Quantifying B-School Chances

Yesterday, I read something on twitter from Poets and Quants about a new blogger being added to the blog list and naturally I was curious to see what the person was writing about.  I followed the links and landed on the new bloggers webpage and I ended up reading every single post!  After reading one post that caught my attention I left the blogger a comment asking if it would be alright for me to write about his/her blog.

I'll share a link after I write all of my thoughts down pertaining to one of this persons' posts.  JustShip had an interesting take on this application process, and after much thought, I am going to agree with his/her assessment.  There was a post titled:  "Am I One of the Top 4,653 Applicants?"  Essentially the post I am referencing illustrates that instead of wondering whether or not we will be 1 accepted student to a school with a low double digit yield, given the chances, it's better to just ask yourself, am I one of the X applicants from the total applicant pool of the schools I am applying too?

As I thought about this, I realized that this ease of thinking can only be achieved when you have done your research and are only applying to schools that you would love to attend, should an acceptance be received.  If you're applying to schools just to apply to them, then it may be a little bit harder to say "Ok I just need to get into one."  But then again, if your goal is to just go to business school then that's fine too.

I'm not going to get into much of what was said in the post I'm referencing, because honestly...I cannot do the post justice.  Clearly, with my writing style I would butcher the whole thing.  All of the data and assumptions are cited in his/her post as well.

I will say that the post prompted me to make my own matrix:

If I were to get into only one of these schools, I would definitely be happy and enroll, so I can say that it makes sense that I need to be 1 applicant out of 1,529!  This is definitely a smaller pool than JustShip's but our schools are different.  The only overlap that we had was NYU.  There are some caveats in the data too because there is some round(ation) going on.

Even though the total enrolled is about 17% of the applicant pool, it may be slightly "easier" to get into one of the schools because Harvard, Stanford, Wharton are not in my list, which have incredibly high yields.  We need to take those into account account and add that to the total enrolled in my list.

HBS - 903 enrolled

Wharton - 817 enrolled

Stanford - 393 enrolled

Total - 2109

So in a nut shell - I need to be one of 3638 (2109+1529) applicants!

So now when I'm procrastinating I ask myself "WWTHOPBDRN"  

What Would The Other People Be Doing Right Now?

Here is the Blog post that I am referring too:  

Am I One of the Top 4,653 Applicants?