We know many of you have your eyes glued on MBA LiveWire for updates on Round 2 interview invitations, which began flowing out from several schools in recent weeks and keep coming. But we’ve also seen an uptick in entries on MBA DecisionWire as some Round 1 applicants begin to share the decisions they’ve made about where to enroll and others seek advice from peers based on their options.
For anyone unfamiliar with MBA DecisionWire, it’s a sister resource to MBA LiveWire that lets successful applicants share where they have decided to go to business school after all the acceptances are in. In contrast to MBA LiveWire—which lets applicants share their real-time progress through the various stages of the admissions process—MBA DecisionWire is designed to capture applicants’ entire application journey, from where they applied, to which schools accepted them to, finally, where they chose to attend based on their options.
Anonymous and easy to use, MBA DecisionWire compiles the all-important decisions applicants make regarding where to actually pursue their MBA based on the schools from which they have to select. Users can filter others’ submissions by the schools applied to, admitted to, and enrolled at, as well as by application year—gleaning insight from others who may have faced decisions similar to their own.
User Behavior Prompted DecisionWire Enhancements
Last year, we added two new MBA DecisionWire features that we hope will make the tool even more useful to you, our users. The first was an “Undecided” status. Applicants can choose this status before they have made a decision of where to enroll, effectively enabling them to invite thoughts and advice from the Clear Admit community when they are facing a particularly complex choice.
“We make a point of trying to listen closely when applicants are telling us something,” said Clear Admit Co-Founder Graham Richmond last year when we deployed new features for the DecisionWire tool. As more and more MBA DecisionWire entries cropped up with “None” in the field for “Enrolled,” it became evident that applicants wanted the ability to solicit advice from fellow applicants on their decisions. “You asked—we delivered,” Richmond said. “The hope is that the new ability to indicate that you are still undecided will provide just the forum for discussion our community seemed to be seeking,” he said. And it has.
Over the past year, we’ve been delighted to see applicants make active use of the “undecided” status and even more thrilled to see the Clear Admit applicant community respond to its peers with thoughtful insights to help them make informed decisions.
Show Us the Money
Last year we also enhanced DecisionWire by giving applicants the ability to indicate whether or not they received scholarship money from any of the schools they are considering and whether or how much that played into a decision of where to ultimately enroll.
“We recognize that scholarship dollars play a role in decisions for many applicants, which led us to implement a second new feature making it easy to indicate which schools offered scholarships,” Richmond added. An indicator of scholarship dollars by each applicable school—a small dollar sign in a green circle—now helps others viewing the posts understand quickly whether receiving scholarships ultimately swayed an applicant’s decision one way or the other…or not.
Do you have other suggestions for ways MBA DecisionWire can be improved? Please don’t hesitate to let us know at [email protected]. And if you’ve recently made a decision of where to enroll—by all means share it with your peers!
