The Good News About the MBA Wait List
You might be thinking to yourself that there’s no worse place than the purgatory of being on a waitlist for your MBA program. After all the work you’ve put into your application, and all stress while waiting for a decision – they still have you on hold.
But here’s the good news: you haven’t been rejected!
Business school admissions officers are not stringing you along for their own amusement. It may seem that way – that they are wicked voodooists cackling away at your misery. They are not. They have one goal, and that is to fill the class with quality people: you are still in the running.
To no one’s surprise, the 2021 matriculation cycle is only slightly less weird than the previous year’s cycle. We’ve still got questions about embassy (that is, visa) delays, and pandemic uncertainty in countries like India and Brazil. If last year’s rapid changes represent an example, we could see schools scrambling to add to their classes students who can fill the seats who cannot or won’t be able to embark on their MBA studies quite yet.
And admissions officers advise students to hang in there. “It could be till late June or July,” says one admissions officer at an in-demand program. And it could happen. We all know people who got the all well after they put their deposit down on say, Tuck, and found out that MIT Sloan had a last-minute open seat. Well, that just means finding an apartment in Cambridge 2 weeks before school starts, no easy feat. (True story!)
And here’s an amazing facts about the waitlist: It’s rare, but someone I worked with actually got some scholarship money after being taken off the waitlist. I wouldn’t count on it, but it stranger things have happened.
You’ll find all kinds of advice about how to get off the waitlist from me (see a compilation of resources here)
And some of my friends, including Candy LaBalle, based in Spain – showing that this is a global thing – can be found in this article.
In the meantime, it’s good to have a Plan B. You don’t want to put all your eggs in an uncertain basket. But it’s always fun to take on a little upside risk.
