Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Which round to apply?

That's a common question people post on MBA forums. And the answer is always the same: Apply when you can present your best application. However, always avoid round 3 (and 4 where applicable). They are the most competitive.

At London Business School, with 4 admission rounds, about 1/3 of seats get filled after R1, 1/3 after R2, and the remaining 1/3 is split between R3 and R4 (or that's what I recall). But how many people apply for each of these rounds? In a previous post, I mentioned that an admissions officer said that most people apply in R2, followed by R3, R1, and the least apply in R4. Hence, with 1/3 of seats going away in R1, but not many people applying then, your best bet is R1!

However, if I ask Google, most apply in R2, followed by R1, R3, and R4. Here's how I estimate this. Since my blog is very LBS centric, I used Google Analytics to track how many people visited this blog on which dates. So for R1, for example, I looked up how many people visited my blog on November 6, 2009 (R1 interview decision date) and December 16, 2009 (R1 admission decision date). Most visits on these days came through Google Search (e.g. "acceptance rate LBS"). I then took the sum of both, and did the same for all other rounds. The data is below, and it shows that 50% of applicants apply in R2, followed by 25% in R1, 18% in R3, and only 8% in R4. Well... the real truth is probably somewhere in between what I heard from LBS and what Google says :-).

Number of visits to this blog: