she was at the helm. “About 10 percent of each class is composed of students who didn’t get into HBS on their first try,” Losee wrote.
Obviously, we know you are hoping to be among the first group and not the second—we hope you are, too. But we must point out that this is the first time we’ve ever seen Losee resort to ALL CAPS, so there might just be something to what he’s saying.
Good luck tomorrow! We’ll see you on MBA LiveWire.
