Showing posts with label Kellogg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kellogg. Show all posts

Monday, February 13, 2012

Two years have gone by fast...

I never thought I would return to this blog since I abandoned it so long ago. It is not that I dislike the idea of blogging now, it's just that once you leave something for too long, it almost feel wrong to come back, to disturb a piece of history.

Yet, I felt compelled to come back today. I just had dinner with a first year Kellogg student who has been my Kellogg-buddy since his admission days. I mentioned I used to blog. Surprisingly enough, he had followed my blog during his applicant days. I did not know that after I left the blog, it was still making some sort of influence on people.

Now, after almost two years at Kellogg, I came back to where everything started. Reviewing my old posts triggered all kinds of feelings: nostalgia, a sense of achievement and satisfaction, a sense of peace and determination. It's funny to look at my old DAK post, because just last weekend, I was hosting DAK I as a section leader. I was standing at the podium where my old DAK leaders did. How time flies.

Many things have changed during the two years, yet many things have not. I have grown yet I am still the same DreamChaser determined to define my success and happiness in life.

Maybe it is a good time to come back to this blog, to write something about my past two years and give this blog an official closure.

Just maybe.

Winter on Northwestern Campus, overlooking Lake Michigan, with downtown Chicago in the distance

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Back to Blogging

Sorry I ate my own words when I posted in my last post 5 months ago about being more motivated to blog....The reality was, I was too occupied with life disconnected with the real world during the summer and life became insanely busy the moment I landed back in America. I went on KWEST, met many people during CIM, found friends and non-friends in my section, transferred to the MMM program, had my first class at Kellogg, had my first final exam soon after, applied for a bunch of student positions, went to millions of study group meetings, got myself involved in too many things and found little personal time to even video chat with my fiance.

Yet, I decided to start blogging.

I am not sure how I am going to shape this blog. But I realized that I desperately need to take time out of the swirl of business school and reflect on life. It is the only way that you can escape the infamous "Kellogg atrium effect" and chart your own course in the right direction.

I don't know if people still read this blog, but I hope my reflection will also give you a glimpse of what life is like at Kellogg, albeit it's just from one person's perspective.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

BoB Awards

I was genuinely surprised this morning when I saw the ClearAdmit tweet about the winners of their annual Best of Blogging Contest. I won? really? seriously? I felt a little embarrassed since I haven't posted anything since early April...not to mention all the wonderful blogs out there in the MBA blogsphere. I admire the focused content of MadBubbles, the sleek design of a beautiful mind, the extremely informative blog of Hari's. How on earth did I win among all those dedicated and talented bloggers~

Interestingly, my post "Don’t Let [the B-School] Application Defeat/Define You" won the best single post. I think for many reasons, this message really resonated with us MBA applicants and probably won me the BoB award in the end. So thank you all for reading my humble post (and voting for me). I am just glad that some folks took it to heart because I really believe that neither the application process nor the result define who we are.

I think getting this award is a really good thing. It gave me the extra motivation to keep blogging at just the right time. As life becomes tedious again with all the moving to school preparation, I needed the extra push to produce meaningful posts. And this award gives me just that :)

So congrats to all the bloggers! and a big shout out to Orlando, a fellow Kellogger (do they actually call it that? I will find out this fall I guess~ ) who won the student blogging award and whose blog is of top, top quality. Also, if you haven't noticed, there is quite a large number of Kellogg bloggers on the list, which, in some way, demonstrated the Kellogg community/sharing culture. Or, as my friend puts it, we are just a chatty bunch :)

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Kellogg Class of 2012

I am happy to announce that it's official that I am going to be a member of the Kellogg Class of 2012! It's been a long journey and I feel so lucky and thankful to be able to make it in this competitive application season and become a member of this great school. Evanston here I come!

Friday, March 5, 2010

DAK Recap Series #2 - The Admits

The Admits

Another purpose of admits weekend is to meet the other admits and basically see if you connect with your future classmates. However, I don't think DAK was designed well for that. It might be different for those who were able to attend some of the Thursday night social events, but for the majority of people who attended only Friday and Saturday full day events, the schedule was extremely packed with talks after talks. We had a little scavenger hunt activity on Saturday but it was cut short due to my section's never ending Q&A with the section leaders (which was not at all bad~). From my conversation with several admits who also went to other schools' admits weekend, it seemed that certain schools have more free time for socializing or just admits bonding activities. I am not sure if everyone wants more time to bond with other admits (some of whom will not be your classmates anyway...), but I certainly can appreciate some more time to do that. Our scavenger hunt was surely fun! Here is a picture of how we spelled out Kellogg in the atrium :)


