Graduate School

Waitlists stink, don't they? I'm receiving a lot of emails right now from applicants agonizing about their waitlists. No matter what kind of program you've applied to -- college, business school, law school, public health, doesn't matter -- the process works more or less the same. Here's the drill:

You're on a waitlist because something about your file made you less than an easy decision to admit.

Maybe it's because one of your numbers is too low.

Maybe it's because you are a total stud and the school assumes you'll go somewhere higher up the food chain. Why risk taking a hit to its yield rate by wasting an offer on you?

Maybe it's because your numbers are great but your essay is subliterate.

Maybe one of your recommenders sandbagged you.

Maybe you flubbed your interview.

Maybe you're a perfectly fine applicant but your competition is really, really tough this year.

There could be a million reasons why you're on a waitlist. Or in a cryptic "hold" category. Or a cryptic... something. Example:

Dear Anna,

First, thank you so much! I applied to law school last Fall and consulted your book religiously. It's hard for me to describe how much your guide helped me through my application process -- not least in helping me avoid a number of things I now recognize to be application pitfalls. As a result, I've been admitted to 9 of the 12 law schools to which I applied, all but one in the top 14. I've recommended your book to everyone I know who's interested in applying to law school.

But now I find myself in a position that your book doesn't seem to address directly. I've been but on hold at two schools (Harvard and the University of Chicago). I've also received a cryptic email from a third (Yale) that said I would either be admitted or waitlisted in the coming weeks.

My roommate is in the same situation with Columbia, and I know a number of other applicants that are currently in the "on hold" limbo at other schools. Being put "on hold" seems fairly common, but no one seems to know the best course of action in this scenario. Should I start sending additional materials? Should I call the HLS admissions office and tell them Harvard is my first choice? I'm worried that by doing nothing I'll be wasting a huge opportunity.

Thanks again for all your guidance so far. Any advice you could offer would a great reassurance.

First, you should know that at this point in the season, being waitlisted, being "on hold," and not having heard anything at all are more or less the same for practical purposes.

Schools are waiting to see how things shake out after their first deposits come in. Then they do a head count, see if they are under- or over subscribed, see what their medians and quartiles look like, make sure they have enough minorities, etc. etc. -- all the stuff they get paid to worry about. Inevitably, there's some tweaking they have to do, and that tweaking continues for the rest of the summer, even into orientation. They spend the rest of the summer feverishly engineering their incoming class.

Why so long? Because in a world of the common app, gazillions of applications per person, and multiple deposits (with some variation, but not much, from program to program), admissions officers really can't get a true headcount just by looking at deposits. Deposits signify nothing about your true intention to attend, which is the main reason schools now maintain waitlists that are absurdly deep.

And as soon as someone gets off a waitlist somewhere else, and withdraws from the schools to which he has already sent deposits, the Big Mad Shuffle begins. It's like musical chairs. And it also means that admissions officers themselves have no earthly idea how the waitlist is going to unfold. There are even people who put down deposits and then just fail to show up at orientation. You might get that waitlist call after you've moved into student housing and bought your books and started playing stupid getting-to-know-you icebreaker and team-building games with your new classmates.

The bottom line is that the waitlist process is completely unpredictable for everyone involved. If admissions officers seem cryptic, it's because they don't know how things are going to develop any more than you do.

Which is why I scratch my head a bit when I get other emails from people saying, "I just sent my waitlist stuff in two weeks ago, and I still haven't heard anything, and OMG it's already so late, why haven't I heard anything yet???" It's not late in the process at all. By waitlist standards, it's early. Really, really early.

So, what to do when you find yourself in that situation? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the admissions officer. You're a mere mortal, and mere mortals are a little bit lazy, right? So if you find yourself having to fill a spot, and you're looking at a waitlist that's hundreds deep, do you want to have to call 300 people to find that one person who is willing to change his plans at the very last second? Nope. You'd rather call your mental shortlist of the 5 or 10 people who you think are the most likely to say "yes" when you call. You'll still have certain gaps to fill -- numbers you need, demographics you need, all that stuff over which applicants have no control anyway -- but fundamentally, you also care very much about how quickly you can fill that spot, and applicants do have some control over that.

