From the Assistant Dean for Admissions: What Happens After You Hit ‘Submit’

Now that our Round 2 MBA application deadline is a few weeks behind us, many of you may be wondering what happens to your application after you hit the “Submit” button. Just as we do our best to demystify the application as you prepare your candidacy, I want to take some time to give you a sense of what happens to your application once it is out of your hands and into ours.

Having gone through the application process, hopefully you already have a sense that we put a great deal of thought into how our application is constructed. Our guiding principle is only to ask questions that are relevant to evaluating an applicant’s candidacy, and this allows you to focus your efforts on what the committee is looking to learn about you.

We also aspire to create an application process that is fairer, more consistent, more accessible, and open to a more diverse set of applicants. We do this in a number of ways, both in how and what we ask in the application, and also in how we construct the review process after we receive your application. I recently wrote an article that explains certain aspects of how we structure the process in an effort to reduce bias and heighten predictive validity.

After the application deadline, the first thing we do is quickly review the entire pool as a committee to level-set and get a sense of the overall scope of the applicants. We then begin to read applications and send out interview invitations. We’ve already sent out the first wave of interview invitations and will continue to do so throughout the round. (Don’t worry if you haven’t received an invitation yet; we’ve only just started and have many more left to send out!) During the process, your application will be reviewed by at least two members of the Admissions Committee. Reviewers do not know what others thought of the application, and if you are invited to interview, the interviewer will offer another independent evaluation of your candidacy. We then make decisions by committee, which takes longer and is in many ways less efficient than other possible decision-making mechanisms, but we feel this is important because it brings together multiple perspectives, which results in better decisions. We will also bring some applications to committee multiple times as a double-check on the process, to ensure that our decisions are based on the merits of the candidacy and not such transient things as when the application came to committee, what mood we were in, and what candidate was discussed immediately beforehand.

We know that you put a great deal of effort into your application and we feel that we owe it to you to put the same effort into our review and decision-making processes. We look forward to reviewing the many wonderful applications we receive as we look to assemble the Yale SOM MBA Class of 2024. Best of luck in the process!