Dos & Don’ts Before Hitting Submit On Your MBA Application
ApplicantLab |
August 27, 2025

As the whirlwind of MBA Round One application deadlines swiftly approaches, it’s crucial to know the essential do’s and don’ts before hitting “submit.” John Byrne, alongside co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards, offers invaluable advice in this episode of “Business Casual.” With deadlines for top schools like Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford clustering together, applicants need to ensure their applications are polished and timely.

Caroline emphasizes the importance of communication with your recommenders. It’s vital to check in and ensure they are on track, avoiding any last-minute rushes that can lead to mishaps. Recommendations should align with your personal narrative and bolster your strengths, which is why proactive engagement and support throughout the process are key. Caroline advises that while some schools may accept late submissions, it’s best not to rely on leniency and aim for completion ahead of deadlines.

Maria highlights the complexity of application forms, urging candidates to dive in early. Beyond essays and resumes, applications require detailed personal information that can be time-consuming to complete. By starting early, candidates minimize the risk of careless mistakes, such as currency conversion errors or incorrect compensation figures. This proactive approach allows for a thorough review, ensuring that each detail is accurate and reflective of the candidate’s true profile. For MBA hopefuls, these last-minute strategies are crucial for avoiding the anxiety of deadline-related mishaps.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:06] – John

Well, hello, everyone. Do you know we’re only a little more than a week away from the round one deadline for applications at the Harvard Business School. September third is round one. There are only two rounds at Harvard. September third also happens to be the deadline for Wharton. So in this episode of business casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Maria Wickvilla and Caroline Diarte Edwards. We’re going to talk about the do’s and don’ts as you get ready to hit that submit button on your application. What should you be doing and what should you not be doing in the final week to two weeks before these deadlines start popping up like dominoes and falling down. Stanford’s round one deadline, incidentally, is a little bit later, September ninth. Kellogg is on the 10th, along with Yale, Berkeley on the 11th, Duke on the 14th, September 15th for NYU Stern, and Chicago Booth, September 16th. So these deadlines will come hard and fast after that first one at Harvard. Caroline, what are your dues for these last few days before you hit submit?

[00:01:23] – Caroline

Well, one important thing is to check in with your recommenders and make sure that they are on track and perhaps they’ve submitted already. And if not, then hopefully they’re submitting over the next few days because you don’t want them to leave everything to the last minute. You shouldn’t leave your own application to the last minute. You also don’t want the recommenders to leave things to the last minute. So check in with them, that they’re on track, see if they’ve made progress, if they have any questions about it. Hopefully, by this point, you have had a chance to sit down with them and brief them on your goals while you’re doing the MBA, discuss some the key messages that you would like them to get across so that what they’re saying about you is complementary with your own application and what you’re saying about your strengths and what you bring to the program is reinforced by them. If they haven’t yet worked on those recommendations, then it may be a good opportunity to reasserate some of those points and go over it with them and just support them through the process. So you should definitely be very proactive in holding the hand of your recommenders through this process.

[00:02:31] – John

Typically, Caroline, recommendations need to be filed when in terms of your application deadline?

[00:02:38] – Caroline

Well, they should be in by the application deadline. Sometimes schools can be a little bit be giving, and they’ll accept recommendations that come in a few days later. But that’s not an ideal situation, and you don’t want to be scrambling and stressed because you haven’t got confirmation that your recommendations are in. There’s no guarantee that schools will accept items that are received after that deadline. I very much encourage candidates to mobilize their recommenders to get everything submitted well ahead of the deadline if possible.

[00:03:10] – John

Right. Very good advice. Maria, what would you say is a definition What can it do right now?

[00:03:17] – Maria

Yeah, definitely create your application account and log into those applications and start filling out the forms. I think for a lot of people before they embark upon this process, they look I look at the application from the outside and they say, Okay, I’m going to need to write these essays. I’m going to need recommendations. I’m going to need a resume. Cool. I’ll wait till the day of the application, and that’s when I’ll log in, and I’ll upload those documents, and I’ll hit submit. And sometimes people are shocked to see that there are pages and pages and pages of information that you have to fill out. A lot of it isn’t rocket science. It’s frequently information like, What are your citizenship? Which countries are you citizen of? What languages do you speak in? At what level? What are your parents? All this different information. But it is time consuming to fill all of that out. And often people will be in a hurry because they won’t do it in advance. And then they’ll make a careless mistake that then they’ll realize to their horror, a day or two later, they revisit the application with a clearer head, And they realize, oh, my gosh, I put my monthly compensation as my annual compensation or vice versa.

