The mbaMission Podcast

Ep 41 | How Should You Use AI in Your MBA Applications?

• mbaMission • Season 2 • Episode 41

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How can ChatGPT and other AI programs make the MBA application easier? Can you use ChatGPT for your business school research? Can you use it for your essay brainstorming? How about for the actual writing of application essays? And SHOULD you use AI for these and other stages of the application process? In this episode of the mbaMission podcast,  Harold Simansky, Jessica Shklar, and Jeremy Shinewald discuss when you should -- and shouldn't -- use AI in your business school applications, and how to use it effectively.

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AI is a terrific tool but it is not a substitute for your own thinking authenticity is the name of the game right now it takes a lot of input for ChatGPT to get to know you they're not sitting at your dinner table they're not hovering over your shoulder they don't know who you are if you're using something that is substantively still AI you have a serious problem with your

Hi, this is Harold Simansky of the mbaMission podcast artificial intelligence AI ChatGPT it's becoming a regular part of everyone's lives these days but does it have a place in MBA admissions can you use artificial intelligence to write your application essays what about to edit your resume can it help you choose the right business school how about your post-MBA career these are questions we are getting daily at mbaMission and in today's podcast we'll be giving our opinion on the subject hello Jeremy hello Jessica let's talk about artificial intelligence first a disclaimer this podcast is not created using artificial intelligence this is this is not an artificial Herald can I this is natural intelligence this is natural intelligence right here intelligence okay Jess I'm going to throw it right to you I think when you think about it from an um admissions perspective from the applicant perspective AI is a tool or maybe a better way to say it is it's a really good starting point or can can be a good starting point but it should never be the ending point and by that I mean you can use AI to help you come up with ideas to help you get started with a draft to help with some editing basic research interview questions to do basic research but if you stop with what AI does for you you'll never I think you have a phrase that says AI can help you be mediocre that's right so it'll help you be mediocre and you just don't want to be mediocre in this process so the uh I'll start with where we're going to end which is the bottom line is that AI is a terrific tool but it is not a substitute for your own thinking well maybe we can break it down even further and say that let's talk with use cases where the documents or whatever your your output is ultimately admissions committee facing and those where it is not Harold which one should we go with first admissions committee facing or not no actually I will have many clients and sometimes including myself start using ChatGPT for research and and to sort of pick up on something Jessica said beforehand if I go now to buy a new TV ChatGPT is going to be my go-to place how does that affect business school are there similar decisions made along those lines right and I think we have really in-depth insiders guides that go far deeper into each school but it can take a lot of time to read them if that's your initial phase so to say to ChatGPT give me the top three differentiators between Harvard Stanford and Wharton or how what are the most popular classes at these schools that's a good comparison tool and then I would use our insiders guides maybe to go much more in depth I I would say the one thing that's important is you know the mediocre outcomes of it you can say you know cha tell me about the top six strategy classes at at Wharton okay you have to go back and check to make sure they actually are classes if you're using that you're putting it in your in your paper and and you know maybe that Professor left and hasn't been offered for years maybe ChatGPT made it up so you know you always have to be skeptical of something that's out of your control but but I agree the research piece can be quite powerful but it tends to be more surface more comparison more of an overview and then no substitute for our insiders guides or for going to visit a school or for talking to students and laying that we put together on track we have five six seven eight different videos on each school and they've all none of them were done on by by ChatGPT they were all done by research of a human being they're all accurate like like there's no there's no question that if you reference something then you you know you still should should personalize it towards what you're doing you wouldn't say I outsourced This research research to a friend I outsourced it to a research assistant that's what you're doing with ChatGPT so you've got to be just where there is a rule but you've got to be careful no and listen the reality is it also lends itself to opportunity I'll tell you exactly what I mean if everyone is using ChatGPT to do research many people should be but they do not use our Insider guides but if they're doing research GPT which are free they're on our website we have a lot of things going on on our website please check it out all of that noted if everyone is doing research using ChatGPT what a premium there must be to talk to somebody to actually have a live person have a quote in there so can you imagine the admissions committee they're sitting there reading essay after essay they sound exactly right cuz they're all written by ChatGPT then your essay comes up and you've actually spoken to somebody maybe in fact you have a fun essay and ChatGPT is many things it is not fun not fun right so we start with research and then let's talk about our own internal research which is brainstorming right as we think about essays instead of diving right into the questions is there a role for ChatGPT in brainstorming and I would say yes but it takes a lot of input for ChatGPT to get to know you they're not sitting at your dinner table they're not hovering over your shoulder they don't know who you are so if you said to ChatGPT give me some ideas for what I could write for what matters most to me and why for the Stanford essay well they will probably come up with five or six generic topics yeah that doesn't mean that's what matters most to you or to you or to me it's so then you have to take your own idea and say oh this one actually does resonate how and what are examples from my own life and you have to so again ChatGPT can get you started when you're Frozen with ideas you know before writing which I think is going to be where many of you listening to this think about using ChatGPT let's think about brainstorming when you sit down with five essays or three essays for a school and you don't even know how to think about them maybe that's a place to start with ChatGPT say so what are some ideas or even here's my resume what are some ideas but again that's very limiting because chaty is not the person who knows you who talks to you day in and day out they're not your friend they only know the little bit that you give them so it can trigger you to start thinking I think it can get you unstuck or give you of what other people have done but then you have to Overlay your own abilities and knowledge of yourself on it right right right yeah I think when it comes after you've got your outputs and you really know what you want to say I think it's ironic you can take a massive step back by asking ChatGPT right that right WR being an aay about how hard it was to start an MBA admissions Consulting business uh you know the first few months of that it's like that's that's you can you can get from something where you the juices were flowing to something totally totally generic of the ironies I think of as I've seen um people submit things through ChatGPT that are clearly ChatGPT is that it could be it could be anyone it's so vague it's got a certain vagueness and then every once in a while someone will say to me well I started with a ChatGPT and I'm like well this is so specific now you've done so much revising and changing that chat basically wasn't there in the first place it was like it just it it served almost no purpose for you and maybe maybe giving you a rough structure of of how to how to get started but but I think what it does do with the writing is help you overcome writer book sometimes as you know how often do we just throw away the entire first paragraph in a client's essay right well now they maybe they're taking that first step they're getting something generic from from um ChatGPT but it's so much easier to edit than to create yeah and so maybe they're using that as their first draft to get them unstuck that's right I actually want to pause here because I think it's an important point and that is good essays good applications start with introspection brainstorming we as a firm we spent a lot of time on that can ChatGPT help you with that no it simply can't it simply can't yeah it's not there to have creative thought it's it's there to reflect other people's thought and and that and that is not your own right that's right what about I mean what about what about posit other positive use cases let's be fair to technology you know other other use cases I mean would you have you had application you're like who who I don't maybe you said you got to truncate this this feline bullet point to two lines for for a proper MBA resume you could put this through ChatGPT get it down break it into two bullet points da then you have to look at it and make sure for and impact focused I did this recently with one of our internal documents that you guys don't know me but I'm longwinded and detailed and Jeremy's not and so we sometimes butt heads on this and he said to me this is four pages get it down and I couldn't because I like to throw every single detail possible into everything that I do and so I put it in ChatGPT and I said retain all this the key bullet points but make this shorter and you know it got about 85% of the way there it did a really nice job but it didn't know all the nuances and I had to then do a line by line comparison with our original document to make sure they hadn't missed anything so it was great it got me started on something that I was struggling with but I still had to spend really several hours fixing it yeah you know it's a great a great example I think of of the generic nature versus the specific nature but the generic still having some use so again giving credit to technology here we have a massive massive Bank of interview questions from every single school and every single part-time emba program within those schools and it goes on and on and then we've just been we've been you know just harvesting these questions for years and years and years and again even those we have to go through and and make them you know make them specific to our candidates we can't just say to anyone you know so what was it like to be uh you know of six years of manufacturing experience and suddenly transition to strategy Consulting like you know we even we have to do that you wanted to start some basic interview prep you could say to say to you know chat G give me a list of a hundred questions that an MBA might be asked in an interview and I don't think it would be necessarily indicative of the type of experience that you would have and they wouldn't be that specific but it would be enough to start practicing enough to get