Wire Taps 252—South African candidate, strong numbers. Nigerian candidate, works in London. Higher-ed candidate, may seek impact investing role.

This week's episode of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast begins with a peek at the upcoming deadlines for this week, which includes Michigan / Ross, Chicago / Booth, Berkeley / Haas and Cornell / Johnson; interview invites are also scheduled for Duke / Fuqua and IESE. Graham then makes a plea for a new survey we have published which asks about brand perceptions for each of the top programs. More details are here: https://bit.ly/mbabrands Amazon gift cards are available to some respondents! Graham also highlighted the new class profiles for Harvard, Haas, and Dartmouth / Tuck. Overall, the profiles look very decent, but it’s clear application volumes are down about 15% across most top tier programs. Haas reduced its class size this season, and this might be a consequence of that drop. This week's episode also includes a discussion about the recent Bloomberg MBA ranking, which led to a discussion on the merits of Clear Admit's own tiered ranking methodology. Graham then noted the newly published Real Humans pieces for Fuqua and Columbia, as well as the Adcom Q&As for Georgia / Terry and Washington / Olin. Graham also highlighted the essay workshop series; last Wednesday’s event had over 400 MBA applicants in attendance, this Wednesday the participating MBA programs are Columbia, Duke / Fuqua, CMU / Tepper, Texas / Austin and UNC / Kenan Flagler. Signups are here: https://bit.ly/clearadmitfall As always, our WireTaps portion of the show tackles three real candidate profile reviews, taken from ApplyWire entries on the site: First up, Alex has selected a candidate from South Africa with super numbers and a long term goal to return to the region, which both Graham and Alex like. Their work experience is a little on the shorter side (less than 3 years) but your hosts think there’s a lot of potential for targeting the top tier programs. This week's second candidate is originally from Nigeria and is working in London in an auditing capacity. Alex and Graham discuss the reasons why some speculate that auditing and accounting is not seen in the same light as strategy consulting and other more strategy-focused careers. This candidate plan to retake the GRE (current score of 321) and split their applications between rounds 1 and 2. Our third candidate this week is from higher-ed fundraising and development, and has already completed MBA Math (to make up for a slightly lower GPA) while targeting a high GRE. His goals are very interesting, and might well be a strong candidate for top programs. This episode was recorded in Paris, France and Cornwall, England. It was produced and engineered by Dennis Crowley in West Philadelphia. Thanks for listening to the show week and and week out - we truly appreciate it! Please note that you can reach out to your hosts by emailing info@clearadmit.com at any time. We love hearing from you!