One of the best-kept secrets of the admissions process is everything related to being waitlisted and the waitlist. The waitlist is a blind spot with very few data available. How many chances you have to get into the waitlist? How many people make it out of the waitlist? How to get out of it? What’s its purpose?

Most of the applicants I know have never thought much about being waitlisted. At least in my case, it looked like a remote scenario. You either get accepted or rejected. Big fear of being dinged! Great hopes on the big yes! A very black and white scenario, I guess it helps to focus on the application process. It is tough enough to keep performing at your demanding day job while moonlighting as a superhero crime fighter an applicant while managing all the fears of failure and rejection and the paperwork. You do not want to add a layer of uncertainty: “What if I am waitlisted…?” Plus, it seemed to me as a very unlikely outcome.

Then, after waiting for a couple of months to get an answer, it happens to you! You are mentally prepared for a ding or for an admission. And… admissions officers waitlist you! Doubt cripples trough your mind. It is very difficult to process, completely unexpected. What? Waitlist? How? Me! Why? When? Why? Confusion, darkness…

This post is not intended to share advice on what to do in that situation (I have very unpopular yet candid advice on the subject which I will post some other day), but to throw some light and data about the chances of being waitlisted. A quick informal poll among Stanford MBA students (a community I have lots of links with) showed that almost between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 of the current students had been waitlisted at Stanford and about 1 in 2 had been waitlisted by some of the schools they applied to.

If my written account of an informal poll looks like an unreliable source of data (it looks inaccurate to me) you can always check MBA Buzz admission stats. Again it is an informal poll and a small subset (I am sure it is impossible to get real data from the schools) but check the colored dots for the top schools. Admit to waitlisted ratio (AWR) is around 2:1 - 3:1. Check the figures as of today:

School	AWR
London	6:5
Insead	11:1
Harvard	7:3
Stanford	6:3
Wharton	17:10
TOTAL	47:22

This data has some limitations, of course, but it gives some good insight (Math comment: 47:22 is a funny ratio to simplify, 47 is prime and 22 is 2 times 11!). For each two or three admits, there is a person waitlisted! Changes of being waitlisted are actually much more higher than I thought!

I started to research the matter when I got waitlisted at Stanford. Although I was prepared from a practical point of view because I had done my homework and covered all my bases (I did not depend on a single application and had a couple of alternative choices), I was completely unprepared for that outcome from a psychological point of view. I thought it was such a rare happening. I was shocked and confused! When I started to ask for advice, I discovered so many MBAers had gone through the same situation I was taken aback (that is the informal poll I talked about before).

In the greater scheme of things, most of the applicants to top schools get rejected, a few get accepted and even fewer get waitlisted. Getting waitlisted is a rare happening.

However, the moral of the story is: if you have chances of being accepted (qualifications in line with the school statistics, good recommenders, have been interviewed early) you will be better off if you plan for being waitlisted, because there are actual chances that you will!

On Dec 5th 2005, a couple of weeks before my interview, I joined a LBS official chat with students and people from the Admissions Office from LBS. Surprisingly, it is available online at 2006 London Business School MBA Admissions Chat with David Simpson. For the applicants out there, if you have the chance to join one of these chats, they end up being very informative, and you can make friends.

A unique opportunity to ask questions about the school, the experience and the application process, I also managed to make a good pen-pal (Hi Anna!) and future London classmate, and chatted with a few others.

This is probably one of the advantages of a small class, you can organize this chat without big crowds. Surely an event like this in a bigger School (W/H with their 1,000 class and 10k+ applicants) would result in an overcrowded chat and hundreds of nonsense lines.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience and a great initiative. And the transcript is now available for everyone to see!

I feel sad: I have made my decission about Admits Weekend. The choice is as clear as day, but still I will miss the weekend. Forgive me Oh Lord of the MBAs, but I will not attend the Admits Weekend. I would love to be there, get to know my future classmates, feel the ambiance of the school, enjoy the party,…

But it is too far away! One of the problems with California is the distance to Europe. It is not “just the other coast of the USA”, as some of my less travelled friends put it. Some people even think that “If I need 7 hours to get to NY (from Spain), California is about 8h tops”. No way! The USA is a huge country, the country that invented domestic redeye flights.

The friends at Great Circle Mapper, can help me to illustrate my point:

From San Francisco Airport SFO (37°37′08″N 122°22′30″W) to London Heathrow LHR (51°28′39″N 00°27′41″W) there is a distance of 8638 km. In the map, the clear regions are closer to London than SFO, and the shadowed are more remote.

Guess what? Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the hightech world, but it is very far away from being the center of the World like London (Have I read too many times the “London Advantage” part of the brochure?). More remote than half of South America, India, most of Africa, half of Madagascar and even Kamchatka. I would actually spend more time on the plane alone than in Admits Weekend related activities. That alone makes no sense to me, specially when my decision to attend LBS is as solid as rock.