going right and that just keeps coming back to the same point ChatGPT is a really or any AI is a really good starting point but not an ending point if you were to only use AI generated questions you'd end up at mediocre that's right and listen ChatGPT does some things very well it takes a 2,000 word document and it can turn it into a thousand-word document accurately yeah really pretty good that doesn't mean that you're done with that but really it's a great place to be I'd rather edit a the words than 2,000 words that's certainly the case right but you still have to make sure they didn't cut the wrong thousand words absolutely so there is some the personality out of it like it's it's it's the personality that's the piece I remember when we were first um hearing about sort of AI in applications Jeremy you at a staff meeting presented an essay that you had asked ChatGPT to write and you had given it pretty specific guidelines and said it to us and it was pretty good yeah but it wouldn't have gotten anyone into business school because it was not fun it wasn't personalized I tried to sit there with with ChatGPT for a while and get it to the level of detail that I like to see in a why Stanford a why Wharton a why Chicago and really push it I maybe I'm maybe I'm just a dinosaur and I'm not I don't know how to push it appropriately but you know can you add more resources can you add another class can you add a club can you add this and it just doesn't read in a compelling way it doesn't read like someone who like like a human being who really knows how they're trying to put their argument together for why they really fit again here's that word fit you fit fit a snapshot of a million Googles doesn't fit and that's perhaps the easiest that's perhaps the easiest kind of question to answer for ChatGPT because it's research-based whereas um you know Stanford's personal background how has your personal background impacted a recent decision or action you made in the last few years well ChatGPT won't be able to do that because they didn't grow up with you so if it's struggling to be Beyond mediocre for the easiest question yeah one other place let's say a school had a super hard character count or word count on an essay which happens from time to time you know and you got to cut out a few a few words yeah you can use it there um you let's let's say you wanted to a copy edit but like I would even say in circumstances like that some of the blemishes help you like like in talking to admissions officers yeah like they don't want to see something that's smooth and has has you I remember talking to a to a a Harvard Business School admissions uh officer who who said to me like that she doesn't really she doesn't want to see Sloppy but she just doesn't really care about a about a you semicolon instead of a colon it doesn't bother her it's it's part of the flavor of an applicant and especially if you're an international applicant and you and English is your second language you don't need a computer to to to take out the idiosyncrasies of the way you write or speak I would make it even stronger than don't need to we don't take out when when I work with International applicants I promise them that everything they submit is going to be clear and then they're not going to be contradicting themselves or using words incorrectly but do I promise to make them sound like a native speaker that would be against their interests so I certainly am not going to wouldn't want chatGPT to polish an essay Beyond where it would make sense because remember that when you let's say you get to the interview phase with a school with those essays and then you get to an interview and it's clear that your English as good as it may be is not at the same level as your essays that's going to be a disconnect for the admissions office that that's right listen in my mind ChatGPT allows you almost forces you to be interesting if you if you think about it if sort of the default now is going to be sort of mediocre like I've heard it before the syntax is certainly going to be very similar there's not going to be Ernest Hemingway is not popping out of ChatGPT right ex you know D Foster Wallace there is no ChatGPT right right so the reality is is how do you become interesting and that really requires a lot of work a lot of introspection and again things that ChatGPT will not allow you to do it'll it'll trick you in some ways that you think you're doing great job this is a terrific essay I hit word count I didn't have to use the magic hyphen right you the other thing also maybe this is a transition to our second part if we're ready but I mean schools are running AI checks like like like they are they are thoughtful about this and um you know they're they're they've been running checks on on recommendations for years and years to make sure that applicants aren't in fact in some ways they've been ahead of AI in that regard because they've been they've been running people's recommendations through checks to see if the voice is their own or their recommenders and so you know they're they're checking and if if you're using something that is substantively still AI you have a serious problem with your that actually raises a question that our clients and any applicants might be interested in is how should you advise your recommender about using ChatGPT or not I I actually have some thoughts about that because over the years what I've certainly seen is recommendation is becoming more and more vanilla the reality is is for all sorts of different reasons one of which now is AI but other reasons as well as the entire process has become more systematized as more people have been applying as long as there's been a history of people writing recommendations they become super vanilla so at the end of the day what I'm really encouraging