What is The Consortium?

The name of this post should really be - The Consortium application process through the eyes of an applicant.

Last week I was asked by a blog reader what The Consortium was, so I wanted to address this topic since I've spoken so much about it and relatively, not many people would know about it unless they were applying through it.  So I'll give a little bit of background on The Consortium and then go into the application process because it's definitely SOMETHING ELSE!

I first heard about The Consortium from a friend who was applying through it two years ago.  I had never heard about it before but then when I started seeing it referenced on the school's websites that I was interested in I began to inquire further.  Here is evidence:  NYU Stern, Dartmouth Tuck, UC Berkeley Haas, Cornell Johnson, Michigan Ross (whew that took a lot to find all those links!)  So yeah I saw a reoccurring theme going on here.  Now some people may ask "Where is Harvard, Wharton, Columbia..."  Well... from what I hear... in order to become a member of The Consortium, the other member schools must vote you in.  So ask yourself this...Would NYU want to vote in Columbia?  Would UNC want to vote in Duke? Would any school want to vote in Wharton, Stanford, or HBS?  :-)

The Consortium Mission: The mission of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, an alliance of leading American business schools and some of our country’s top corporations, is to enhance diversity in business education and leadership by helping to reduce the serious underrepresentation of African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans in both our member schools’ enrollments and the ranks of management. 

To this end there are 17 schools that are members of The Consortium meaning they're dedicated to the mission stated above!  Here is the list of Consortium Member Schools (go take a look at the list and then come back to my blog and you'll understand later why I wanted you to see the list of schools.)

There are four main benefits of applying through The Consortium and here's where I will add my perspective as an applicant.

1.) Common Application - One application allows you to apply to up to six Consortium schools.

My 2 Cents - So yes there is one application which a lot of people find amazing (myself included).  There are only two rounds though.  R1 was Nov 15th and R2 was Jan 5.  The only "downside" to this is that all of your applications are due on the same day, hence the reason for the madness I went through last week.   Here is what the application entails:

- 3 Recommendation letters - 2 professional and 1 that is from someone who can speak to how you support the Consortium Mission.

- 2 Mandatory essays - 1 about career goals and 1 about how you support the Consortium Mission

- 1 Optional essay - is there anything else you'd like for us to know?

- School specific essays - So each school has a topic or topics that they would like to use.  In a lot of the cases the school specific essay mirrored the school's "normal" application, but in some cases it did not ie. with Tuck - remember my video essay?

- School Rankings (fun times with this one...see Fellowship below)

2.) Tiered Application Fee - Using The Consortium common application significantly reduces your application fee costs. You may apply to up to two member schools for $150, three schools for $200, four schools for $240, five for $275, and six for $300.

My 2 Cents - nothing really to say about this other than it was simply INCREDIBLE!  Had I applied to 6 schools outside of The Consortium it would have cost at least $1200, but when I hit submit I had to pay $300 total, so that's a blessing.  This is why I added one more school to my list the Sunday before hitting submit.  My friend said "Richard what's another $50 and 2 essays?"  He was right too!  It's not like I needed to find new recommendation letters and what not.

3.) The Consortium Fellowship - Last year, Consortium member schools offered more than 330 fellowships covering tuition and mandatory fees for two years of full-time study. Applicants who are admitted through The Consortium process and become Consortium members are considered for these prestigious fellowships.

My 2 Cents - so when you apply through the consortium, you HAVE to rank your schools in order of preference should you be accepted.  Do the schools see your rankings?  The consensus is that they don't, so I'm going to go with that.  Why do you need to rank them?  Well it's all for fellowship consideration.  I believe in March the schools Consortium representatives get together in a room and practically "duke it out."  Here's an example of what happens to the best of my knowledge.

All of the acceptances and decisions go out with the rest of the people who applied normal R1 and R2.  If I am accepted to my first choice school they get the first chance to offer me a fellowship.  If they decide to forgo giving me a fellowship, I can still attend, but have to find other means of financial aid.  Also, if they decide to not give me the fellowship, then the school that I ranked 2nd gets the option to offer me one of their fellowships.  This continues all the way down the line.  At this stage in the game I do believe the schools know where they fall in your ranking.  Cool Right?  Well no not really because us applicants know which schools tend the have more fellowships available so that factors in to people's ranking decisions.  You can only be offered 1 fellowship because of the trickle-down effect works.

