Application Week: School Research, Fit, and "Why"

[WILL] Today's session is about research. That might sound like a slightly odd thing, but we'll get our way there.

So our focus today is talking a little bit about school research, exploring your fit, and articulating your why.

Do your research is one of those phrases I've been hearing a lot, especially recently, from other admission officers when I've been on panels.

But the question is, what does that even mean? So today we are going to work on expanding our research mindsets, our toolkits, and ways to help us as we're thinking about questions like why business school, why now?

Why this particular school? Why Stanford for you? Ways that you might be able to center yourself and rethink about the way that we approach these questions such that they're able to help you not just in the admissions process, but during your time on campus, and even thinking about the many, many, many opportunities

you're going to have in your career and life beyond. So we'll do some foundations, things that I think are essential that folks know as they're approaching the GSB application process.

We have research in three sections. One is kind of exploring and understanding a little bit more about yourself.

The next, thinking about schools and programs, different potential opportunities, things in that space.

And then a little bit of frame, reframe, how might we take a piece of kind of ubiquitous knowledge or kind of a question that I hear A lot, approach it from different directions to give you that much more power and stand with more confidence in the way that you respond and engage with it.

And then at the end, we'll do a little bit of wrap up. I'll scroll through the Q&A, and if there's other topics that we haven't covered yet that are applicable today, we'll go back and make sure we're able to handle them.

So Foundations. What is the GSB looking for? Where do we find it? Let's start here to make sure everybody is able to start this journey on the right foot.

So, key concept, holistic review. This is something that many schools will speak about, and there might be slight nuances in the way everybody engages with it.