Our Scavenger hunt team

The bustling hallway

Admits listening to presentations

One thing I want to emphasize is that you do have plenty of time outside of the regular day-time activities to interact with people. We had a dinner, a closing reception, as well as pub time and club time. Unfortunately my energy level deteriorated with the lack of sleep and the fully packed day time activity. I was barely functioning during pub time on Friday and didn't even make it to the club on Saturday. So ya, can't comment too much on that I suppose :)

TG = "Thank God it's Friday"
@ the Keg
a dive bar which apparently is Kellogg students' hang out hot spot

So overall, I think I was able to talk to some 20-30 admits and really built a connection with about 6-8 of them? Which was not too bad. After-all, I am more into building meaningful connections than meeting as many people as possible. My overall impression of the admits is in line with the students, maybe a little shy and more low-key, but then again, I didn't make it to the club.

P.S It seems that half of the admits were set on Kellogg and half were still comparing schools. The most admits I encountered were deciding between Kellogg and Wharton or Kellogg and Berkeley. Also there were quite a few international folks who made all the way from Europe, Latin America and Asia to Evanston for the weekend. Kudos to them!

Next post: DAK - the MBA program

DAK Recap Series #1 - The Kellogg Culture

I finally completed my HBS interview, which turned out to be more conversational than a grilling one. Now as I wait for the final result which is entirely out of my control (and any last minute interview invites from Haas or Stanford), I can finally sit down and write this long over-due post on my DAK experience, which happened almost one month ago.

I don't want to recall every single event happened at DAK so I will just make a simple list at the end of this series of posts showcasing what DAK offers. I will focus my post on some key takeaways and my overall impression of Kellogg through the experience. I am also dividing it into several posts so it's not in a super long post. :)

The Kellogg Culture

I think the best part of any admit weekend is that you really get a sense of what the students are like and have a taste of the culture. Although at DAK, you don't have that much socializing time due to the packed schedule, you do get a sense of what Kellogg is about. Two things stood out to me: the student-run culture and the down-to-earth students.

DAK is a entirely student-run event, and I have to give a thumbs up for the DAK team's organization and execution. Given the 300 something students and significant others, there were definitely possibilities for some chaotic moment, but I didn't really experience any. Every time I stepped out of room, there were always some students in the hallway with the DAK shirts, directing people where to go. From KPW to DAK, everyone I met at Kellogg was easy-going and genuine. Sure, there were a few that I probably wouldn't become close friends with due to certain personality differences, but I have yet to meet an arrogant or bad-attitude Kellogg student, which says a lot in the MBA world.

What I really loved about DAK was my section leaders. The admitted students were divided into sections named in a similar way as the real Kellogg sections. Mine was called "Jugheads" which was the junior name for "Bucketheads", go figure. Each section had 5-6 section leaders who were current students, both 1st and 2nd years and they pretty much ran the break out sessions and answered any questions we had. My section leaders were a group of really down-to-earth, fun-loving folks who were very honest in answering our endless questions and went out of their ways to help us. I felt very comfortable around these folks and could see really see myself being apart of the community.

My Awesome Section Leaders

The very pretty Kellogg glass

The not so impressive DAK sign outside of Jacobs :P
Next Post: DAK - the Admits

Sunday, February 14, 2010

HBS interview invite

Last Friday, HBS released about 800 interview invites to R2 applicants. I was lucky enough to get one of them. Since I was attending DAK at Kellogg, I was perfectly distracted from worrying about the invite. In addition, after R1, I was more realistic about my expectations and was psychologically prepared to not get an invite from HBS. So when I signed into the Kellogg wifi with my admit account(I thought that was a nice touch for Kellogg), and saw that invite sitting in my email, I was pleasantly surprised.

I felt honored to be selected by HBS to move on to the next stage in this almost cruel admission process. At the same time, I plan to continue staying humble and grounded, because I know there are so many applicants out there with amazing achievements, great aspirations and big hearts who didn't make it this time. And I am by no means better than them.

I also want to continue through the process with a realistic expectation. After-all, about half of all interviewed applicants don't make it in the end. Most applicants do well in interviews and a lot of time it will come down to factors outside of our control at this point. Therefore, all I aim to do is to try my best at the interview and be ok with whatever the final result would be.

btw, I had a great time at DAK. It was exhuasting but extremely informational and very fun. I will write a detailed post later this week with pictures!