[00:04:21] – Maria

Or once I had someone who had put their compensation in Indian Rupees instead of US dollars, which, of course, was a pretty A pretty big mistake. And so there’s a lot of room for different typos, especially because different schools will have slightly different. They all ask in general the same things, but they have slightly different maybe character counts. So one school will give you, I don’t know, 150 characters to talk about an extracurricular activity. In another school, we’ll give you 200 characters. Or some schools will say, well, we want your summer internship compensation to be reported monthly, or we want it for the whole summer, or we want it for the… There’s all these little minutiae in slight differences in nuances in what the schools ask. It’s so easy to make a mistake. So right now, and especially if you’re stressed out about your essays, this is a great mental palate cleanser. Take a break, log into those forms, start filling them out, and then step away from them for a few days. And this is true for any aspect of your application. Step away from it for a few days, and then come back to it with a clear head and a calm mind.

[00:05:24] – Maria

And then you’ll be surprised that you’ll catch the fact like, oh, in my optional essay, I referenced the wrong school. Or, Oops, it said to only put this many… It said to not put my summer employment from college under the employer section, and I did, or vice versa. It told me to put my summer employers, and I didn’t. Those little details, you would be surprised. And it’s funny, in applicant lab, I have this warning of, Don’t be the person who accidentally does this. And I get emails later after the deadline of, Maria, you’re going to kill me, but I’m the person that you warned about in the lab. I just I realized in my heart that I’m that person. And so then we try to talk about damage control after that. But anyway, just trust me on this. Start logging in, fill out those little forms, and double-check them, please.

[00:06:11] – John

Absolutely. Caroline, another tip from you?

[00:06:15] – Caroline

Sure. Yeah, those forms are super important. I would also suggest at this stage… So hopefully the candidate has worked on their essays, and the essays are in really good shape, and the resume as well. So hopefully at this point, they’re really putting the finishing touches to their application package. And so this is a good stage to take a step back, review the whole thing and think about how that all fits together. Because those different elements of the application should be like pieces of puzzle that fit together and build a picture of your candidacy. And there shouldn’t be a lot of duplication or a lot of repeated content. You need to think about how you’re building an overall picture of your key messages, your key sprints that you want to get across. So taking a step back and just reviewing the whole thing to get a sense for what is the overall picture that the file reader will get here. Because the file reader, of course, is not going to spend hours and hours. You have reading through the application. They’re going to skip through it pretty quickly. So you need to think about what is the high-level picture that they’re going to get of your candidacy.

[00:07:28] – Caroline

And it can It’s difficult to do if you have been spending a huge amount of time on your application at this point. It can be hard to see the wood for the trees. So what can help is taking a break, as Maria said, maybe take a couple of days away from your application and just park it, do something else, think about something else, and then come back to it with a refreshed mind, read the whole thing and see what strikes you. It can be useful as well to somebody else to review it and bring a fresh set of eyes and give you feedback on what strikes them, what comes across as the key messages, what’s coming across well, what is not coming across so well. This is a really good point It’s a good time to get that holistic picture and do some fine-tuning.

[00:08:20] – John

Now, Harvard, I think the actual deadline is noon on September third, Eastern Standard Time. Should you wait until just before soon to push the button? Should you push it well before? What’s your advice on that, Maria?

[00:08:36] – Maria

I guess you should not wait until 11: 59 and 59 seconds to hit submit. Some people will. I know they will, and they should not if they listen to this podcast. They will not make that mistake. Of course not. I remember in previous years, I don’t think that this is so much a problem recently, but there would be previous years where people would wait until 11: 59, hit submit, and then, Uh-oh, the servers have gone down because there’s thousands of people hitting submit all at the same time. And then that was a real mess to untangle. So yes, definitely submit, as ideally, several hours in advance if you can. But maybe even a day or two before, and just to avoid that last minute rush. To build upon something Caroline was saying, she said she brought up a really good point of the admissions officer is not going to spend the hours and hours and hours reading your application in detail with a little magnifying glass. They’re only going to spend some minutes on it. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind. And it’s also important to keep in mind that the admissions officer also doesn’t live in your world.

