Ahead of Schedule...Fingers Crossed

I've read a few places about how good it feels to finally click SUBMIT for the first time. Well, I just submitted my first application and it felt great! It builds up confidence knowing that I after two months after Kellogg's essays were released, I was finally able to get through a few outlines, 3 rough drafts, and 5 revisions of the final essay (with a lot of helpful input from others). Of course, there were some hurdles (remember the spacing issue?) and I found out when I opened the app that MMM applicants have a slightly different essay 1 than regular 2Y applicants.

Actually, I think the change in essay 1 helped out a lot. I was better able to tie in my engineering background to Kellogg and show a clear fit between me, my goals, and Kellogg/MMM. I also was able to get in touch with an MMM student and get some nice little tidbits that aren't available on the MMM website...always a nice bonus. I actually found out that some MMM students go into finance and IB, which is nice because if there's one thing I want to do it's to keep my options open and not limit my options to mgmt/consulting. The only issue, if I should even call it that, is that I couldn't fit all my transcripts and have to email scanned PDFs of the extra one, which I already did. Now I just need my recommenders to come through before R1 deadline -- I think I've left plenty of time for that.

On the Columbia front, I've just finished tweaking my final rough draft and will be starting on the final version soon (probably on Monday, I am relaxing this weekend). I would like to finish it up in the next week and a half or so. One of my recommenders already finished his CBS rec form and will submit this week. I asked both of my recommenders to do CBS recs first since they are the most in-depth and CBS is rolling admissions.

So yeah, I'm ahead of schedule. It just seems like essays flow much better/quicker once the first essays are submitted. I am quick at picking up the value of each sentence and deleting it if necessary. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Still thinking about which school I will tackle next. I'm thinking Wharton since Chicago's essay 2 is still giving me some trouble. I'm learning towards 2B but I'll focus on that later.

Oh yeah, finally, thanks to ClearAdmit and Stacy Blackman for their generous offers. I'm not going to go in depth into what exactly their offers were, but it's nice to be acknowledged for my hard work and get a couple freebies. I also fully expect a ClearAdmit BoB award on the left side of my blog by next year hehe :)

OK so I probably won't be putting any more updates next week, but I will be in Cambridge, Mass for MBADiversity's Annual Symposium next weekend and I'll be sure to let everyone know how that goes. There should be some MBA admissions officers there as well as alumni and current MBA students who are part of the MBADiversity community.

I hope all your applications are going well.