AI and the MBA Application: B-Schooled Episode 272

[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Be Schooled, a podcast by Stacey Blackman Consulting. Bringing you insights, tips, and advice about all aspects of the MBA admissions process and business school experience. And now, here's your host, social impact CEO, Stanford GSV alum, and MBA admissions consultant, Chandler Arnold. [MUSIC] >> Welcome back to the podcast, I'm your host, Chandler. And today we are talking about AI and the MBA application. I am so excited to have a vet back with us. Those of you who are frequent listeners will remember her from previous podcast. After graduating from HBS, she has done all kinds of things with the HBS community from leading alumni circles to serve as VPS, the HBS alumni club, to all kinds of other things. And unique among our MBA admissions consultants, she has extensive experience in the AI space, really making her the perfect guess for today. She's also the architect of MBA AI, and AI specifically focused on MBA admissions. And we're excited to sort of preview that just a little bit here and now, but excited to get into that much more in future episodes of it. Thank you so much for coming back. >> Hello, hello from a sunny, but cold San Francisco. And always excited to talk to you, Chandler. >> Thank you, thank you again. I feel like so many clients have so many questions about AI. And as we were chatting today before the podcast, this will probably be the first of several conversations about this topic. But I'm excited to get into it with you now. You know the impact of chat GPT and other AI tools, really can be seen almost everywhere you look these days from automating our workloads, to helping us generate ideas, to researching competitive landscapes. But today, we're going to talk specifically about the role of AI and MBA admissions. But before we get into that nitty-gritty of it, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about what various MBA programs are saying about AI with regard to their own application processes. >> Great question to start our conversation today. All schools have responded to whether AI is okay to use an application or not. Whether they have said explicitly AI or not, all schools do have an honor code that for candidates or students, they require and they explicitly say, hey, whatever work you give us, whatever essay you're providing, we expect that to be your own work, that it's a reflection of your thoughts and your capabilities. So if you take a step back and you think about this from that broader honor code perspective, AI is only one more tool that could potentially be abused. So let's get into what actually some of the schools that are specifically calling out AI are saying. For example, Columbia, Wharton and HBS have said that they require that the work contain in your application, including your essays is completely accurate and exclusively your own work. Then Columbia, for example, has added that Columbia University permits the use of generative AI tools for idea generation or to edit a candidate's work. However, those tools to generate complete responses violate the honor code. So again, it's this idea that broadly, the work is expected to be your own, your own ideas and a reflection of your capabilities, but that AI is a tool that can upscale, that can improve your work. And HBS goes a step further and again, says, you know, AI is permitted, however, don't claim AI work to be your own. And they even ask, how have you used AI in completing your application? And this question is intended to understand a little bit more of the way candidates are using this new technology. And it's something that I would expect from any top forward looking institution, any of the top MBAs, to know that this is very novel and we don't know exactly all the capabilities and to be open to iterating and ideating of how you could use it and to describe brainstorming and using it for some edits, but again, being clear that you did the work. And that I think that's fantastic advice. You know, I want to kind of ask a couple follow-ups there and dig a little bit deeper. Let's talk about the things that one should definitely avoid with regard to chat GPT or AI and your applications. Yeah, another great question. And also just to broaden the scope of when we're talking about chat GPT, we'll use it synonymously with, like, let's say, any other LLM so that our audience doesn't think we're only specifically talking about that, but Anthropoclaw, Gemini, Deepseek, you know, etc. All those LLMs are apply. So I would say the biggest thing to avoid is assuming a general LLM large language model knows your story, knows your growth, your creativity for the future. LLMs have been trained on general information, so that does include understanding what Harvard Business School is, what NMBA teaches, what Stanford states on their website, for example. But that LLM is not going to know your story. So you definitely want to avoid assuming that it's going to know what should be reflected to show your candidacy to show who you are. And a derivative of that is assuming that it's going to do your work, that it's going to provide ready essays. So if you prompted a new ask, write a successful Harvard Business School essay or insert any school, Duke essay, Berkeley, Stanford essay, you're assuming that it's basic knowledge is going to expand knowing what Hoss is all about, what talk is all about, what Stanford is all about, or what an essay like Stanford's, what matters most is expecting or the themes that are powerful and effective there. So don't expect to do the work and fully give you something that is baked and ready right