For instance, Michigan has a large Consortium cohort and I have many friends who are applying to schools outside of the Consortium who ranked Michigan first.  So now when doing my rankings I need to factor that in.  Also, one would think that a school would choose to give the fellowship to someone who ranked them first, but they don't BUT if you rank a school too low, the chances of getting a fellowship dwindle.  And then you get into a situation where you know that there are a couple schools out there who will not give a fellowship to anyone who does not rank them 1 or 2, a couple won't if you rank them below 1. So then you think to yourself.. hhmm if I won't get it if I don't rank them first then I'm just going to put them last so that I have a better chance with another school who likes to see themselves 1st or 2nd.

Now you see the trickiness of it all....  But once accepted you become a Consortium member.

Furthermore - If you've applied in R1 for any non-Consortium schools, your deposit will be due before you find out if you've received the fellowship, or acceptances for that matter, from any Consortium schools.  So you get into a situation where you may have to send a $2k deposit to school X before you know if you're admitted to schools A,B,C,D,E, or F.  

4.) Consortium Membership - Consortium members gain many benefits, including access to over 70 corporate partners, a mandatory Annual Orientation Program & Career Forum (OP) prior to beginning their MBAs, and access to nearly 6,000 Consortium alumni across member schools.

My 2 cents - This orientation program occurs in the summer and a LARGE percentage of students who attend walk away with an internship before the start of the school year!  This is huge because as we all know the recruiting process is grueling and pairing that with school work and activities is tough, so I've spoken to many students at schools who already had their internships when they started so they never had that recruiting headache.  You may be asking, well which companies recruit that soon?  Well... companies who are dedicated to increasing diversity.  All of the big MBA recruiters are there so it's not like these are just Tier 10 (are there Tier 10?) recruiters.

Also if you're a Consortium Member, you get a huge network!  HUGE! Networks are always fun!

Read and re-read this post if necessary, I know it's confusing.  That's all folks

Essay Madness(ness)

So everything is coming to a close very very very very very quickly.  I’m writing this blog post as I sit on the bus coming home from work.  I know that I said I wouldn’t write a long post until after I hit submit, but what I really should have said was that I am not going to write another blog post AT home, until after I hit submit.  Today was probably the fastest work day I’ve experienced.  

On the bus trip into the city, I was working on my 2nd consortium essay.  I’m not going to lie, I was procrastinating on this one because I find this one to be the most difficult.  So the question is 

“The mission of The Consortium is to enhance diversity in business education and leadership by helping to reduce the serious underrepresentation of African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans in both our member schools' enrollments and the ranks of management. What have you done in your business, academic or personal life to demonstrate commitment to this mission? Please provide specific example of your involvement, actions and results.“ 

...which as you can tell is much different from all of the other school specific essays that I’m accustomed to writing.  I knew that once I actually started writing this one, the ideas would come to me.  True to form, it occured while I was in Starbucks with my computer.  I will say that I was slightly disctracted because there was a cute guy sitting across from me and I kept staring, but I think he caught on and him and his friend left.  ::shrugs::  It was for the better anyway, because I was able to get three long paragraphs done.  Then EUREEKA, I got an idea.

So one of the things I was writing about was a Diversity focus group I was asked to participate in at work.  So I used that as one of my examples.  When I got back to my desk after getting a great draft of the essay accomplished, I decided to email this person in HR to just talk to her about the outcome of the focus group from her perspective.  I emailed her with background on the Consortium and a list of the schools I was applying too.  This is a benefit I guess of people at work being behind you in your endeavors.  She, like my VP and Manager and the rest of my team, knows that I am applying to business school.  I feel fortunate enough to have a team supporting me in my place of work.  I guess when I was stressing out about “breaking the news” back in May was beneficial.  FOR ME!  Unfortunately, I know that it’s not like that for others.  In any event, we spoke for about 10 minutes and I took a page and a half of notes on a legal pad...then I stuffed my notes into my bag immediately so I wouldn’t forget them. 