What that means for you, the applicant: if you find yourself waitlisted, "on hold," or completely ignored by the powers that be at this point in the admissions season, you want to make crystal clear to your school of choice that you would be the guy who says "yes." You do that by writing them and telling them without any ambiguity that you remain very, very interested, and that you would accept an offer if you received one. You can make that promise to only one school, so be strategic about it, and be honest with yourself. (And if you know in your heart that you wouldn't say "yes" if that call came around, be a good citizen and take yourself off the waitlist. You'll make someone else very happy.) The other schools on your shortlist should get the strong expression of continued interest, without the promise to accept an offer.

Stay in touch with your shortlist of schools about once a month. That's often enough to stay on their radar screens without looking like a pest or a stalker. Those letters will feel very repetitive, and that's OK. If you have updates to share in those communications, so much the better, but don't feel as if you have to manufacture lame updates if all you have to say is... "I'm still really interested."

If your schedule and budget permit, visit the school. Say hello. Introduce yourself to the nice people at the front desk. Hand deliver your LOCI (letter of continued interest). Do not pitch a tent in the quad or call people at home or do anything stupid.

What doesn't work, in my experience?

• Extra letters of recommendation. Rec letters have such questionable value to begin with; sending more of them doesn't add a whole lot more value, although I would make an exception for MBA applications, where the recs really do matter.
• Extra essays, unless (1) additional essays are invited (like Chicago Law School's hold essay), or (2) you have not yet sent a very tailored, very credible "here's why I love your school!" essay as part of your original application.

Keeping my fingers crossed for you you... I know the wait is excruciating.

The topic of graduate school admissions can pop up in the most unexpected places. I'm a fan of Salon.com, and one of their advice columnists (Cary Tennis) recently published a letter from a 20-year-old called "I'm wasting my semester abroad watching TV in my apartment." Subtitle: "Could I really be blowing the definitive period of my college life?" Tennis's advice in this column is spot-on: humane, productive, sympathetic. He gets it. I love him. I want to send him flowers.

I'm very familiar with the reader's plight, because it's a common one for college students and recent graduates. College students are encouraged to seize opportunities to stretch, but then they find that stretching experiences are inherently difficult and uncomfortable and unfamiliar. This article gives great advice about how to get unstuck in those situations.

I've decided that I need to be posting more of the discussions I have (largely by email) over the course of the day. I yak all day long about things that might be of interest to readers of the Ivey Files, and I need to get over the fact that reproducing things I've written in an email will by necessity offer up writing that is less than polished (although Lord knows that's true for blog postings as well).

So, just today, I was chatting with some people who were commenting on the habit of finance employers to ask job applicants for their SAT scores (as well as LSAT or GMAT scores, as the case may be). On the one hand, we laughed our butts off -- we're in our mid-thirties and can't imagine that a test we took back in, oh, 1989 (!!) could possibly say anything meaningful about us. Can SAT scores say anything meaningful about someone who just graduated from college? Maybe yes, maybe no. Some argued that SAT scores do say something about raw horsepower under the hood, while others argued that good SAT scores just prove you're good at taking the SATs. Either way, to people who aren't routinely dealing with recruiting practices in the the finance world, it seems weird to ask for the scores.

However, if employers are asking for the scores, then employers obviously see some value in that information, and I'm very curious where that value comes from.

From one of my emails:This is, I suspect, also a reflection of the fact that college grades, and college transcripts  as a whole, don't really mean squat [to the interviewer].Unless you have very inside-baseball *and* recent knowledge of a school's grading practices, as well as knowledge of the grading practices and substantive difficulty of individual courses and professors, transcripts really mean nothing. When I look at a transcript, I have no idea whether PHYS 325 is string theory or "Physics for Poets" (as the gut physics class was called at Columbia in my day). And when I was still on the job market, I was bummed that my law school transcript didn't say who taught my Financial Accounting class at the business school -- it was Roman Weil, and that actually means something to some people, but I never got the benefit of that on my transcript.

