My Advice on Business School Apps for Veterans

Why I Wrote This

• In the last 2.5 years, I think I’ve personally advised 60–80 military applicants on their business school applications. I was the VP-Admissions for Haas’s Veterans Club, which put me in a unique position to talk to a lot of veterans about their military to civilian transitions via B school (applicants to Haas as well as several other top B schools)
• This post captures all of the major pieces of advice that I give military applicants and some of the places where I’ve seen applicants falter a bit.
• My opinions don’t represent my alma mater, they are my personal opinions and practical observations.
• I think that paying a “consultant” thousands of dollars to help you with admissions is patently absurd. Invest the time to learn and develop yourself and you’ll be a better applicant. All the information you need is either open-sourced or available by making human connections (CALLING people). Admissions consulting is a business predicated on fear of the unknown; educate yourself with what’s out there and spare the cost.
• Some of this may be a no-brainer, but for many military applicants (myself included), the norms and customs of interviews and civilian life in general are surprising.

General Things to consider as a military applicant

• If I gave you a list of the military accomplishments of a Navy Jet Pilot, a Marine Corps Infantry Officer, an Air Force Intel Officer, a Submariner, a Ranger, a SEAL and an Army Combat Engineer, could you rank them? Do you really know what the difference is between the awards that a soldier gets versus a pilot? Do you know what the significance is of a Navy junior officer qualifying (insert qual here) after (insert time frame here) means? Doesn’t every military report/evaluation that you get make you sound like you’re the greatest thing on Earth and God’s gift to the Navy/Army/(Insert branch here)? The point I’m getting at is that it’s really hard to rank and stack military applicants based on their military accomplishments or background alone. It’s hard for a military veteran to do it, why do you think a civilian in B school admissions would do any better? You should think of your whole application as an exercise in selling yourself and the unique qualities you have.
• (This is where Admissions might get angry at me). I don’t think that any good B school has a quota or specific target for the number of military applicants that it will admit to a class. I think schools have an idea of the caliber of applicant that they can “yield” (get to accept an offer) at their school, and they will extend offers to candidates that can meet or exceed that bar. Having said that, I don’t think that top B schools really stray too far from around 5%-7% military veterans in their entering classes. So…it’s not a quota, but practically speaking, this seems to be a benchmark/industry standard for a top school’s incoming class.
• Connect the Dots. It’s okay to not know what you want to after B school. I’m still figuring out my career path, and so are most people in the world. But you don’t want to convey this uncertainty in any part of your application. Pick something that interests you, and try to tailor your application around that vision. Be confident! Don’t game the system here; if you try to sell a career vision that you don’t believe in then that will come through in your application.
• Don’t sell yourself short. If you’re a military applicant, chances are that you’ve done amazing things and that you’ve got a good story to tell. Don’t self-select out of an application because your GPA/GMAT are a little bit below average for that school. Also, don’t be scared to put something really bold in your application for a career vision.

Test Scores/GPA

• There’s nothing you can do about an undergrad GPA, so if it’s low or average then you need to crush the GMAT. If you think you could do better with another shot, you should err towards retaking the test. If you had a great GPA (>3.8) and an average GMAT, maybe not. If you’re on shore duty, you have no excuse to not study intensively and retake the GMAT if in doubt.
• Look at the GPA and GMAT scores of the entering classes of the schools you hope to enter. There are exceptions/people that get into schools with lower scores, but these should be the minimum targets for you to be competitive. Don’t bank on getting in by being in the 25th percentile of applicants.
• I think GMAT/GPA is the strongest way to differentiate yourself as a military applicant. It’s the clearest way to show aptitude in an academic environment and intellectual curiosity, stand out from other military applicants, and put yourself on some kind of common ground with non-military applicants.
• Practically speaking, at some point with the GMAT, you’ll learn how to “game” the test a little bit. But that will only come out of practicing with real tests. If you’re lacking time (like most military applicants out at sea or in the field), just find a period of time where you can take practice tests. For me, I found a 6 week period in the Navy where I was not going to sea and not working up to a deployment. Every weekend, I would do one official, timed practice GMAT test and on the last week I took the actual exam (take your pick of test prep providers, I used Manhattan GMAT). Some people might need more focused study, so only you know what’s best for you, but I found this to be the only efficient way for me to do this while on sea duty.