Hope you had a great valentine's day or/and Chinese New Year! :)

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

DAK here I come!

I thought I would have plenty of time to write blogs once application season finished. Reality proved otherwise. In between work, social events, running, snowboarding, cooking and volunteering, I somehow ended up with no time to write a decent blog entry! Just imagine how hectic life can be in b-school! Hopefully I can keep up with blogging then!

Another reason I haven't written many entries lately is because I am experiencing a little bit of a writer's block. I have been writing basically just about anything that came to mind. As much as I like reflecting on my random thoughts, I also want to improve the quality of my post and have a more defined focus. It's just that I haven't found it yet.

So in the meantime, please allow me to ramble on~ (as you can see this entry has already deviated far from the title...)

I am meeting a group of Gmatcluber tonight and will be leaving for Kellogg to attend DAK with bf tomorrow. I have been bombarded with emails from DAK section leaders and Kellogg student club leaders about all sorts of social gatherings during the weekend. Looks like the weekend is shaping up pretty well! The real challenge of this weekend to me is the weather. Living in soCal, you don't experience canceled flight or road block due to bad weather that often. I am renting a car due to the location of my hotel and it will be interesting how that would pan out...thanks Jeremy and Orlando for the weather/driving advice btw.

As far as DAK goes, I am really looking forward to it. During KPW, I had a great time, and that was when I was still an applicant :) This time, I will bring a camera, take lots of pictures and report back with details! Until next week, ciao!

p.s. I know I promised to write an entry about interviews. After thinking more about it though, I realized that I need more time to really come up with content with real values without repeating myself or information you can find elsewhere online. So I am going to wait on that.

(picture courtesy of Kellogg website)

Monday, February 1, 2010

More waiting on MIT ~

After an unproductive day constantly staring at my phone, I opened up the MIT online application expecting to see a rejection letter~ turned out I was deferred to R2 for decision. I know this happened to some R1 applicants without interview, so now it's my time to join the club.

I am a little disappointed I guess. I haven't got a chance to visit MIT when school was in session and sit in a class. I was actually looking forward to doing that if I got admitted. There are a lot of aspects of Sloan that I am excited about~ too bad I don't get to explore it more in the R1 decision time frame, since R2 decision deadline is in April and Kellogg's deposit is due end of March...this deferral just made life a lot more complicated...

So with three interviews, one admit, one rejection and one pseudo-waitlist, my R1 concludes in the most diverse possible way~ I feel extremely thankful for Kellogg offering me an admit so early in the season so that I had a great holiday (despite not doing much but writing essays) and a peace of mind while waiting for Wharton and MIT (was still pretty anxious though, waiting is never fun). Looks more and more like I will be heading to the wind city~~~

Monday, January 4, 2010

Kellogg Interview Report

As I promised in my previous post, I would share my interview experiences on accept.com and clearadmit's wiki once I got the result from the schools. The downside for doing this is that I can't really remember many of the questions asked during the interview. For Kellogg, I took notes soon after the interview so I still have a beefy report to give you. But unfortunately for Wharton, I did not take notes and the questions are forever lost~~~

Anyway, here is the report I sent to ClearAdmit, got a $10 itune gift card in return~ cool~ :)

Interview Date: Mid November, 2009
Admissions Round: R1 (admitted!)
Interview Location: On-campus
Interview Type: Adcom, blind interview

I selected to do the interview on campus during the Kellogg Preview Weekend (which btw, is an awesome event that you should check out, see my post on KPW). I wasn't sure if I was gonna interview with a student or an Adcom. But it looks like on Saturday you interview with student (I am not 100% sure about whether you always interview with Adcom during the week days though). I ended up in one female Adcom's office for the interview. She was very friendly and that relaxed me a little bit because I was quite nervous since Kellogg was my first interview. The interview started off with the most standard question about walking through the resume. I went a little far into explaining why MBA, and my interviewer actually smiled at the end of it and told me there was specific question for that later (I thank her for not interrupting me while I went off for that would have throw me off a little). All the questions were pretty standard Kellogg questions, even the leadership style one I have seen on accept.com interview reports. The interview lasted about 30 minutes and the interviewer left enough time for me to ask questions. Overall, the interview was like a relaxed conversation with the interviewer occasionally probing on points of interests. Because of my profile and my answers, the interview end up focusing a lot on leadership and team work, which allowed me to fully showcase my strengths. I felt that the Adcom was very experienced and asked lots of follow up questions. She also kept writing notes the entire time but kept good eye contact in between and had lots of positive confirmation through body language (nodding, smiling, ect.) Overall, I thought I did quite well and the admission later confirmed that.