[00:09:42] – Maria

So when you mention anything in your application, go through and make sure that you’re not talking about any jargon from your field, that you’re not talking about some specific aspect of your employment that’s very obvious to you. So you and everyone at your office might know exactly what Project Olympus because it’s all you’ve thought about for the past two years. But an outside reader might not know. So keep in mind that that person doesn’t live in your world. And so try to put on that perspective of an outsider who doesn’t know you at all. I also agree with her point about trying to get an extra set of eyes on it. I would caution, though, to be very judicious about who those eyes belong to. I think a mistake that some people make at this phase is they then… They’re like, Okay, I’m almost done with my essays. I’m going to send out my essays to 15 people that I know. And that’s just too many cooks in the kitchen. And then all of a sudden, you’re going to get people, and many of them, they all mean well, 100 % of them mean well, but not a hundred % of them actually know what they’re talking about.

[00:10:48] – Maria

And so you’re going to suddenly start getting all this feedback from people who want to help you, but who might not be helping you, in fact. And then you’re going to be like, oh, my gosh, should I make these changes? Should I not make these changes? My dad said that I should do this, but my roommate said I should do that. And then you’re just going to get pulled in a million different directions. So if you do start to get lots of help, just stay true to whatever message you want to portray. At the end of the day, it’s your application, and it’s up to you to say to yourself, what do I think shows me in the strongest light if you are getting conflicting information? But yeah, maybe avoid that. Don’t spam a lot of people and ask them for advice, especially if they are themselves not super knowledgeable about this process because they might lead you astray without knowing it.

[00:11:35] – John

That’s a good not to do. And it makes great sense to me because your friends or even relatives or whatnot want to try to add value. Sometimes they’ll suggest things that aren’t really necessarily helpful just because they’re trying to help. Sometimes trying to help can just confuse you, create doubt in your own mind about whether you put your best foot forward. At some At some point, you just got to say, Hey, this is me. This is who this represents. I’m happy and I’m good with it, and I’m going to push that button. Now, what are other don’ts that we should be warning people about, Caroline?

[00:12:15] – Caroline

Sometimes at this stage, candidates start to get very stressed with the imminent deadline and second-guess themselves and start to overhaul their application and rewrite all of their essays after having worked on them, thought about them, refined them for many months. So I would say, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater at this stage. Don’t panic. And often those last minute rewrites are, at least in my experience, are not an improvement. So I would encourage candidates to stay calm, stay the course. If you’ve been working your application for some time and you’re nearly there, then probably you’ve put a great deal of thought into how you’re conveying your candidacy. And also remember that admissions is an art and not a science, and there is no one way to get it right. There’s different ways that you could approach essays. There’s different ways that you could put your best foot forward. So don’t overhaul everything unless things are really off. If you feel uncomfortable with something, if your gut feel is that you haven’t put your foot forward, or if you get some expert input that something is off in your application, then of course, it may be time to do an overhaul.

[00:13:40] – Caroline

But at this stage, that might mean possibly waiting until round two because it’s very difficult to rewrite an application and start from scratch and do it well within about a one week time frame.

[00:13:53] – John

Based on our last week’s podcast, where we discovered, because several of your clients brought it to your attention, the fact that Stanford had changed the rules on the acceptability of valid GMAT and GRE scores, I’m thinking it’s a good idea to reread the application page and the requirements just in case you miss something. Or just in case something changed in between the time that you downloaded the application and filled it out and now. Just that extra step might be helpful given any last minute change that admissions committee or official could have made in what they really want from you. Any last words, Maria?

[00:14:37] – Maria

I like Caroline’s last point about at a certain point, just stop second-guessing yourself. You’ve worked hard on this. Just go ahead and hit submit. I like her phrasing that it’s an art, not a science. A lot of the terminology that I tend to use is around optimal and suboptimal. So for example, I give advice, for example, don’t spend a lot of time in your HBS essay is talking about why HBS and all the classes I want to take it HBS, and I want to marry the case method. Don’t put that in there, is my opinion. And then someone’s like, well, if I put that in there, does that mean I’m getting rejected? I’m like, of course it doesn’t mean you’re getting rejected. These are not hard and fast rules, But there is a more optimal allocation of that word count and a less optimal allocation of that word count. But at a certain point, don’t worry about, oh, I have a semicolon versus a comma. Is this going to be the thing that gets me into Stanford. No, don’t worry. It’s the content. At the end of the day, it’s the content of what you have accomplished in your career, and in some cases, what you did as a leader in college.

