Admissions Q&A
No Tricks at Wharton
The advice the admissions department gives applicants is on the square, says director Thomas Caleel. So don't over-think your responses
Thomas Caleel, director of MBA admissions at Penn's Wharton School since April, 2005, is a busy man. Each year, he reads 6,000 applications—every single one Wharton receives—and this year he will be making recruiting stops in more than two dozen countries across the globe.
Caleel is a Penn alumnus twice over—he received his MBA from Wharton in 2003, and a B.A. in International Relations from Penn in 1994. He worked at the Silicon Valley private equity firm Cagan McAfee Capital Partners before joining the admissions office of his alma mater.
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| Thomas Caleel
U Penn - Wharton |
Caleel spoke with BusinessWeek.com reporter
Kerry Miller to dispel some myths about Wharton and the B-school application process. For one, he says that while the stereotype about Wharton being a "scary" place filled with hypercompetitive quant jocks just isn't true, it's no place to coast, either. "If you're looking for a school that's going to bring you in and hold your hand through the whole two years, we are definitely not that school." Caleel also talks about why "extracurricular activities" doesn't have to mean "community service," and why a 4.0 GPA, 750 GMAT, and two years at McKinsey aren't enough to guarantee admission at Wharton.
Here are edited excerpts of the conversation:
As a Wharton alum, what would you say is the toughest part of the application process?The whole thing! These applications are hard, and they take a lot of time—not because we're trying to erect impediments to entry, but because this is an intensely personal process and we really want people to step back and think and answer the questions intelligently and learn about themselves in the process.
A lot of people just discount that. They view it as a game. They view it as, "O.K., I'm just going to polish up these essays and then crank out the rest of it at the last minute." Those people are rarely successful in the process. It's really the people who understand what we're trying to do and who do step back and do invest the time and do invest the effort and are self-aware enough to answer the questions who tend to be more successful in the process.
What do you tell candidates who ask how Wharton is different from other schools?What I always tell people is that the question is not, "Why is Wharton different?" The question is, "Why is Wharton the right place for you?" Having gone through this myself, I did my process of elimination up front. I knew what I wanted out of school, and I just started crossing schools off the list, and I came down to the fact that Wharton was the right place that met all of my needs, and that's why I went there.
What we encourage people to do is to think about, really, why do you want an MBA? Why is now the right time? What do you look for in a school? Do you want a large school like
Harvard and Wharton, with 900, 800 students in your class, or are you more comfortable in
Stanford, that has a much smaller class size?
Do you want a large city, or do you want to be somewhere like
Tuck, that's out in the countryside and more removed? Do you want a one-year program—should you be at
INSEAD? And what are you trying to study? Oh, you're trying to study real estate. Great. You know, Wharton has eight real estate professors. Have you looked at the real estate conference? What's the Real Estate Club like?
That's the kind of level of diligence we want people to do. And if someone comes back to me and says, "Listen, I'm interested in distressed debt emerging market REITs, and there's a professor at UCLA who is the world's expert in that and I'm going there," I take my hat off to them, because that really shows that they understand what they're going there for, vs. someone who says, "Wharton's got good professors and an international reputation and a diverse student body." That to me says you read page one of the brochure.
How would you suggest candidates go about figuring out if Wharton is the school for them?I think one of the important things really is the environment that you'll be in for the next two years, so I always encourage people to reach out to the student communities there. We have a huge section on our Web site to help people kind of figure out where they fit in, [so they can] reach out to those student groups. It might Wharton Women in Business or the Finance Club or the Marketing Club.
And just start talking to students. On our Web site, we have an interactive chat board called
Student-2-Student. Go on there, ask questions, and ask yourself, you know, "Do I like these people? Do I want to be part of this community? Are they like me?"
I always tell people that Wharton is not necessarily the right place for everyone, and you might decide, "You know what? I don't really like the kind of person that Wharton attracts," because we tend to attract a kind of internationally-focused, active, entrepreneurial person.
I really encourage people to get beyond the stereotypes, get beyond what their parents and their friends and their colleagues are saying, get beyond the rankings that you see in the magazines, and really dig and find out if a place is the right place for you.
Are there any stereotypes people have about Wharton that you would like to dispel?One of the frustrating things for me personally is that people will sometimes not consider Wharton because they view it as a quote-unquote "scary place." Because yes, we are academically challenging. But the interesting thing is that a lot of these people that are scared of us have never shied away from a challenge their entire life. They've been top performers in everything they've done.