Recommendations

• If given enough lead time, and assuming you’re okay at your job in the service, I believe that most senior military officers will do a decent job with writing a rec for you. If your boss is an O-5/O-6, You aren’t going to be the first person that asks him/her for a recommendation. Also, it’s not such a coincidence that the people that you ask for recommendations are usually people that want you to do well outside of the military as well — they’ll probably be glad to help if you’re confident in your decision to leave the service and you’ve been a good performer.
• Some schools (i.e. Stanford) actually publish guidance for recommenders. What’s to say you can’t channel that advice to your recommenders for other schools? I just took that school’s advice and told the recommenders for all potential schools to read it.

Having said that, senior military officers are busy people and there are some tactical things you can do:

• Give your recommenders a 1–2 page “brag sheet” of accomplishments or anecdotes of what you’ve done in your time in service. Since CO/XOs may not have seen your entire body of work, providing that data will be helpful for them in writing letters
• I would try to give a minimum of 6 weeks notice before your application is due. You will want to give them a heads up 3 to 4 weeks and 1 week ahead of time.
• You can’t write your own letters of recommendation, but you can at least streamline the process and play secretary for a few weeks.

Essays

Schools sometimes like to get cute with their essays. Before you get cute in response, be able to answer the following questions:

• Why do I want this MBA degree right now?
• Why do I want it from this school?
• What career path will I choose in the near-term and long-term after graduating from this school?

If your essays don’t answer those questions above, rewrite them so that they somehow address those questions.

• Tailor your essays for each school. Don’t try to recycle essays, and answer the questions in each school’s prompts.
• Give yourself time for 2–3 civilians to review your essays, and 2–3 military veterans that have transitioned out of the military. Pick any civilian you respect, preferably someone else with an MBA. The civilians will help you identify jargon in your essays. The post-transition military veterans will help you transform jargon/military experiences into “business” language.

Interview

• I’ve never heard of a school doing a case interview or interview with hypothetical questions in them. It’s a “get to know you” process, not a problem-solving assessment.
• I think there’s kind of an expectation that military applicants have good leadership/relationship management stories. Military officers take leadership more seriously than any other profession, so you should already be trained in thinking that way.
• Have your “cool stories” ready to go. Every military applicant should have 3–5 really profound experiences from your service, good or bad. These aren’t necessarily your badass war stories or sea stories, these should be the things that stand out to you the most as a leader. Don’t worry about your story being boring or mundane, I guarantee that almost any story from your military experience will be more interesting and fun to hear than work stories from people whose backgrounds are in banking/consulting/traditional feeders.
• For each of those experiences, practice telling the stories in such a way that you can tell the whole thing in 2–2.5 minutes. At a bare minimum, answer with:
• A summary of the situation or problem
• What did I do?
• What did I learn from it?

How does it tie back to the question that was just asked?

• Practice your stories with civilians so you can take out the military jargon from the stories.

In your interviews, you’ll probably be given the opportunity to answer questions with 2–3 of those stories or forms of those stories. You’ll be glad that you’ve thought about this ahead of time.

• You will be given the opportunity to ask questions

If interviewing with a student, I recommend you ask him/her about their plans post-school and why. You could also ask if there were any “can’t miss” classes at the school and why they were so great.

My favorite last question to ask: In any interview, when things are closing, I will often try to ask something to the effect of “Is there anything else that you wanted to cover today or anything else in my background where you still have concerns?”. Some people see this type of question as being too aggressive or forthright, so you’ll have to read the situation a bit. I actually think for many interviewers it can be something of a relief, especially if there is any kind of specific set of criteria or a rubric that they need to answer post-interview. It’s also a chance to really help your case if there’s an area where they honestly have a concern.

