要死了,才发现sloan的题目要求过去一两年的经历

Just came back from a Sloan reception. I asked the admissions officer about this 2-year constraint. She said the school wants to see applicants' recent career progress, exactly what I expected to hear. Remember when you ask an adcom member a question like that, you are supposed to get an "official" answer, which echos the school's website. Then I asked her whether I can use my older experiences in my application because they are more powerful, she gave me two suggestions. 1.Use the additional essay to describe my previous experiences. 2.Use the previous experiences in the mandatory essays and use the additional essay to explain my choice of older materials. So I asked her whether the use of old materials will hurt my application, and there came the puch line, "I don't think it will have a negative impact on your application, as long as your story is not too old, say, something happened back in your college years."

Folks, this does not necessarily mean you are risk-free to use old stories in your essays. Especially for those who want to make an iron-clad safe play, even a confirmation from Mr. Rod Garcia may not be good enough.  So please use your own judgement.

Mr. Rod  told me at MIT on-the-road shanghai station :  yes, you should limited your story within these two years. that is our requirment.

sigh...

MBA application is more of art than science.

我个人的见解： 如果你确实有些2年前经历才能展现你自己。你完全可以不必被2年所限制。其实你们仔细研究一下这些牛校的网站，好多信息都不consistent.原因是他们自己的好多东西都在摸索中。没有一个鲜明的cut line. 有些所谓的标准只是preference巴了。 要相信自己！

MBA= "Must Be Arrogant" !

刚在BW Forum上发现的讨论，如下，供参考：

http://forums.businessweek.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?msg=36873.1610&nav=messages&webtag=bw-bschools&sr=y

just noticed that the MIT Sloan asks that the stories in the essay
have to happen in the past one or two years. If I have a better one
which happened more than 2 years ago, do you think it is ok, or the
committee will think I do not follow the instruction and ding?

You can find this limitation only when you apply online and login
and go to essay part. They did not mention it on the public web.

Thanks for your help.

In this case, it's okay to use stories that are older if those are the best examples you have. That's because, as you noted, the instructions about more recent events aren't anywhere obvious or prominent - even on Sloan's own page of instructions, there's absolutely no mention of this. I've spoken with my contacts within Sloan who have also said that due to the lack of clarity around this, it's not considered fair to enforce it and so it's not something that they'll be rigorous about. Bottom line, don't worry about it.

Tasha