Later that day I was talking to my friend and we were going down our checklists of things that we need to do before Wednesday.  I decided to send my resume to my consultant at Veritas one last time with a couple of questions.  I wanted to know if I should have removed a bullet point from one section in order to add it to another section.  I also wanted to know what an admissions committee will think when looking at my resume and I was very very pleased with her feedback.  I definitely feel confident about my resume now.  

I’ll be honest  - that I was beginning to get nervous about my essays, because I have been doing so much work on them that I know that my grammar is not the best.  If you couldn’t tell... I write the way I think.  Hence the reason for ellipses...that’s where I “pause” in my head during my inner monologue.  I would not feel comfortable submitting all of my essays without a final read through.  The veritas consulting package that I won in February of last year, only covers the three Core Consortium questions, so I was left to my own devices for the other 12 essays I need to write.  

I didn't want to constantly ask my friends going through the same process as I am.  They have their own essays to worry about and I was worried about the turn around.  So I emailed a friend who has helped me out with my diversity conference essays.  I asked her if she would like to make some money.  Who wouldn’t like to make money right?  I told her that as I finish my essays I would send them to her for review and to help me fix grammar mistakes.  She obliged and I began flooding her inbox with my essays!  ;-)  I feel bad but that’s why I’m willing to pay.  I mean it would be pointless at this point to go through a year of all of this work to only have the admissions committee look at my essays and say “Um.. what is this nonsense?”  Anything I have to do right?  

Almost done almost done....  Now I’m home and have to finish that 2nd Consortium essay to send off.  Thankfully my Veritas consultant is on the West coast!

Focused on January 5th!

Right now I'm laying in bed watching some stupid movie On Demand.  I am no longer living in New York City :-( and :-)  Sad because that was my life for nearly two years so I was accustomed to my 20 minute commute to work.  I am now back in New Jersey and have a 1.5 - 2 hour commute in the morning!  Not fun by any means...  The plus side is that I don't have to write that quadruple digit rent check any more!  I am not able to begin saving for business school.  So yeah that's that...

So as I lay here watching whatever movie is on right now I'm preparing to focus on the next two months.  I have exactly 2 months to get my applications submitted.  There is only one thing I can and shall focus on for the next two months and that is getting my applications completed.

This weekend I plan on getting all of my first draft essays completed.  Here is what I need to do:

3 Consortium Essays
1 Dartmouth Essay
2 Michigan Essays
3 Cornell Essays
2 Berkeley Essays
________________
11 Essays

Then I need to get my life together and start studying again for the amazingly fun GMAT.  I do not have another test date yet but I have to take it before the Consortium deadline in December.  I can do it!  I just booked another tutoring session with my tutor.

I still haven't heard whether or not I'm off the waitlist for the Tuck diversity conference.  I still have the days off from work, so if I hear that a spot opens up all I have to do is hop on the bus.

I will also be attending the LGBT preview day at Michigan on the 19th.  My friend (one of the guys I met at Yale during my visit in February) said that I could stay at his apartment even though he won't be there that weekend.  It's all good though because I met many of the other LGBT Michigan students when I was at the Reaching Out conference, so I've been conversing with them giving them a heads up that I'll be visiting that weekend.  I'm really looking forward to it.

I know this was a boring post but I'm exhausted... good night

GMAT & B-School Journey Update!

Hello All...  at the end of my last post I said that there were a lot of things that I needed to update you guys on.  So this post will do just that.  I don't want to fall behind because there are a couple things going on later this week...

I was interviewed for MBAPodcaster:
So last week a representative over at MBA podcaster reached out to me.  She said that she was putting together a podcast related to the MBA Timeline and what candidates should do prior to applying and when.  She was tipped off to my blog by one of her colleagues.  I was excited to participate because MBA Podcaster has been very useful for me.  I found out about it last summer and have listened to all 100+ podcasts... if you don't believe me check my very post because I called it out http://bit.ly/MyFirstPost.  I will say that I was very nervous when we were talking on the phone.  I wasn't nervous because of the conversation topic, but I was nervous because I knew I was being recorded.  You guys all know that I love to talk, but something changes when you know that you're being recorded I guess.  I also think it was because I didn't want to say any school names.  When I talk freely I "name drop" all the time, but since I was making a conscious effort to not name any schools, I would trip myself up.  She reassured me that I was doing fine, aside from the couple of "speak ups", and that the podcast would turn out just fine.  I don't think it will be out until the fall.