My 2cents for interview prep: read interview reports from accept.com and clearadmit, prepare those questions, and prepare all of them. I always think it's good to over prepare than under prepare. Just make sure your answers don't sound rehearsed. Know your story, of course, but also know your strengths, and try to showcase as much as of it during the interview. And lastly, stay relaxed, don't get throw off by odd questions, just be confident and be your best self. Good luck!

Here is the list of interview questions that I remember:

Walk through your resume starting from undergrad experience?
What is your biggest accomplishment at work?
Leadership experience at work?
Follow up question on my leadership experience such as my specific actions and leadership style.
How has your leadership style progressed since college (through work and a specific extra-curricular activity)?
What role do you play on a team?
Tell me about xxx (a specific extracurricular activity on my resume).
Why MBA?
Why Kellogg?
What unique contribution can you bring to Kellogg?
What clubs do you plan to participate in while at Kellogg?
What do you do for fun?
Anything you want to say that we haven't talked about?

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Beautiful B-School Photo Contest

Like many of my fellow MBA bloggers, I was invited to become a judge for accept.com's Beautiful B-School Photo Contest. As an armature photographer (in high school) who always wanted to pick up her old-time hobby, I think this is a really fun idea. After all, even though I don't take them anymore (maybe will start taking them again in the future!), I always like looking at beautiful photographs.

Not surprisingly, I don't have any pictures of b-school during all these visits...so I am borrowing my friend G's photo of Kellogg to add a bit of color to my blog. She tagged me when she took the picture back in early fall, and it brought me good luck! :)



So I encourage you to submit a photo for the contest as a way of having some fun during this strenuous process. Plus, you can win some prizes! So why not :)

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Happy Holidays and Go Purple! :)

Just got my "big envelope" from Kellogg this morning. It's a big leather binder (wait, is that what it's called? I never had one before...ya I am frugal) with lots of purple in it! :) It reminds me of those college decision days as I waited anxiously for the "big envelope" to arrive. Thank goodness for email/phone notification nowadays!



Just want to share my joy and wish everyone happy holidays! I actually have quite a few ideas that I want to write in my blog but since time is precious during the holidays and I really need to plow through Stanford's essays right now and still leave time for family fun, I am gonna hold out on posting until I get a little break somewhere down the road. But yes, there will be more interesting posts to come, hopefully some good advice for fellow and future applicants too!

In this holiday season, enjoy your time with family and friends my fellow applicants, for they are ultimately what matters to you most! :)

Friday, December 18, 2009

Striked out @ Wharton

So after a semi-sleepless night (I have no idea why so even though I thought I would be so relaxed with my Kellogg admit), found out that the box theory turned out to be mostly true. Rejected @ Wharton.

How do I feel? Hum, it's hard to say. I can't say that I am leaping for joy that I don't need to make the difficult decision between Wharton and Kellogg, but I don't necessary feel sad or disappointed. Maybe a little disappointed since I did a good interview and felt pretty good about my essays. But in the grand scheme, I think this rejection might be good for me. First of all, I was imagining before the decision how would I choose between Wharton and Kellogg, and I couldn't make a decision. I applied to Wharton mainly because of its reputation. But after visiting Kellogg, I certainly had a better connection with the people there and felt great about the program. Secondly, this rejection really put me back into perspective in the whole admission process, which is really a black box. After Kellogg admit and MIT interview invite, I was feeling a little too good about myself and start imagining getting into lots of schools, which is a dangerous thing. While I still maintain high confidence in my ability to succeed, but I want to remain humble and grounded, and most importantly, do a great job for R2 and the interviews to come. The rejection helped that.

So to my fellow readers, best of luck with all your applications, and truly remember this, there is no rejection that can put you down, unless you give up on yourself already. So get up where you fell and charge forward!

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

In @ Kellogg!