The uselessness of transcripts also leads to over-reliance on the name brand of the school to signal something about the applicant.We went on to discuss grade inflation more generally, and I recalled a Boston Globe article from the early 2000's about the fact that 91% of Harvard undergraduates had graduated with honors that year. (The rest of the ivies are pretty inflationary too, so I'm not just picking on Harvard, although it has seemed to be the worst offender.)

So I throw that out there, because transcripts are so unhelpful not just in the job hiring process, but also in the graduate school admissions process.  When applicants complain about the seeming over-reliance on standardized test scores, understand that most transcript are in fact very, very hard to interpret in any meaningful way.

The always excellent Penelope Trunk has a great article in today's (technically tomorrow's) Boston Globe about the best timeline for different graduate degrees. Check it out here.

A friend of the Ivey Files sends me this news story and asks whether MIT should drop in the rankings for admitting someone that stupid. I'll let you be the judge. Guess some people didn't learn from Adult Swim's little bomb scare here in Boston back in February. If my grandmother were around to read this story, she'd no doubt whip out one of her favorite sayings: "She's brilliant, but not very bright."

This will make for one doozie of a disclosure addendum if Ms. MIT (evocatively named Star Simpson) ever applies to grad school.

An admissions officer just sent me this link about at study showing that "the emotional distress of law students appears to significantly exceed that of medical students and at times approach that of psychiatric populations." Wowza.

I won't argue with their empirical findings, but I do question the underlying reason they offer:The problem with most law schools, the authors write, is that they place little emphasis on hiring faculty members with proven records of teaching excellence. Instead, they tend to “emphasize theoretical scholarship and the teaching of legal theory, and many hire and reward faculty primarily based on scholarly potential and production,” say the authors. Observers suggest, they add, “that such priorities and processes train students to ignore their own values and moral sense, undermine students’ sense of identity and self-confidence, and create cynicism.”That's the state of affairs at just about all the major research universities, all of which reward scholarship and theory above teaching and insist on moral relativism, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. If that causality holds true, then everyone coming out of Harvard or Columbia or Stanford would be just as much of a basketcase. So there must be something special about law school. I'm open to theories.

I'll throw this one out there: In my experience, the majority of law school students have absolutely no good reason to be there. I've heard over and over again from applicants how they have no idea what they want to do with themselves but expect to figure that out in law school. It doesn't matter how many times I tell them that's a really boneheaded plan (and so passive -- who wants to wait and see where the tide drops them off three years and six figures later?). Some of that angst and indecisiveness and failure to plan and path-of-least-resistance mentality must play itself out during law school (and certainly afterwards).

Mind you, I've worked with pre-med and med school folks as well, and there are lots of med school students who are there only because their parents pushed them into it. All the professions suffer from that problem to some degree, and perhaps it's worse with law school and med school.

Here's an interview I gave recently about helicopter parents to the Atlanta Journal Constitution ("Boomer Parents Hover over Careers of Offspring").

Great anecdotes in the article:

Shortly after one Emory University student was rejected for an internship at a prestigious Wall Street firm, the student's mother called Emory's career center: Could someone there get the firm to reconsider?

Never mind that the student had missed a sitdown session and canceled a phone interview with the company.

"Her mother got into full swing," said Tariq Shakoor, director of the career center. "She felt we should do more to get her daughter this internship."

A recent Georgia State University breakfast for MBA candidates drew 200 people, including two dozen parents who asked most of the questions, said Diane Fennig, GSU's director of graduate student services at the Robinson College of Business.

"I wouldn't have expected it at the graduate school level, but they're here."

I've heard similar stories, which I've written about here.

Here's a quiz to determine whether you've crossed the line into helicopter parenting:

You are a helicopter parent if you ...

• Drive your son to a job interview, then try to sit in on it.
• Call your daughter's prospective employer to find out the status of the job offer, reschedule or set up interviews, inquire about benefits, or follow up on why she didn't get the job.
• Show up at any of your son's student- or job-related events.
• Camp out in your daughter's dorm room during student orientation week.
• Accompany your son to the registrar's office and select his classes.
• Argue with the registrar about why your daughter can't take an 8 a.m. class.

