As many of you are no doubt well aware, the second round application deadline for the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business looms just around the corner on December 9. For any of you working to put the final touches on your application, you won’t want to miss this recent conversation we had with Peter Johnson, Haas director of admissions.

Johnson has been working in higher education for more than 20 years and has been at Haas for the past nine. He loves the opportunity it gives him to interact with some really fascinating applicants and students, he told us.

In the transcript that follows, Johnson shares interesting details about the many experiential learning opportunities available to Haas students, talks about how excited he is to have long-time Haas finance professor Rich Lyons return to the school as its new dean and imparts some valuable advice to prospective applicants about how to approach the essay portion of their application.

Our thanks to Peter Johnson for making time to chat with us. And lots of luck to all the Haas applicants out there!

Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at Haas this coming year?

Peter Johnson: Well, that’s a very open question of course. I could come up with a lot of answers, but if forced to choose one my answer is probably our new dean, Rich Lyons, who arrived in July. He returns to the Haas School after a year and a half on sabbatical working as chief learning officer for Goldman Sachs. He’s been on the faculty as a professor of international finance for many years, but many of us here are really excited to have him come back in the role of dean.

What does that mean for the school? I think we are going to see a further sharpening of the school’s brand identity, and I am expecting a lot of new programming through our Leading Through Innovation initiative. So I think having him back as dean is a very good thing.

CA: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?

PJ: One of the things I wish more applicants knew more about is the breadth and depth of the experiential learning opportunities we provide for students. One of the opportunities that lots of applicants seem to know about is the international business development program, which has been running for 18 years and through which we providing consulting services to businesses across a range of industries on international projects.

But beyond this we also have the Haas@Work Program, in which we provide services to companies who are looking for solutions to a particular business problem. Some of the recent companies that our Haas at Work teams have been involved with have included Disney, Cisco Systems, SunPower and Lam Research. So it really is a broad variety of different industries with different types of business problems.

We also provide students with corporate social responsibility experiential learning opportunities though our Center for Responsible Business. These students get to work with businesses interested in strengthening their social responsibility initiatives. And then there’s business innovation and strategy. For instance, lots of companies are looking to change their technology strategies.

So, as you can see, we have many, many experiential learning opportunities students can choose to be involved in while they’re here. And, in fact, if you talk to alumni about their most rewarding experiences here at Haas, you will find that it’s these experiences that many of them talk about the most.

One great way to see a little bit more about what’s going on with regard to experiential learning is to visit our International Business Development website at www.ibdclass.blogspot.com. There you will find a range of different blogs about the projects that students were working on this past summer as well as some projects that are coming up.

CA: Walk us through the life of an application in your office from an operational standpoint. What happens between the time an applicant clicks ‘submit’ and the time the committee offers a final decision (e.g. how many “reads” does it get, how long is each “read,” who reads it, does the committee convene to discuss it as a group, etc.). 

PJ: Well, once a candidate clicks submit that is the beginning of a fairly complicated process that starts with the materials being printed and matched with transcripts and placed in a hardcopy file. Given the volume of applications we receive, we haven’t tried to go to an online reading process.

After the files are assembled, each file then goes to a first read, which is typically a longer read than the others. How long the read takes depends on the individual reader, but this first reader reads the entire application carefully, highlighting key aspects and making a recommendation about whether he or she thinks the candidate should move forward in the review process. In terms of who conducts this first read, it’s going to be someone from our admissions staff. We do not use student readers.

The file then goes on to the second reader, who does basically the same thing. At that point, if both agree that an application is not competitive, the process is pretty much finished. But any other combination of recommendations means that the application goes to a third reader.

Then, one of a few things might happen. Either the candidate will be invited to an interview, be slated for being placed on the waitlist, or be slated for denial. In the case of those candidates we are invited for an interview, we communicate with them and offer then an invitation to interview. When the results of the interview come back, the committee convenes and discusses, and a decision is made.

Candidates who are placed on the waitlist also will be invited to interview prior to a decision being made. Certainly not all of those who are invited to interview will get admitted, but getting invited to an interview is always a good sign. At Haas, we don’t admit people without an interview, so that’s one of the key pieces along the application road.

Sometimes people interpret an invitation to interview as indicating that perhaps there is something wrong with their application.  That would definitely not be the case. In an average year we are able to invite between 25 and 30 percent for an interview.

As to what happens with candidates on the waitlist, we use the waitlist throughout the cycle in a variety of ways. Those placed on the waitlist during round one are reviewed again at the end of round two. In some cases, these applicants may receive an offer at that point. In other cases, they will be released from the waitlist. And in still other cases they will remain on list for the third round. So in this way, it is only at the very end of the process that our waitlist functions as a traditional waitlist, in that applicants receive a spot in the class based on a spot becoming available where one might not have been available before. 

CA: How does your team approach the essay portion of the application specifically? What are you looking for as you read the essays? Are there common mistakes that applicants should try to avoid? One key thing they should keep in mind as they sit down to write them?

PJ: What we are looking for in the essays is a clear sense of who the candidates are beyond what we can see on their resumes and transcripts. What are they passionate about? What are their goals? What are the experiences they have had that have helped prepare them for a rigorous MBA program?

A key mistake I see some applicants make is that they approach the essays with the intention of writing something they think the Admissions Committee wants to read. When they do that, they usually squeeze out any individuality, and the result is something very generic.

Another piece of advice I’d offer to prospective applicants is that, as they look at our essay and short answer questions, they should think about how they would answer if a friend or family member were asking. Of course, you’ll want to go back and clean it up a little, but I think the people who are most successful are the applicants who are able to more authentically present a complete picture of who they are.

Some will get another chance to do this in the interview, certainly, but given the volume of applicants to Haas, the written application has to be compelling enough to move applicants forward to the next stage, so they should view this as a real chance to show who they really are.