Sorry my future classmates, but we will catch up in person at the begining of the year! In the meantime, let’s just keep us posted electronically!

A big thank you goes to The Divine Miss N (who has moved to a new URL!) for dropping by (or commenting by) and providing me this critical piece of information:

Best Spanish foodstore in London is Brindisi (voted this year’s best foodshop in the UK by the Observer).

The other day I told you about me being a travelling aficionado. I happen to be a foodie as well. I cannot travel around the world everyweek, but I can travel culinarily to a new world, to a different state of mind, to a parallel universe enjoying a good meal. I love both cooking, eating and going to restaurants. And in the USA is quite difficult and expensive to find fine foods.

Food is one of my reasons to get back to Europe after a two year period in the USA, believe me on that one!

Back to Brindisi, I will check it out the moment I arrive in London and give you my barcelonese foodie point of view. For my future reference:

This importer of the highest-quality Spanish foods started bringing Iberian flavours to an eager public 17 years ago. As Spanish regional cooking has become more fashionable, so Brindisa has continued to supply superior paella pans, unforgettable chorizo and morcilla, savoury sauces like the Catalan Romesco almond and pepper, and great cheeses. An emporium of wonderful food under the direction of passionate Hispanophile MD and founder Monika Linton.

Brindisa, 32 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell, London EC1 (020 7713 1666), and the Floral Hall, Borough Market, London SE1 (020 7407 1036)

source: The Observer

Lonely Planet Bluelist
618 Things to Do & Places to Go

1st Edition
Simon Sellars, Simone Egger
Published December 2005
ISBN: 174104734X
328 pp

The Lonely Planet Bluelist captures the world’s hottest trends, destinations, journeys and experiences for the year ahead.

Drawing on the knowledge, passion and miles travelled by the Lonely Planet community of authors, staff and travellers, and covering every country in the world, this first edition is a selection of 618 of the best places to go and things to do in the world right now.

Excellent book for the independent preMBA (or postMBA) traveller. Picture yourself with a more or less clear plan for the next two years (quit daily job soon, holidays, MBA for two years) with a very good finantial forecast (if you can do a top MBA, you are incredibly rich by world standards). This lack of anxiety about the next two years mixed with a vacation period puts the preMBA student in a unique and very convenient state of mind for relaxing, reflecting and traveling. And that is exactly the situation I am in right now.

Travelling is a passion for me, the only vice I spend my money on. Inspired by Phileas Fogg, I have already completed one around-the-world trip two years ago, and I loved every single minute of it. At that time, I had two main destinations, two places I had longed for years to discover: China and Australia, two of the bigger countries in the World. I spent one month in each of them and it was a mindblowing experience.

This summer, I have a myriad of smaller targets and I wanted to get a feel for my potential destinations before making decissions. The BlueList is an excellent ressource to plan for your next trip when your goal is to discover the World. All the countries are on it, and it sticks to the Lonely Planet secret recipe for success:

• Focus on the independent traveller,
• a certain degree of priorization and top destinations
• coupled with comprehensive information on all the tourist attractions (or countries in this case),
• healthy sense of humor and finally
• hunger for discovering and understanding the world.

If you plan to travel this summer and you are open to suggestions, get the Bluelist, it will give you quite a few unexpected hints.

Myself, I am already making some decissions, but I have not made up my mind yet. A new trip is in the making!!

(the planning and anticipation from trip planning is almost as good as the trip, isn’t it?)

I will keep you posted on my plans!

Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm

I loved this series and I am glad it is finished. These last one is not of my liking, but still the idea of a Seagull Manager or a Blamestorming meeting is very funny (and all too real!) to me!

Well-Off Older Folks.

I don’t get this one, maybe someone will explain it to me.

Hi readers! Sorry for the not-so-fresh prepackaged content I am delivering these last days. Life is keeping me busy. Life and a wonderful book. I am gaining a new insight on how I tackle tasks and work with “The Now Habit”, by Neil Fiore, Ph.D.

I believe its approach to overcoming procrastination is very powerful and adapted to the audience. Far from the usual schedule more, plan more, do more, the book has an irresistible left brain intitive and understanding approach. Delightful! I still have not finished the book nor used the method for a long time, but I will gladly report once I am done with both.

Everyone procrastinates some work in their life, some projects or some very important actions.

That is why everyone can benefit from working on their procrastinating habits and, much more important, their underlying causes.

That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake)

I love the Berkeley Law School Story, you know it!

Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

Unfortunately, this is happening in Europe as well, but at least national boundaries add a little bit of diversity from mall to mall.