It’s tough being a business school in the era of helicopter parents. How do you make leaders out of twenty-somethings who are still attached to mommy by an invisible umbilical cord?

Now that Admitted Students Weekends are behind us, administrators and professors around the country are wondering whether they admitted mom and dad by accident.

BusinessWeek reports on the overbearing parents of incoming MBA students who arrange housing for their kids, try to crash incoming student dinners, sit in on classes, and clash with campus administrators and professors trying to set some boundaries. And that’s after they’ve already butted in on the admissions process:

At Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, 75 students attended this past weekend's welcome event for admitted and confirmed students. Ten parents also came, said Brian Lohr, Mendoza's director of admissions.

. . .

A mother of a Boston University School of Management student asked the admissions office last year if she could attend an open house for admitted students in place of her child, says Chris Storer, BU's associate director of admissions. The school refused to let her attend the event, he says. "It's really designed for students to connect with each other and other admitted candidates," Storer adds. "It sort of defeats the purpose if we were to allow random parents to come."

. . .

Dawna Clarke, director of admissions at Dartmouth's Tuck
School of Business, recalls two recent cases where parents called her
office after learning their children didn't get into Tuck and proceeded
to complain about the school's decision. "I would say I think that the
applicants would be really mortified if they know how their parents had
handled it, and in both cases the parents didn't want the applicants to
know they had contacted us," Clarke says.

I’ve heard similar reports from law schools. One law school administrator I talked to this past week reported the following:

We had several students bring one or both parents to Admitted Students Weekend. I don't get it. Why would parents want to be here? Why would students tolerate their parents being here???

Parents now show up at orientation, call the Dean of Students to ask to have their kid's schedule changed ("my daughter simply can't have 8:30 classes"), call the Dean to complain about faculty, call the registrar to complain about grades, try to come to their students admissions interviews, call the Dean of Admissions about admissions decisions...

Don't get me wrong -- we love it when parents come to visit their enrolled students or when parents join their prospective students on a general admissions tour. I don't mind answering the parents' reasonable questions on those tours either. The ordinary parents ask questions about housing, financial aid, and safety, mostly. The ones I don't like are the ones who speak on behalf of their children at all times and never let the kid ask a question. And it's the ones who get involved with the day-to-day academic and social lives of students who are old enough to drive, vote, and drink who baffle me.

From a thirty-something law school professor:

I was on a faculty panel during admitted students weekend, and I noticed a kid in the audience flanked by his parents. He had a look of absolute panic on his face the entire time. I felt really bad for him.

And from as a thirty-something law firm partner:

Talk about an automatic ding -- if you need Mommy to fight your battles, I don't think much of your chances going up against the plaintiffs' bar.

The problem is, Generation Y is a good 80 million strong, and employers are going to have to deal with helicopter parents in the workplace whether they like it or not.

I’ve written before about Gen Y’s narcissism (that description comes from a recent study), how parents and the admissions process feed that narcissism, and how employers can best manage Gen Y. My 15 tips for motivating Gen Y in the workplace have been getting a lot of feedback -- most recently a request to distribute the article at a conference of law firms discussing retention problems.

Now comes an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the limitless praise that Gen Y expects at work (see my tip #5), and the “praise consultants” companies are hiring to help them dole it out.

Childhood in recent decades has been defined by such stroking -- by parents who see their job as building self-esteem, by soccer coaches who give every player a trophy, by schools that used to name one "student of the month" and these days name 40.

Now, as this greatest generation grows up, the culture of praise is reaching deeply into the adult world. Bosses, professors and mates are feeling the need to lavish praise on young adults, particularly twentysomethings, or else see them wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit.

