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jlamb

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  • Application Season
    2015 Fall
  • Program
    Policy Analysis, Business, Systems

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  1. Sorry that was confusing; to clarify I was accepted last year and deferred to 2017.
  2. Hi there. I was accepted to RAND for Fall 2017 so I can speak to this a little bit. Although there is no explicit indication that it makes a difference, I would recommend doing the pre-application in addition to reaching out to the director of admissions and faculty/students that fit your interests. This will put you on their radar, and you can get a good sense of mutual fit. I was pleasantly surprised by the attention that everyone I interacted with at RAND. After I submitted my pre-application, I received concrete feedback that I was considered competitive, as well as some guidance on areas to enhance or clarify. It's free and doesn't take too much time (you don't need references or anything), so it's the best way to gauge your profile versus asking for other peoples speculation! I respect that they do this since it technically makes their acceptance rate sound a bit more generous on paper (they are able to cut the applicant pool from hundreds to something like 150) but I suspect it lets them focus on a smaller set of candidates. In terms of GPA I suspect it has a fair bit of variance; I had a slide from an online information session with a bit more nuance than they publish online but lost it with a hard drive failure. I can't recall if they had any GPA data on there, but I suspect yours would be competitive. I do sense that they care predominantly about your statement of purpose (ultimately being very applied), what your prior coursework and experience would contribute to RAND and the cohort, your compatibility with the program structure and mission, culture fit, etc. They were pretty outspoken about its differences from a traditional university setting; it's unconventional and the students there tend to seem to fit a strong but unconventional profile as well. Happy to try to provide other info if I can.
  3. I was wondering if anyone else has done both the GMAT and GRE and could speak to how performance correlated between these for you, versus the comparison tools online. In a kind of impulsive move, I put in a last minute application to an MBA program including taking a "cold" GMAT. Since I hadn't done math since highschool and am about 8 years out of undergrad, I predictably did pretty poorly on the quantitative section, landing at about 38th percentile and pulling my overall down to 620 (I had about 89th percentile in verbal). Since I'm interested in Public Policy or a joint MBA/MPP, I took a baseline GRE after revisiting the core math subjects for a few weeks. Although it is not exactly fluent yet, I'd been doing much better on practice tests for both (interestingly, although I keep hearing that the GMAT math is harder, I've found it the other way around...). My GRE quant came back this time at the 68th percentile. Yet it's kind of surprising that when I plug my results into the ETS conversion calculator, I've barely moved the needle–a V95%/Q68% GRE equates to a 640. When I redid a GMAT practice test, my estimated score was 690-730. And oddly if I shift to the equivalent scores on the 800-point scale, the estimated GMAT indeed goes up to 690. The comparison just seems awfully murky, and seems to disproportionately weight the GMAT math difficulty. It doesn't really matter at this point, but I'm curious if anyone else has data points on this, or if actual comparative performance data has been reported anywhere.
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