applicants to do is just like push much more to the recommender basically say I'm going to give you some ideas about what I'd love for you to talk about but at that point don't write anything for them just push it to them push it to them we're looking for authenticity and I think that's really the case with essay I think that's the case with ChatGPT generally authenticity is the name of the game right now so if we can be really really directive for applicants out there if your recommender comes to you and says I'm going to use ChatGPT for this your push back should be that's a good place to start but unfortunately business schools are alert to that and we're starting to see that those or we are seeing that those recommendations become quite generic so if that's where you want to start that's fine but could we then meet and go through specific examples or anecdotes that you can put in it to make sure that this is in your voice and really reflects me as a candidate I I would even go further and say I really want you to have an efficient process with this I'd like to I I don't think any of the admissions committees would would would tell you you shouldn't be doing this I'd like to review some of my major accomplishments with you I'd be happy to furnish you with a list of them we can talk about them but I would really appreciate it if you're here to support me if you could write this whole thing from scratch and just and have it really reflect you I understand that some you can't depend on people but I think maybe the opposite way of saying that is if you are going to get to the point or if you if you are not going to get the point where it's where it's largely you know your own original output and where chat gbd is still evident it's going to hurt my candidacy please don't write my letter for recommendation and look to the applicants listening to this we know that's a hard conversation you want to come onto a free consultation with us and role play that conversation we're happy to help you with it but it's hard and we get that sometimes you just have to do hard things now sort of moving forward in the sense of what's Happening inside the admissions office as far as how are they using artificial intelligence Jeremy you started talking about it as using it simply to sort of assess who wrote what but are there other ways more maybe even more sophisticated ways that they're using it right now I think it's I'm actually going to switch that question around and say that what we're hearing from admissions officers when we've spoken to them and from what we're reading is that they're doing what they can to to avoid using it more by challenging applicants to avoid using it and we see this with questions that have many more subparts that really force you to be specific or video questions um MIT, your alma mater, has popup video questions that you cannot prepare for because they're trying to test your spontaneity test your ability to think on your feet and so ChatGPT can't do that for you it can't even prepare you for that right we can but dove tailing on what saying let's think about Harvard Business School for one second for I know about a decade or so they had uh they had a very long prompt uh then they cut back to 900 words it was almost like tell us effectively it tell us anything you'd like us to know it was more more very open-ended yeah very very open-ended that is the perfect kind of essay to to be completely abused and ruined in an in an AI in a ChatGPT world right like I I imagine that they foresaw that that question was just effectively out of date it was like a dinosaur because of it because it was going to invite vague answers I don't think they were afraid of ChatGPT I think they were afraid of not getting interesting data not getting interesting stories and so they changed it to three very short extremely detailed and complicated somebody vexing prompts that even you can read them several times and still kind of be like a little bit like what's going on here what do they want here and things don't Naturally Fit together all the time as well transitions in like eras in those questions like how did this how did this experience impact your perspective on this going forward like they're all extremely cumbersome and confusing because they don't want individuals to be able to have this big kind of open opportunity they want people to to force them into a box I bet you they might even maybe they'll last a year or two and then they'll change because they'll be saying oh they're examples online we're starting to get the generic versions of these right and two of those essays are only 250 words with multiple parts so it really forces you to be to avoid being generic every single word in there has to be specific to you and has to count Jessica and Jeremy this is not a bad time to pause and say we as a firm have spent a lot of time sort of what I'll say figuring out the HBS essays there's three of them now as you said 300 words 250 words 250 words they're very hard I think at the end of the day they are very hard in a way that other essays weren't as well was certainly HBS in the past wasn't and I have to tell you through all of our work many many hours of work on all of our parts and as our entire firm really looked closely at HBS essays none of us could use ChatGPT to figure it out the reality is it's very personal it's very hard and there is no role for ChatGPT in an HBS Essay and then I think MIT is another example of a very different way they have not really changed their application that much but it involves a cover letter and then a video and then two popup and or One popup video question maybe two so a recorded video that you can do on your own and then also a popup video in the middle popup meaning like you're just you're going to get a prompt and