Update on conversation with VP:
I know people are anxious to hear about this update.  Well...hhmm... it did not go as planned. :-(  The conversation I had with her was not bad by any means.  She liked the position I created and asked what I was looking for.  She also noted that I added a title change and I explained why.  I think she was surprised by that but I explained to her that since we got rid of our agency and were engaging in new initiatives that I felt that new responsibilities warranted a new title.  She didn't quite understand that, which was mind boggling to me.  Maybe I'm missing something, and you guys can correct me, but... if you're Title says that you are a Lawn Mower...and now in addition you trim hedges, plant flowers, and water the grass... wouldn't your title change to Landscaper or something like that?  At least that's how I feel.

She reassured me that her and the team have noticed the progress that I've been making.  There are still some areas with which I need to work on, but that she and my director and my manager are dedicated to helping me improve those areas.  She said "that's kind of our job... to make sure that you progress..."  Funny she says that because she leaves this week on a 3 month maternity leave.  Which brings me to my next point of discussion with her.

Let me just say that she's hardcore!  She's due this Thursday!  I asked her when she would be leaving and she said that as of right now... Wednesday will be her last day!  I said... "I think your last day should be Tuesday so that you can get a full days rest on Wednesday before your life changes for ever."  She laughed but didn't seem to agree haha.  So when people ask me if I think she'll be able to write my recommendation letter, I say that she definitely will.  She's going to give me her email address and phone number and said that I should keep in touch with her constantly to give her updates and so she can update me.  It's great having people in your corner... she's definitely on Team Richard!

InsideTheMBA.org event on Tuesday:
So last Tuesday I attended an MBA fair at the Westin Times Square... which by the way is NOT in Times Square...it's on 43rd and 8th avenue....I know why hotels do that... but it's not good for people who live in the city and hear Times Square and then walk through that horrendous crowd only to find that it's not in Times Square.  Anyway... the event was PACKED to say the least.  There were more people standing up than sitting down because there were not enough tables.  When I got there I looked for my friends Jess and Ben (called out in a prior post).  We were standing... I was eating and drinking white wine (you guys know how I feel about free alcohol).  There was a "panel" discussion for about 15 minutes and then they let us mix and mingle with the school representatives.  The reason I put "panel" in quotes is because they were standing and passing the mic between a couple of them.  It was very informal.

They allowed people to ask questions of course... and all of the questions were pretty standard.  I honestly don't know how the school representatives stomach answering the same questions over and over and over and over again.  Doesn't it get draining?  I mean how many times can you answer "What GMAT score do I need?" before wanting to pull all of your hair out?

There was one question that was asked that made everyone go "Did he/she just say that?"  I was debating whether (not whether or not because that would be redundant) to post what the question was, but I've decided that this is MY blog and I'll do as I please haha...  So the topic of discussion was about application essays.  This person asked "So you guys said what people should not do, but what can we do to make sure that the admissions committee isn't thinking, "Wow this essay blows!""  I don't know if you guys think that's inappropriate but I sure do.  That question should have been phrased differently.

I was only at the event to talk to three schools.  NYU, Cornell, and UNC Kenan-Flagler.  The crowd for Baruch and NYU were huge, so I wasn't going to take the time to speak to the NYU reps.  I'll be attending 100 other NYU events, so that wasn't a concern of mine.  At first the crowd for Cornell and UNC was huge too, so I just got some more free food and free wine and sat down at a table and waited for the crowds to die down.

I heard from a friend that UNC was making strides in the digital marketing realm, so I wanted to see if that was true.  Turns out... it's not.  So that's an excluded school.