[00:15:43] – Maria

The substance is what’s going to matter the most. The application helps in terms of how you convey that substance. Do you convey it in an optimal way? Do you convey it in a way that’s clear? But at a certain point, the admissions officer is not going to say, You know what? They really should have put a semicolon here, and that’s, forget it. That would have been a better way to write it, and that’s it, and they’re rejected. That’s not how this works. So at a certain point, just as long as you’re conveying your story in what you feel is an optimal way, just trust yourself and hit submit.

[00:16:18] – John

There you go. Hey, good luck to you if you’re applying in round one. I think we gave you a little really good last minute advice to make sure you put your best foot forward. So with the September third deadline for the Harvard Business School coming up, we hope our advice is helpful to you. We’ve got a lot of deadlines right after that one. Obviously, Wharton is September third as well. Incidentally, it’s also the round one deadline for Columbia’s August intake. And then you have on September fourth, Virginia Darden, along with Notre Dame. Michigan comes next on the eighth, along with Georgetown and Ohio State. Then on the ninth, another big one, Stanford. The 10th, Northwestern Kellogg, along with Yale and Johns Hopkins. On the 11th, it’s Berkeley. Duke comes in early action on September 14th. The next day, it’s NYU Stern. Then at Chicago on the 16th, Cornell on the 17th, Dartmouth on the 25th of September, MIT on the 29th of September. Duke for around for round one, as opposed to early action on September 30th. So lots of deadlines to pay attention to. And hopefully you’re not cramming and trying to meet the deadline up until the last minute.

[00:17:42] – John

Good luck. This is John Burr withry with Poets & Quads.

P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Dos & Don’ts Before Hitting Submit On Your MBA Application
ApplicantLab |
August 27, 2025

Video transcript, for you skimmers out there: 

I love the fact that they. Report on this metric, right? The salary percentage increase, I think is an incredibly valuable metric because there are so many business schools out there that are great for so many people. And at the end of the day, these programs are in fact able to do what a lot of business school applicants are hoping for.

They are in fact able to provide a real change in the trajectory of someone’s career. They are, in fact, able to help people leapfrog. Into a higher career stratum than they would’ve otherwise been able to be in. So from that perspective, I love the fact that the FT reports on the salary percentage increase.

So valuable. I think it helps, when sometimes I talk to people at the beginning of the business school journey, I will frequently hear something like, well, it’s M seven or bust, you know, it’s Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or bust.

And I’m often like, look, slow your roll, man. There are so many programs out there that are going to get you. They might not be the first ones that you think [00:01:00] of, but wow, does that even matter? I mean, whew. Look at some of these numbers. $170,000. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it’s one and a half times more than what you were making before business school.

I mean, wow. , That is life changing. , And these schools can really change people’s lives. And I think it’s important to have this metric available because I think it helps open people’s eyes. To, To be a little bit more open-minded. , And I think that’s wonderful.

Where my little quibble is. Is that I believe this is an important metric to report upon. However, I do not believe that it is a metric that should have significant amount of weight in the rankings because if we think about what is the purpose of a ranking, it is meant to be some sort of a representation of relative quality.

Now rankings. The entire concept of them is flawed the entire, for me, the entire concept of an ordinal ranking is ridiculous. Like school versus two versus four, versus seven versus six . You know, like, there, there’s sort of [00:02:00] these tiny miniature marginal differences. I think that school rankings should instead be in buckets.

Like, here is the top bucket, and then here is the also very good, but just underneath the top bucket, the next bucket. Um, but no one, no one listens to me. Uh, but so anyway, to the extent that a ranking. Is intended to be some sort of a measure of a program’s quality. I don’t think that this metric is one that should be included in the weighting.

