December rolls around and all the R1 school decisions have been released. In order of having found out:
R1 HBS (Harvard): Ding without interview
R1 GSB (Stanford): Ding without interview
R1 Sloan (MIT): Ding without interview
R1 Wharton (UPenn): Interview
I will admit, after finding out that I had gotten rejections to Harvard, Stanford, and MIT without any interviews at all, I was quite devastated. Because these applications are so subjective, it was hard for me to figure out where I had gone wrong.
For HBS and Sloan, was it because I submitted a GRE test score instead of a GMAT score? For GSB, I had already accepted the fact that they were looking for above and beyond candidates. Being a data scientist from a large tech company was “typical” and wasn’t anything that made me stand out from the rest.
Banking on Wharton as my last hope, I was ecstatic when I found out I got the interview. Wharton is known for their quantitative rigor and their data – driven curriculum (and yes, the fact that they have a lot of finance people) so it makes sense that I would fit right in. As this was the one and only school I got an interview for, you can imagine how nervous I was when it came time to prep for the interview. More on that in my next post.
