“It matters what you consider a safety school,” says Fortuna’s Judith Silverman Hodara, former head of Admissions at Wharton. “I had client who got into Booth, and his bosses told him he should hold out for HBS and GSB. Given his profile, I advised him to take Booth’s offer. Why? In all honesty, he would never really know what had kept him out of GSB and HBS, and, as they say, a bird in hand in this case was well worth it.”
“It’s different, of course, if you didn’t give it your best effort or suspect your application wasn’t good enough,” says Judith. “Maybe you can concede that an additional year of work or leadership experience could make a difference. Or you might feel you got into your safety school too easily, and that it’s not as worthy because you didn’t have to struggle.”
While each situation is distinct, Judith advises reflection on the following key questions:
- Will your second-choice programme give you what you need and want in terms of career progressions, network and community?
- Will you always be thinking you should be somewhere else?
- Do you think what you communicated or wrote was found lacking, as opposed to the more quant-driven factors in admission?
- Is the ROI of taking the offer you currently have better or worse than the ROI of a possibly unknown better offer, with no guarantee?
- What are the pros and cons of taking on another year of the MBA application process – another year delaying your career track progression and another year with more experience? (Note: delaying isn’t always strategic for schools favouring candidates earlier in their careers)
- While re-applicants are certainly encouraged and welcomed, how will you meaningfully enhance your story in the coming year? What will have changed since you last applied?
- Are you willing to re-examine everything?
“At the end of the day, I like to tell candidates to flip a coin on the answer – not to do what the coin says, but gut-check how you feel about the outcome,” Judith says. “This can tell you a lot about how to proceed.”
