How to get into HBS after undergrad? (if it is actually possible)

pete_gre
Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:05:49 +0000

"Pete, in my experience summer work won’t do it. There has got to be something that truly seperates you from the crowd they want to wait. That will typically mean having managed people and major budgets, something unlikely to happen if your work is confined to summers. They are looking for sustained success.

Why do you not want to work for a few years?"

^don’t know how to put that in a quotation box…

I can’t stress how much I hate the idea of taking a career break, particularly a two year one. I know some will say that I’ll welcome the break and it’ll be fun etc., but for me it really won’t be.

As for the work experience, I’m actually getting a student entrepreneurship project going, which I’m hopeing will be quite (very?) successful. Thanks to the structure of my degree I can work on it almost uninterrupted from Wednesday to Sunday (with a few hours of private study of course) and only go to class on Monday and Tuesday (that might sound strange for you, but in my country its very possible to do that and get very good grades if you work hard). So because of the amount of time I’m able to put into it I’m hoping that we can grow pretty large and have something serious to show for it. Managing people and budgets as you put it would certainly come into that.

Sakky and cbreeze, these examples you give of people who aren’t anything special and still got in immediately after undergrad - I’m assuming this is only possible if you’ve got some sort of amazing connections which I don’t have?