Acknowledging the approach of its own Round 2 application deadline – January 7, 2009 – the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) devoted a recent post on its Admissions Blog to the top ten ways applicants can avoid making some of the mistakes most commonly spotted on incoming applications.
The list, shared by LaNeika Ward, acting assistant director of MBA admissions, is as follows:
1. Enter your name correctly. The Stanford GSB calls for applicants to enter their family name (aka last name) followed by their first name (aka given name), not the other way around. “Yes, smart people make this mistake,” writes Ward.
2.  rovide a specific reason for leaving any of your previous jobs. Circumventing this by stating instead your reason for accepting your next job is not adequate and can cause many issues as part of the application verification process, Warn cautions.
3. Don’t submit your application until after your recommenders have submitted letters of reference on your behalf. “Stanford’s instructions may differ from some other schools in this regard, but your application processing works best when you follow our advice,” Ward writes. “Trust us on this.”
4. If your university provided A/B/C/D grades, calculate your grade point average on a four-point scale (A=4, A-=3.7, B+=3.3, B=3, C=2, D=1, etc.) even if your university itself didn’t calculate GPA. “This is the easiest math problem that you’re likely to see in an MBA program,” Ward offers.
5. If you have a period of four months or more during which you were neither in school nor working, tell the Admissions Committee what you were doing during that time.
6. When you sit down to answer Essay C, Options 1 through 4, keep it current. Only discuss experiences that have occurred in the last three years. “Work, community, or college experiences are terrific, as long as they took place within the last three years,” Ward says. Also, be sure to include the “how” and “why,” not just the “what.”
7. If you can’t provide a recommendation from your current supervisor, explain why in one or two sentences in the “Additional Information” section of the online application.
8. Select a true peer to provide your peer letter of reference. Supervisors are not peers, even when they also happen to be your friends. At the same time, while many peers also are friends, not all friends are good choices for recommendations.
9. Make sure that your transcript is completely legible after you scan/upload it. “As a general rule, if you can’t read it, we can’t read it,” offers Ward.
10. In calculating your months of work experience, only include post-college work. And provide your answer in terms of months, not years, through September of the year in which you plan to enroll (not as of the date you’re applying).
So if you are busy now preparing your Stanford GSB application, you’ll want to be sure to leave time to run through this list and catch any potential mistakes before you hit “submit.”
Ward also invites applicants to contact the Admissions Office with questions via email. The Admissions Committee does its best to respond to all queries within one business day, but it does request that you not ask questions that are easily answered by reading the website and that you refrain from submitting a profile and/or asking about your chances for admission. | 