Just got the call (actually have a story regarding the call) from Kellogg! I am in! Will write more later, but just want to share my joy! :)

Today has been an exciting day. When I intentionally left my phone on my desk as I went to a lab with no cell phone signal, I secretly hoped that when I get back to my desk at noon, there will be voicemail from Kellogg waiting for me. And indeed it happened! There was a small episode of confusion when the lady from the career center left me a message to call back, and I couldn't get through her phone. I was wondering why someone from the career center would call me and was seriously thinking if she was going to check on my career goals for considering admission. So FYI , Kellogg uses all administrative staff to call admits and they might not say "congratulations" in the voice mail~

As I bounced around the building, announcing the good news to my boss and my co-workers, and updating it to bf, friends online, I could feel a sense of reality deep inside the shell of excitement. MBA is, after all, a mean to an end. Getting into school is only the beginning. Now as the admission finally sunk in, I started to feel the weight of the loan (which I have never experienced in my life) and the pressure of job hunting to pay off the loan...especially when my boss' boss said "ok, now we can officially start planning for you leaving in 6 months". I am really gonna be leaving this job, having no income, moving to a different city, leaving my bf behind, it all sounds so scary...at the same time, I am truly excited about this journey, for I can see many doors opening and many opportunities coming at me. There will be a lot more thinking to do before selecting a school and getting ready for this incredible journey.

But at the moment, I try to stay grounded and focused so that I can put together a solid app for Stanford and HBS. I have to admit though, one admission really gives me a boost in confidence that maybe I CAN be a contender at my dream school.

Good luck to all the applicants out there!

Monday, December 14, 2009

Quiet Monday + The Power of Twitter

The new week began as I lay in bed, nervously opening up my gmail on my iPod Touch....and of course, it has been a quiet Monday~ again.

It seems like everything repeats itself. I am back at the waiting days for Wharton invite, except this time I am waiting for a phone call from Kellogg. Patience, this is what I need, I keep telling myself. Yet I still can't help but watch my pot constantly.

On the other hand, as I was casually browsing through my twitter feed tonight, I was quite shock to find that the Haas School twitted about my last blog. I have no idea how they monitor the million blogs out there (probably through google alert or something like that...) and how they dug up my humble note (really? my blog show up in google alert?). I feel honored but also a little scared at the same time. The power of search engine and twitter just makes everything so transparent these days! You gotta watch what you say (type)! On the bright side, I am sure the Haas tweet will draw more traffic to my blog tomorrow. Just Hope I will have some good news to share with all my readers soon!

The last note, I am back to square one of the essay writing process again. This time is for Stanford. This is the big one, I will try my best to suppress my urge to worry about R1 decisions and really do a good job on this one. With a 7% admission rate, I definitely need my best foot forward (and a sprinkle of luck perhaps ^_^)

Happy writing!

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

No news is good news?

I did not know that this waiting process was going to take such a huge toll on my productivity. Since my instrument is broken in lab, I am sitting in front of my computer a lot doing data analysis and other stuff. I kept going back to gmatclub and business week forum to check the latest news for MIT Sloan and Kellogg applicants. Well, hearing other people's invites, admits and dings is not exactly calming. Surprisingly Kellogg sends out a fair amount of dings with admits in the first couple of days, so I guess no news is good news? Come on, let the phone ring before I get hit by an email! :)

Just now, I checked my email and a blue tagged email (I label all school communication with a blue "MBA application" tag in my gmail account) just came in, I swear my heart skipped a beat (since I was just writing not wanting to get an email from Kellogg). Turns out it's my recommendation confirmation from Haas, phew....

I've decided to close up my browser window for the online forums. They are not doing me any good and I am just losing precious time. Now I hope I have some lab work to do so I can step away from my desk~ oh, the waiting game~

Sunday, December 6, 2009

about leadership @ Kellogg

I stumbled upon a blog post from a current Kellogg student. He provided some great insight on leadership @ Kellogg. He writes,

"...I wanted to quickly address a misconception that I've heard from a few applicants during the past couple of weeks on Leadership at Kellogg. Basically, there are a lot of opportunities to develop leadership skills here, but as far as I've seen, you will rarely, if ever, have formal authority over anyone (or a team). Instead, you will be working with groups of classmates that are all pretty much equally qualified to be the "leader." In these situations, you have to find a way to work together with your teammates to arrive at the best possible solution or successfully plan and execute something, and if you think that you have the right answer, it is up to you to convince the rest of the team. This is a lot harder than it seems, and I think it is representative of the situation you are likely to find yourself in most often throughout your career."

Will post more on my thoughts on this topic, but now need to get ready to take my dear bf out for his birthday celebration! I planned a mystery wine tasting and a mystery dinner to surprise my special man :) Look forward to this afternoon/evening!

