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Business Schools Turning to Technology in Admissions Process
It's been about five years since the University of Iowa's Tippie School of Management became the first notable business school to give applicants the option to tweet their way in. The move was a popular one with applicants, who were allowed to chose between a traditional admission essay or a 140-character sound byte; the vast majority chose the tweet.
Since then, the liberal use of technology in admissions has been exploited most deftly by graduate business schools. Back in 2011, Tippie turned to the tweet in an effort to break a cycle of stale admission essays. Business schools are famous for requiring several essays of varying lengths. But there is almost always a primary essay with a limit of 500-1000 words. A tweet would be shorter than the first two sentences of this paragraph (which is 178 characters). Students lapped it up.
In 2016, it's difficult to find a business school that doesn't either encourage or require technology as an admission component. Georgetown now requires a one-minute introductory video from each candidate. Kellogg has dispensed with some of the writing components and now requires three video essays. Tippie, for its part, now offers an option that is potentially limitless; there is no length or file size limitation and buy viagra online blog the "admission question" may be addressed via video, social media, Power Point presentation, blog post, or other. As Tippie puts it "all options are on the table".
Full disclosure: I'm not a Millennial or even Generation Y. And while I'm pretty tech-savvy, video essays would make me sweat-something that speaks volumes about the demographic that b-schools are courting. At the very least, videos are a shortcut around in-person interviews. They give charismatic students an opportunity to shine. Students with weaker "written records" may be able to use visual media to knock an application out of the park.
In any event, the times, they are a-changin', and business schools are paving the way.
Labels: Business Schools Turning to Technology in Admissions Process
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