Look, again, . Life-changing levels of improvements in salary. But when I look at, okay, so these were the top five programs by the salary percentage increase, but now when I look at it by the weighted salary, right, the top five US programs, by weighted salary, it’s not entirely accurate to say that.

Well, these programs, you start with people who have lower incoming salaries and they end up in the same place as the other programs. The numbers do not [00:03:00] really, , the numbers would tell a slightly different story. So if you look at the weighted salary a few years out for the top five programs by salary,

we’re talking about a $70,000 a year difference, roughly 240 a year versus 170 a year. That’s about a 40% difference, which I don’t think is a small, you know, if we were talking 5%, even 10%, I’d be like, yeah, 10%, that’s nothing. It’s, you know, nothing but 40% I do think is a pretty, I think it’s a pretty significant difference, uh, that is worth noting.

And so. Your point about like, well, they were letting in the people who were already on a, you know, if you were making, let’s see if we can, if we figure out, okay, so if we take this, these numbers, then we can sort of back into what’s an implied pre MBA salary, you know, that would indicate maybe something in the mid sixties before MBA versus, you know, one 10 something, [00:04:00] 1, 1 10, 1 15, for these other programs.

I get your argument. Your argument is like, look, these people were already clearly high achievers prior to business school, and so, mm-hmm. Is it not true then that the business school, like they would’ve continued to be high achievers And in fact, this is true, some of the most successful, financially successful people I know skipped business school altogether and they didn’t need it.

, However, I think GMAC often does, polls or surveys of MBA graduates, and I think the vast majority of them, at a minimum say that they’re glad that they went to business school, that they do feel that it was worth, their time. So. How much of this is,, nature versus nurture.

We, we will never know. , But I would gently push back on the fact that I, because these numbers essentially to the extent that they’re lower than say these numbers, it effectively penalizes thes e schools in this ranking. And for that reason, I don’t think that it should be part of the ranking because you’re penalizing a school for letting in more successful people.

But there’s a benefit. [00:05:00] To attending. Like, first of all, if you are a more successful person, think of the opportunity cost that you’re giving up. So the fact that these schools are able to lure away people to give up two years of their salary, in order to go to business school in the first place, I think is a pretty good indicator of the desirability or the perceived desirability of those programs.

Also, I do think that there is merit to thinking about like, who are my peers going to be in a business school? and. If a school is attracting people who were more successful prior to business school, I actually think that that is an indicator of the quality of the school, not only because it shows the people that are willing to give up those two years of salary, but also think about who the peer group is once someone is in the school.

Right? That means that if you are attending one of these schools. This percentage isn’t as high, but you’re surrounded by people who, prior to business school, were already achieving on a different level. And also after they graduate, they continue to achieve on a different level. True. The slope is not as sharp.

Right. But the.

[00:06:00] Result is a larger number. So I think that this implies that perhaps at the school itself, you might be surrounded by people who are driven. some people might say more competitive, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but people who are more driven and also after they graduate, they continue to be driven.

And so I think that also implies something pretty powerful about the ultimate benefit of the network because business school isn’t just the two years you go there and it’s not just that first job you get out of school or that third job you have five years out of school.

it’s also who’s your network gonna be and, and who are you gonna call 10, 15, 20 years after graduation? To invest in your company or to partner with your company or to start a company with. so I do think that there is value to attending a school and to have your peers during school and after school be people who were, for lack of a better term, high performers.

[00:07:00] I don’t think that this should be punished because I do think that this does yield a better business school. Experience and a better result in the long term. And so my quibble, again, I love this metric. I think this is an amazing metric to provide, but my quibble is that this should not be given honestly, any weight at all, and certainly not the high level of weight that it’s given, because again, you’re punishing the schools that, you know, you’re basically indicating that I, what I would say is an indication of quality.

An indirect indication of quality, but an indication of quality all the same. You’re basically punishing the schools that have sort of higher quality, quote unquote, coming in. And, and that to me is. Counterintuitive and kind of wrong. And so that’s why I continue to think that this should not be, uh, reported upon.

Absolutely. Tell us. It’s important. I think it’s great to know. I love using this information, but I don’t think it should be used in terms of like, let’s figure out which programs are the , [00:08:00] quote unquote highest quality programs. But what do you think? What did I miss? let me know. Thanks.

ApplicantLab

New around here? ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!