With the exception of Booth and MIT Sloan, my R1 candidates are done submitting. We won't get much of a break. MBA interview invites will start popping up quite soon. And one thing has become really clear this admissions cycle.

This feels different

As I was wrapping up the R1 work this week, I kept thinking about just how much the MBA application game has changed. Four years after ChatGPT "burst onto the scene," to use the obligatory cliché, we've reached a point where what used to be a signal of a strong candidate has essentially disappeared.

Good writing.

To be clear, artful prose was never what differentiated the best MBA candidates. (Neither was a 99th percentile GMAT.)

But strong writing used to tell us something. A well-constructed essay indicated structured thinking and the ability to communicate clearly. Today, that signal is essentially gone.

Everyone is using AI and everyone is producing coherent, well-structured narratives. AI can smooth out awkward transitions, tighten an argument, impose structure on a wandering narrative, and make an essay sound remarkably buttoned up.

So if everyone can arrive at polished writing, what is left to differentiate you?

The quality of your thinking

It's the last frontier you, MBA hopeful, are left with in the MBA admissions race.

Now, to be very clear, we should differentiate between two things. Your most valuable asset in the MBA admissions race has always been, and always will be, your track record: the professional and extracurricular accomplishments and impact you've had.

But what I'm talking about here is something different. How you think about that track record, and how you capture what you've learned and understood from it in your MBA application materials, will determine whether you make it to the interview and ultimately land those admits.

What is high-quality thinking?

When I work with strong MBA candidates, the ones who end up with multiple M7 admits and crack HSW, I see it at several levels.

The first is the quality of your reflection.

Can you examine your own track record with enough honesty, sophistication, and depth to understand what has actually shaped you?

Can you look at the important choices you've made and understand why you made them?

Can you distinguish a genuinely consequential experience from one that merely sounds impressive?

Can you see patterns across your life that aren't obvious from reading your resume chronologically?

Next comes the quality of your judgment.

Reflection produces a lot of material. Only some of it belongs in an MBA application.

Which insights actually matter?

Which experiences reveal something important about you?

What does the admissions committee need to understand that they couldn't infer from your resume, title, employer, or recommendations?

What should you leave out?

Then comes the quality of connecting the dots.

Does your future clearly follow from your past?

Can you explain why the next step makes sense without retrofitting your entire life into a suspiciously engineered career narrative?

Can you connect what you've done, what you've learned, what you're missing, and what you want to do next in a way that has actual substance behind it?

And finally comes the quality of the articulation.

Not: Is the sentence elegant?

But: Have you expressed the idea precisely enough that another human being can understand what you actually mean?

AI can help quite a lot with that last step. It can help with structure. It can clean up sentences. It can point out gaps. It can make an essay flow better.

What it cannot do is retroactively give you better judgment about your own life.

It cannot manufacture a genuinely insightful interpretation of your choices if you haven't done the thinking that produces one. It cannot decide which of ten superficially plausible interpretations is actually true.

And it's downright pitiful at capturing the idiosyncrasies that make us, well, human, and that are always part of strong MBA essays that get the attention of an admissions reader.

There is an irony here

When ChatGPT first appeared, there was plenty of speculation that admissions consultants would become less relevant.

For me, the opposite has happened; I'm in higher demand than ever. And a big part of the reason is that the valuable part of my work was never fixing somebody's sentences and making their writing polished. It is asking the questions, pointing out how that thing they're treating as important actually isn't, seeing the contradiction between two things they're telling me, and pushing again and again until “I want to have more impact” becomes an actual concrete idea.

It's helping someone decide which parts of a complicated life belong in a 300-word essay and which don't.

In other words, the work has moved even further upstream.

Reflection → judgment → connection → articulation

AI has made the last part dramatically easier, but only in terms of style, not substance. Which, in turn, has made the first three much harder and infinitely more important.

And this matters even more in the current admissions cycle. Here's why.

We have actual data: applications are down

We now have actual data showing that MBA applications are down this cycle. As I wrote recently on LinkedIn, Duke, one of the first schools to publish its Class of 2028 profile and application volume, confirmed this unequivocally.

Cycles like this mean one thing: strong candidates have better odds at higher-ranked schools.

Now, a weak applicant doesn't suddenly become a Duke admit because applications are down (just look at the class statistics!). But a Duke-level candidate may become an M7 admit (and the notable yield decline Duke experienced confirms this). And an M7-level candidate may get a shot at H/S/W that might not have materialized in a more "crowded" year.

For candidates on those margins, the quality of your thinking, and your ability to capture it in your application, will be exactly what moves you across that line.

And that's why I'm genuinely excited for the candidates I'm working with this cycle.

Onwards and upwards,

Petia