Another common stereotype is that we're also a very competitive place. It's a very subtle point. We are full of very competitive people, there's absolutely no question about that. I think that you have to be competitive to get to the level where you're excelling enough to be accepted. But what's very interesting is that when you get that many people together, it becomes a collaborative competition. People actually help each other quite a bit.
One of the best parts of your educational experience at Wharton will be working with your classmates to understand things—the investment banker will be teaching you things about finance and how to build spreadsheets, and somebody else on the team will be teaching you how to present. It's that kind of learning that happens. So, yes, everybody is competitive, but the competitiveness isn't turned on each other. We work very hard to maintain that culture.
One of the biggest changes you've made at Wharton is making the school more receptive to candidates with less than two years experience (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/7/06, "B-Schools: You Don't Have to Wait"). What advice do you have for those early career candidates?I think the biggest mistake that a lot of the early career candidates make is they assume it's all about brain power. But just going through school and getting a good undergraduate GPA isn't enough because we're looking for the same thing in all of our candidates, which is intellectual curiosity, a demonstrated record of achievement, and passion.
We hold someone coming straight out of undergrad to the same standards we do someone with eight or 10 years of work experience, because we're really looking for the quality of what they've done and the impact that they've made.
The students we've admitted as early career candidates have really made a difference, both in their school and in their community outside of school. They may have held real internships. They may have started large organizations on campus. They've really done unique things that set them apart, and they've excelled academically.
Assuming that being qualified is enough—is that something that you see in the applicant pool in general, too?Yes. People say, "Oh, well, I had a 4.0 GPA and a 750 GMAT, why didn't I get in?" And it's because we're very fortunate—and we know we're very fortunate—but we have just an incredibly rich and deep applicant pool. So just being able to handle the academics, for us, that's a starting point.
If someone is genuinely worried about their GMAT score, what do you tell them?My question to someone is always, "Is that the best you can do?" If they can look me in the eye and say, "It honestly is the best I can do," I say, "Fine, just don't worry about it anymore."
Wharton is a tough school. We're not hiding from that fact. When you come to Wharton, you're going to work very hard academically. You're going to learn a lot. And it's my responsibility, our responsibility on the admissions committee, to make sure we admit people who can handle that kind of rigor. So if someone says to me, "Look, I got a 4.0 from Cal Tech in engineering, but I'm just not a good standardized test-taker. I got an 1100 on my SATs, and I can only get a 670 on my GMAT, but I can show you four years of just outstanding academic performance," that's great.
There is no magic number. Our middle 80% range is 670 to 760. And there are people below that and people above that.
What do you say to the person who says, "I'm at a top investment bank. I went to a great school, but so did lots of other people. How do I distinguish myself?"I always laugh about this at our information sessions because, guaranteed, I always get at least one question from somebody saying, "How do I differentiate myself because I went to a good school and worked for a big company? I wish I worked in a small company."
And then the next question is from somebody in a small company saying, "Well, I work in a small company. You probably have never heard of it. I wish I worked in a big company so I didn't have to explain myself, because I'm at a disadvantage." So what we really tell people is to trust the process.
When you say trust the process, what does the process look like on your end?When that application comes in, it's printed out and it's read by a second-year student. And those second-year students, it's a very competitive process to be chosen. We train them, we pay them. Then the file is given to a full-time member of the admissions committee and it's read cover to cover again.
Then I review all the files, and we extend an invitation to interview to about 45% of those candidates. Then those files are re-read by a full-time member of the Admissions Committee, and then I read them cover to cover. We get about 6,000 applications per year, and we all lock down come late October—put on comfortable clothes and sit in our offices and read and read and read until our eyes fall out. But it's the best part of the process.
Your office has a pretty strict policy about additional materials that you haven't asked for. What's the reasoning behind that?At Wharton, we have a very strong commitment to fairness and equity, and this is something I believe in very personally, being an alumnus myself. There is a potential for tremendous inequalities in the application process.
So if, for example, I went out and sent a message that said, "It's very helpful for you to come to the campus and meet with a member of the admissions committee," well, that really puts someone who's working in, say, Nigeria for maybe $500 a month, at a disadvantage, and that's not the kind of system we want to create.
So we don't want additional information. If, for example, someone has access to a lot of alumni, well, it's not really fair if they can fire off five alumni letters, and I look at that and say, "Oh, well, that's an automatic in," when somebody working in Sri Lanka—or for that matter Montana—may never have met an MBA candidate in their entire life. I don't want to create that kind of inequity.