Saturday, December 5, 2009

What Can an MBA Applicant Do To Stand Out - From GSB's Derrick Bolton

Came across this video today and thought Derrick gave some great advice, not just for applying to GSB but also other schools. I resonate with the comment he made about very very few applicants have the experiences that are truly unique and impressive, most successful MBA applicants are those who have done "ordinary things extraordinarily well". That's what I have been telling people who asked me for b-school application advice. Do not try to impress adcom with your achievements, but really showcase how your experience reflects who you are, what kind of leader you are, what you believe in and what you aspire to do.

MBA PodTV also recently posted an episode on GSB and how to tackle GSB application with advice from Accepted.com founder Linda Abraham.

As for me, I just learned that Kellogg started releasing decisions last Friday. So now I can be super anxious next week waiting to hear from both MIT and Kellogg while trying to focusing on Haas application! Let December be a fruitful month!

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Kellogg Interview, KPW and Wharton Interview

A lot has happened since last blog entry. Last week I went to Evaston for the Kellogg Preview Weekend for minority students, during which I had my first interview. Then this week, I had my Wharton Interview with a local alumni, marking the mid-point of my application season. Although now sitting in front of my computer, I don't feel relaxed because I still yet have 3 more applications to prepare. However, I do feel proud of myself for making it this far, without totally losing my mind. If I have advice for future MBA applicants, it would be to get organized and mentally prepared for a LONNNG journey, for it's definitely a test of your stamina.

Anyway, time to reflect on my trip to Kellogg and my interview. My Kellogg visit, by far, has surpassed my expectation for any school organized event. It was an awesome experience in terms of the caliber of students, professors and the level of organization, even the food! Come on, they served custom made omelette for breakfast and lamb for lunch! My "buddy" who reached out to me before the event specially came over during lunch to answer my questions. I saw way more students during this event than any events that I went to at other schools and everyone was genuinely nice! What impressed me the most, was actually the professors at the event. The legendary Prof. Steven Rogers was truly legendary, so were Prof. Harry Kraemer (former CEO of Baxter) and Prof. Katherine Phillips. It was not just their intellects but their passion for teaching management and educating the next generations of leaders really impressed me. I felt lucky to be able to experience this level of professorship and would see myself fighting over points to take their classes while at Kellogg. During one of the lunches, another group of professors and program directors sat with us and shared with us their Kellogg experience. That I thought, was an extra nice touch. I truly recommend anyone considering Kellogg to attend KPW. Here is a picture of the atrium in the Allen Center where the Marketing Competition TG (Thank God it's Friday) took place. Picture was taken by the end of the event, it was WAY more packed during the whole thing.















Now on to the juicy stuff, the interview. Well, it was much more relaxed than I had imagined. I couldn't remember the last time I interviewed for a job or something else, so I was quite nervous and prepared a lot before the interview. It turns out the interview was very conversational, and the admissions officer who interviewed me was very friendly and nice, so that helped too. The adcom seemed very experienced at interviewing and followed up quite a few points I made throughout the interviews. No surprise questions though, even the most difficult/interesting one I have seen it before on accepted.com's interview report. So do prepare those. It's always better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. Just don't memorize your answers.

Comparing to Kellogg interview with the Adcom, my Wharton interview with the alumni in LA was actually quite different. I thought an interview with alumni would be even more conversational. Turned out that my interviewer mainly asked questions from a list of questions and didn't follow up on my answers much. I guess that's how interviewer are trained. Adcom are just simply more experienced at this so they can follow up with your answers to weed out the nonsenses. Because Wharton gave you a list of alumni to choose from, I particularly avoided alumni with pure finance/PE field because my unconventional goal. In the end I interviewed with an alumni in the non-profit world and I am pretty happy with how the interview went.

I will write interview reports for accepted.com and clearadmit wiki once I hear back from these schools (hopefully in December for Kellogg!) since other people's interview reports really helped me prepare for my interview. Just don't want to jinx it at this point :)

Now it's time to start R2~ more essay writing~ yay....

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

still no invite from Wharton, but at least Kellogg app is confirmed

All the required elements of your application are complete.

If your interview has been completed, the application has been submitted for review to the admissions committee. If your interview has not been conducted, the application will be submitted to the admissions committee upon completion of the interview. The next status check update will be the admission decision (Admit, Waitlist or Deny). When a decision has been rendered, the Office of Admissions will send you an email notifying you to check your status for your decision. Decisions will be released throughout the round, but the majority of decisions will be released during the last several weeks of the round.

Oh, now the dreadful interview and endless waiting period~