I then spoke to Randall from Cornell.  If you guys have never met him, he's full of energy and I think is one of the most approachable people in the industry!  I remember last year I heard him give a presentation about Cornell and I was incredibly impressed with the school.  So I asked him about the curriculum pertaining to my interests and about the Johnson Means Business diversity conference.  I'm actually going to email him when I finish writing this post.  I have some questions for him.  :-)


GMAT studying:
Studying is going well.  Right now I'm going back through my MGMAT books.  Today I was going through Equations, Variables, and VIC's.  Initially when I went through these books I circled the problems I got wrong or didn't know.  I did not write in the books other than that and I advise anyone else studying does the same.  That way when you go back through the books you aren't persuaded by the answers you came up with before.  I was feeling more confident because the questions I got wrong months ago, I was now getting right for the most part.  I'm going to start studying a heck of a lot more now.  I've got to!!!  I do not want to have to take this exam again.

Kaplan event on August 8th and the sacrifice I will have to make to attend:
So on August 8th there is a Kaplan event at the Grand Hyatt.  It's called Destination Business School. It's an all encompassing 2 Day business school event.  It covers everything from Essay writing to Elevator pitches etc.  I'm looking forward to it.  I initially heard about the event last week when I went to the Ross event at the Kaplan Center.  I saw the date and quickly wrote it off because that's the weekend I was going to be in Fire Island with friends.  When I got the opportunity to go to the event I jumped at it with no question.  I'll have to cancel my one day trip even though I already paid for it, but that's not a concern for me.  I mean gotta make sacrifices right?  Who knows what I'll learn or whom I'll meet.  The opportunity cost is just too great too not attend.

ESSAYS:
So as I'm sure you all know, essays have begun rolling out.  I know that for me I've seen all of the essay questions for the schools I wish to apply too.  So in reality I could start my essays.  All that I've done thus far is add a folder to my desktop titled B-School Essays.  Within that folder there are X amount of subfolders for each school.  Right now I just have 1 document with all of that schools essay questions.  As I think about things throughout the days and weeks I just go in and jot notes under which question it would apply too for each school.  I'll go back through at a later date and then begin writing.  I haven't begun to write the essays, because well... again I've be better served by studying for the GMAT otherwise my essays won't matter.  But at least I'll have all of the information available.

I also had a call today with that HBS alum.  We spoke for 15 minutes and he gave me some incredible advice that I would not have thought of.  I'm telling you guys... if you're going through this process with me... having people at the schools you wish to apply too.. is invaluable.  They know the culture of the school and can tell you what to focus on.  Sometimes just hearing it from someone else is enough.

Fall calendar:
OMG this is filling up sooooo quickly and I'm not even done.  I've been going to the school's websites to find out when they're having events in the city or on their campuses.  I'm in a position where I'm looking for two types of events, on campus and here in my neck of the woods.  I'm looking for of course general info sessions, but more importantly events geared towards Minorities and the LGBT community.  With that being said I have a full September/October/November.  I'll give you a preview into what I have on my calendar as of right now.  Some of the events overlap and I'll have to decide which ones to attend.

September 2nd - Tuck Reception @ Yale Club
September 3rd - NYU Diversity Conference application deadline
September 6th - Ross Diversity Conference application deadline
September 19th - MBA Tour event
October 7th - 9th - NYU Diversity Conference
October 8th - 9th - Ross Diversity Conference @ Ross
October 13th - Tuck Early Action Deadline
October 14th - 17th - Reaching OUT Conference in Los Angeles
October 16th - UC Berkeley Diversity Workshop @ Berkeley
October 28th - 30th - Cornell Diversity Conference @ Cornell
November 6th - Consortium interview Deadline
November 6th - UC Berkeley LGBT event @ Berkeley
November 11th - 14th - Tuck Diversity Conference
November 15th - Consortium Application Deadline.

So yeah needless to say this fall is shaping up to be a very busy and expensive one... not sure where the funds are going to come from...if anyone wants to donate a couple thousand dollars to my bank account, I'm all for it!

This week I'll be hitting the quant side of my gmat prep HARD!

As always... take care...  beware... don't stare... who cares?  Now I'm just delirious because it's late...