We tell people, "Do not send additional information." And some people [still] do. I don't view that positively because there's a lot of other people who have followed the instructions, and so why would we give preference to someone who doesn't follow the instructions? I understand that successful people take initiative and make their own luck, but there are times when you need to follow the instructions, and there are times to be a little bit more of a cowboy. And this is definitely not a time to be a cowboy.
On the admissions committee's blog, you say you don't assess candidates on the number and type of extracurricular service activities, and that you consider less formal commitments, as well. What do you mean by that?Unfortunately. the idea of extracurricular activities has become synonymous with community service. And in my mind, that's not good because everyone expresses themselves differently. I don't want there to be an expectation of, "Oh, I have to go volunteer at a soup kitchen for the next six months to beef up my resume."
First of all, we love people who do give back to their communities in whatever capacity that is. But we also understand that people have different lives. A consultant, for example, who's on the road four days a week—it's very hard for her to get involved in her local community, so we look at what else she does outside of work to give back or to stay involved or to relieve stress.
If you really break it down to a core principle, we're just trying to get to know you. So you work? Great. What do you do at work? That's interesting. What do you do outside of work? I mean, do you finish work, go home, eat dinner, watch a half-hour of TV, and go to sleep?
And what if you do just go home after work, watch TV, and go to sleep? What would you tell those applicants?I would first of all advise them we're not impressed by quantity of extracurriculars—we're impressed by quality. So find one thing that you really enjoy and you can make a commitment to and you can work your way up to a leadership position in and do that. Also, don't start extracurriculars just for your application—I mean, things that get started in like July or August of 2006 are a huge red flag
Are there other things that students do that backfire like that (see 8/22/06, "The Admit Office's Hate List")?We deal with very bright people, and sometimes they don't listen to us. Even though we tell them something and we have no motivation to hide the truth, they assume we're hiding the truth. So when I say to them, "Be honest in your essays and just tell your story," they say, "Well, yeah, but, you know, my friend told me that they're really looking for this, so I'm going to write my essay based on what I've heard they want to see."
And really, we're not trying to be tricky. We're just telling people, "Look, tell us your story. Be honest. Tell us about yourself. That's what's going to make you successful in this process."
Another critical mistake that people make along those lines is with recommenders. Our instructions are very specific, and they say, "Choose the person that knows you best." And that person tends to your direct manager. It's a person that you work with every day who knows your strengths, knows your weaknesses, knows what you're like at 2 a.m. when things are going wrong. And that's the person we want to hear from.
This year we've also added a third optional peer recommendation because we think it would be interesting to hear what your peers think about you. But in terms of recommendations, what a lot of people will do is they'll go and they'll get a letter from the CEO or they'll ask their parents to get them a letter from the senator that, you know, they contributed to her campaign or something.
One of the best recommendations I've ever seen was from a presidential candidate, nationally known presidential candidate, and it was one of his right-hand guys on his campaign team. Brilliant. I mean, he had worked with him for years. He knew him very well. But a lot of times we get these letters from kings, queens, presidents, and senators that, you know, say, "Oh, so-and-so's a very upstanding young lady from a wonderful family, and I've known her since she was yea big." Doesn't really tell you that much, does it?
The second essay this year is "Describe a failure or setback." That seems like one of the things that make people say, "Oh, this is a tricky one." Can you tell me a little bit about what you're looking for in that question?First of all, we're not asking, "Tell us your greatest weakness," that old cliche interview question. We're talking more about an experience that you've been through. You describe a failure or a setback.
And I think people are over-thinking it a little bit too much, and they're getting too caught up in, "Well, do I say something negative because that—does that reflect negatively on me?" We've all made mistakes. We learn from our mistakes. We don't learn really as much from our successes.
So just tell us about a time when something went wrong. It may have been your fault. It may not have been your fault. A counterpart in a transaction may have defaulted on you, and there was a huge failure. So tell us how you dealt with it. Were you faced with an ethical dilemma? Were you an athlete and you made a mistake and cost your team the championship and you learned something from that?
It doesn't need to be a huge, monumental, dramatic thing. It could just be something small, and that's why we say failure or setback.
Any other words of advice to applicants?Please listen to us when we tell you things, we're not trying to be tricky! I say that a bit tongue in cheek, but really, we want to meet interesting different people from around the world, so come to us and tell us your story. If you have questions, please just ask us. We're not scary people. And really, be yourself.
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