Employers are dishing out kudos to workers for little more than showing up. Corporations including Lands' End and Bank of America are hiring consultants to teach managers how to compliment employees using email, prize packages and public displays of appreciation. The 1,000-employee Scooter Store Inc., a power-wheelchair and scooter firm in New Braunfels, Texas, has a staff "celebrations assistant" whose job it is to throw confetti -- 25 pounds a week -- at employees. She also passes out 100 to 500 celebratory helium balloons a week. The Container Store Inc. estimates that one of its 4,000 employees receives praise every 20 seconds, through such efforts as its "Celebration Voice Mailboxes."

. . .

Sixty-year-old David Foster, a partner at Washington, D.C., law firm Miller & Chevalier, is making greater efforts to compliment young associates -- to tell them they're talented, hard-working and valued. It's not a natural impulse for him. When he was a young lawyer, he says, "If you weren't getting yelled at, you felt like that was praise."

But at a retreat a couple of years ago, the firm's 120 lawyers reached an understanding. Younger associates complained that they were frustrated; after working hard on a brief and handing it in, they'd receive no praise. The partners promised to improve "intergenerational communication." Mr. Foster says he feels for younger associates, given their upbringings. "When they're not getting feedback, it makes them very nervous." [See tip #1.]

. . .

At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, marketing consultant Steve Smolinsky teaches students in their late 20s who've left the corporate world to get M.B.A. degrees. He and his colleagues feel handcuffed by the language of self-esteem, he says. "You have to tell students, 'It's not as good as you can do. You're really smart, and can do better.'"

Mr. Smolinsky enjoys giving praise when it's warranted, he says, "but there needs to be a flip side. When people are lousy, they need to be told that." He notices that his students often disregard his harsher comments. "They'll say, 'Yeah, well...' I don't believe they really hear it."

My advice to employers? Here.

My advice to twenty-somethings? Go against the herd. You’ll distinguish yourself in the admissions process, in school, in the hiring process, and on the job if you present yourself as an independent, mature adult and leave mommy and daddy at home.

My advice to parents? Stop infantilizing your adult children, and stop living through them vicariously. (I wonder if there such a thing as narcissism by proxy?) You are doing them no favors by depriving them of important life skills and experiences, and you’re making them look like incapable, pampered toddlers in front of people they’re trying to impress. Harsh, but true.

More details here on the recent torture of a Columbia grad student.

This is a good time to re-recommend The Gift of Fear. From amazon.com:Each hour, 75 women are raped in the United States, and every few seconds, a woman is beaten. Each day, 400 Americans suffer shooting injuries, and another 1,100 face criminals armed with guns. Author Gavin de Becker says victims of violent behavior usually feel a sense of fear before any threat or violence takes place. They may distrust the fear, or it may impel them to some action that saves their lives. A leading expert on predicting violent behavior, de Becker believes we can all learn to recognize these signals of the "universal code of violence," and use them as tools to help us survive. The book teaches how to identify the warning signals of a potential attacker and recommends strategies for dealing with the problem before it becomes life threatening. The case studies are gripping and suspenseful, and include tactics for dealing with similar situations.

People don't just "snap" and become violent, says de Becker, whose clients include federal government agencies, celebrities, police departments, and shelters for battered women. "There is a process as observable, and often as predictable, as water coming to a boil." Learning to predict violence is the cornerstone to preventing it. De Becker is a master of the psychology of violence, and his advice may save your life.

More sad news.Tied up and left to die in a burning apartment, a Columbia student used the blaze set by her sadistic rapist to free herself, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday.

"It appears she was able to escape as a result of the fire," Kelly said. "She was tied, and the flame was used by her to break the bond."

The 23-year-old woman, identified by sources as a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, endured 19 hours of rape and torture at the hands of a sick creep in her Hamilton Heights apartment Friday night.

In what Kelly called a "particularly vicious" assault, the fiend tied his victim to a bed, cut her, raped her, burned her with scalding water and chemicals - and then set the woman's futon on fire to cover up the crime, police said.

He was so brutal he slit her eyelids, Kelly said.

The student used the flames to free herself and fled her fifth-floor apartment with her hands still bound to each other to get help from a neighbor, officials said.

The woman remains hospitalized in serious but stable condition.Full story here.