you have to respond on the spot right you know in fact let me use this to take a step to the side and talk about the one minute MIT video If you may remember in the past there was really no requirements around it give us one minute since over the last few years they said give us one minute now on your iPhone one take one take no no um no transitions no music exactly because back in the past you can find them on YouTube it was like these Academy Award quality creativity it was a creativity exercise and that's not fair because business school is not about how well you know how to do video editing exact and that's the case in my mind with ChatGPT right it's anti- authentic is that is that a term it's anti ChatGPT is anti- authentic we see from Business Schools in all sorts of different ways the use of videos interviewing that now they're looking for authentic so this notion here of ChatGPT will make you a better applicant is simply not true because it's going in the wrong direction you're more inauthentic you're more artificial exactly what business schools don't want right and so and I think that admissions officers tend not to be of the generation that grew up using ChatGPT right I'm sure some people are but for the most part they're not and so that's not their orientation they're not going to think about how can we use this they're going to think about how can I get authenticity from applicants so I can really get to know them because their goal hasn't changed their goal is to build a diverse class that reflects multi facets and that makes sure everybody at the school has an amazing experience that's not going to happen if you can't read who someone is because they're too generic so as a as a trend line I think we could be saying you know where we would expect to continue to see shorter essay prompts maybe a little more complicated we we would expect to see more video prompts which I think that has been a TR like there used to be one school kog was Yale and and yeah a few other yeah some have have video interviews as well which are effectively spontaneous prompts shorter videos other and we in you other spontaneous things like I wonder if they'll be uh you know we're going to call you we're going to call you at some point in the next in the next like 12 hours you know be ready or or you are you free it's the admissions committee called or or maybe like we are going to I I would suspect there we almost is significant conjecture here but nonetheless I there that we might almost get to the point where there's like a rough cull and then it's like you're all invited to campus you know for for a for a day like almost like a a Super Sunday day for for investment banking or something like that the Wharton team based discussion interview was actually like that if you think about it in sort of the most proxy form and for those who are not applying to Wharton are not familiar instead of a one-on-one interview for Wharton you actually meet now it's in a virtual room it used to be on campus or some other satellite locations and four or five of your closest friends now four or five other applicants you're solving a business problem together I understand that it sounds terrifying it's not a complex business problem you won't need a calculator hour spreadsheet in half an hour it's more a pro problem like develop a course around these parameters or create a day of orientation so it's not a business problem I think is a little bit scarier that it actually is but there's no way to prepare for that using ChatGPT and once you're in that session you're dealing with four or five other people right right that's right Jessica Jeremy I'm sorry I have to pause right here you know who does a great job of Preparing People for the Wharton Team Based discussion it is us here at mbaMission absolutely right okay we take six of you who've been invited for an interview we put you in a virtual room and we actually run it just like you will see if you get a Wharton TBD and I will say that although from admissions perspective they're not the most dynamic thing that we ever work on with our clients it is my fav favorite thing because of how completely transformative it is you see everyone walk in you see these applicants walk in and they all have this look of Terror on their face and an hour and a half later they are walking out confident and it is the fastest and most dramatic transformation we see in the admissions process so I love it for that re yeah you see people who go in and it's like everything is about difference and and you know like it's not that we're telling people to be impolite but no one is prepared to advocate for an idea because they're all afraid they're going to seem like like they're being to Alpha yeah and it's like you get to the point where it's a natural discussion and like that's where you need to be and in fact remember when we they us used to do these in person and ours were not quite the same because they were virtual right and then when Co happened Wharton decided to keep those team based discussions virtual which means there our PR preparation for it is now exactly the same as the on there it really helped us right right right right absolutely and and again to get back to theme here that is not anything that ChatGPT can help you all it's simply artificial intelligence again it's artificial intelligence it's natural intelligence and that's really what business schools are looking for so I said at the beginning we were going to end at the same place and I don't think we've evolved from that I think that's exactly what we did ChatGPT or AI can get you to mediocre the AI tool is a really good place to start but it is mean meaningless if that's where you finish agree okay then well this is Harold Simansky with Jessica and Jeremy for the mbaMission podcast thank you