Meeting people and “interviewing the school”

• It’s a must do to reach out to the current veterans club at any school where you are applying. All of them have contact emails, you should make it a point to learn about the school from a current student and plan to meet vets at the school if you visit campus. I can’t speak for other schools, but at Haas it was common for visiting veterans to crash on the couches of current vet students.
• You should think of the school application process as a two-way interview. At some point, you’re probably going to have to pick between schools. You want to have done your homework on each school before making a decision, so that you’re not making a choice based purely on financial aid or a ranking.

What to do if lacking inspiration

You should only put pen to paper if you’re feeling inspired. If you’re not in the zone, it will show in your work.

Sometimes it’s just hard to find inspiration, so I frequently advise people to think of a few options :

• Think of the proudest or coolest military experience you had. Did you do something really unique or outside of the box?
• Research alums — you probably aren’t sure what you want to do post B-school, or maybe you only have a rough idea. If you get on LinkedIn and poke around, I guarantee you can find at least 2–3 veteran alums from that school who are doing something that you find “cool” or “interesting”. You should read up on their backgrounds and see if it sparks any ideas for you.
• What do you do outside of your job? What interests you?
• Let’s say outside of work you like to work out a lot. Let’s say you also like to track your movements on a wearable device/tracker. Let’s say you like to read books like MoneyBall or The Signal and the Noise? Maybe you’ve noticed that there’s a particular sport or practice of yours that could be improved with technology? There are definitely vets working at the intersection of sports and technology.
• Let’s say you’re a SEAL and you’ve operated in a bunch of extreme outdoor environments. You also enjoy outdoor “gear” a lot (The North Face, Patagonia, etc.), and you believe in preserving outdoor spaces and using resources efficiently and sustainably? Maybe something like a testing/research and design center for textile manufacturing or product innovation is interesting. I know vets working in the outdoor industry doing this exact thing.
• Let’s say you got the career starter loan from USAA that many other service academy grads opt for. You invested most of it in mutual funds, but decided to take 10% of it to open a brokerage account and start to learn a little bit about trading/options/commodities/what have you. Do you read the The Economist religiously? I even know veterans that work at global macro hedge funds.

What I’m trying to get at is that often times the paths that veterans pursue don’t seem all that unusual after they look back at their own experiences and things that excited them before they went down that path. If you can connect the dots in your application that way, it will make your essays much smoother.

Really Bad Mistakes

• Don’t portray a negative attitude towards your military experience. Sometimes I was (very) frustrated as a naval officer with the bureaucracy and ineffectiveness I saw in the Navy. I think this sentiment is present inside almost every military applicant, but you shouldn’t ever bring that out in your interactions when it comes to admissions (even with other vets). You’d be amazed at the stories people tell me in their phone calls/e-mails sometimes.
• Don’t be wishy-washy about what you want to do after school. An applicant once (let’s call him “Dave”) told me that he didn’t want to tell the interviewer he wanted to pursue a specific career path because “that would be lying”, so he literally told his interviewer that he wanted to use the MBA experience to explore career options. Hardly anybody sticks to the exact path that they had envisioned when start school, and nobody is going to say “hey, you said you were going to do [X] in your essays, so you’d better do it!”. Needless to say, Dave didn’t get into the school of his choice — what he effectively told me and admissions was that he hadn’t done enough research on career paths. It’s not “lying” to outline a career path for yourself, it’s simply a matter of doing your “homework” and thinking hard about what you want to do at school before you get there. B School only lasts about 20 months and costs a lot of money, so you don’t want to come across as someone that will squander that short and intense period of time.
• Don’t try to “game the system”. Don’t say that you want to be a consultant because 30% of a school’s graduating class does that. Your essays, interviews, and whole application is going to be mediocre if you don’t actually believe in what you’re doing.

I hope that was useful!

• There’s obviously a lot more dimensions/nuances to this whole process, so please get away from the websites/reviews/magazines/blogs like this and talk to current students/alums to improve your odds of success!