Harvard Business School

[Anonymous]

What is the profile of a successful applicant? Do they generally come from T25 schools or ?

[Anonymous]

Successful applicants to HBS come from a wide variety of undergraduate schools. The key beyond GPA & GMAT/GRE score is one's post-undergraduate full-time work experience and one's reason for wanting to earn an MBA degree.

[Anonymous]

Yes, your work experience is far more relevant than your undergrad...although many kids from top undergrads end up getting high profile / great jobs coming out of undergrad.

No pun...but business school is far more transactional. HBS will accept a lot of kids that worked at McKinsey because they want McKinsey to hire a lot of HBS grads. A ton more back-scratching in that sense.

[Anonymous]

This is all true. A lot of MBA programs take students who have graduated relatively recently. But the top schools like HBS are looking to curate a class of students with interesting and impressive work backgrounds.

[Anonymous]

Many hbs people have told me that the trick is to apply a 2nd time. First year you get rejected, apply again and you will get in.

My boss is hbs but from the 90s. It’s different now, they want breadth and less classic white guys like him.

Many of the HBS people I know come from famous families or are wealthy, they just hide it well. The grandson of a local Fortune 500 attended. Family has billions.

[Anonymous]

Good work experience, being well liked, and good GMAT scores. Having decent grades and extracurriculars also helps. This past year MBA graduates who were pivoting from a different field are having trouble with recruitment, so I imagine a strong professional background pre-MBA is most important. Also HBS has like 1000 people in their class, which is large for a MBA. Not every graduate will end up being a superstar.