to submit, that would be nice, but it's also taking away that fruitful experience from you, that insightful journey that helps you actually unearth and define why NMBA makes sense for you. And in that same light, don't expect it to be trained on sample essays. Again, an LLM is a model that understands language, so you could speak to it in your language and English and Spanish and in any language. It understands it, but it doesn't, for example, know that an effective essay has several different components and it must unearth specific things about yourself, so it will not know what you want to convey to admissions, so I think that's important to avoid and to be aware of. And this is where working with a coach at Stacey Blackman would be very powerful because in working with a coach, you can brainstorm, you can be insightful, you think about what makes you and what you want to convey to admissions, because again, a chat G-P-T-A Gemini is not going to be able to understand that and define that for you. I think that's a super useful set of information there and I want to just touch on a few things. I think you make a great point, you know, you're the only one that can say what matters most to you and why, so even if these AI tools were capable of answering that question, which they're not in a robust and fully meaningful way, you wouldn't want to use them for that anyway because that's, you know, exactly what the schools say, they don't want you to do. I think that's a really good thing to remind our listeners of. Now on the flip side of the coin, can you talk about some things that generally seem to be compliant and effective ways to use AI on your applications? And again, with the caveat that you're going to want to look closely at each school's application, details and nuances to make sure that you are compliant, but generally speaking, what are some effective ways that one might consider using AI? Yeah, so let's talk about what it is good for. So AI is extremely powerful and it should be used, in my opinion, to upscale your day-to-day job and, you know, writing essays and applying is a little bit of a part-time job and a very important job, so you should absolutely be using it to improve your capabilities there. If we think about writing your essays as having two components, so what am I writing and how am I writing it? So let's talk about how AI can help you do these two different things. So when you're thinking about what am I writing, you're thinking about what stories answer the essay questions specifically. So, for example, you might have a story of how a conversation with your grandparents fueled your career choice and that can be something that you could use to answer Harvard Business School Business Focus question about career choices and and how those point to your goal, but unless you brainstorm first or work with a Stacey Blackman coach or mentors and friends and reflect on what that moment meant to you, the AI is not going to help you, but if you write those ideas down and it's just a very long, right, kind of brain dump of these different moments and then you provide those to an AI and you say, okay, well here's a story. Does it actually convey a career choice? Does that make sense? So the AI can now help you on that. What am I writing? And if I write the story, does it convey what I what I want to do? So it's helping brainstorm, but again, you're providing insight in your clear on what you want to write and what you want to convey and it may say back that what you have written does not actually reflect the theme or the takeaway that you wanted to get across and that's a way to to have real-time feedback and then reword your story and you might even ask it, book me three other different ways of writing this idea and to convey exactly this point that I want to make. So that's one way of using it to define what should I write? And that if I'm understanding correctly in that example, it's sort of a I as sort of playing the role of a editor or a coach or a thought partner to kind of push back on your ideas, push back on your ideas and your thinking right to our previous point. Absolutely. Simply make that writing stronger and more coherent and compelling and to ensure that it's answering the question. Right. And even before you get into the writing concisely and clearly and your grammar being correct, because I think that's the how do I write it? How do I structure it, right? It is saying to you, okay, when you tell me the sentence about this meeting or this walk with your grandparent, I don't understand or I don't see that theme, right? So then that's an indicator to, okay, I'm not being clear. So you're absolutely right that it's your idea and it's giving you feedback on what this general intelligence reads in your language, which is fantastic. Now looking at the second part of how do I write, you can have AI help you a step at a time. So we said what not to do is send in the prompt and expect it to give you a fully baked ready to submit essay, but you could absolutely, but you could absolutely go in and prompt it to help you when section at a time. So let's say for example that you have a first paragraph, you're not sure if you're what matters most for the Stanford essay is being conveyed upfront and clearly in that first paragraph. So you could submit that first paragraph and say prompt the AI to give you an opinion of whether that paragraph is positioning what matters most to you and what is it that you're conveying and ask it to give you three different ways of writing that paragraph. So that's a way that you could chunk out and knowing what you want to convey and have it help you brainstorm and rewrite paragraphs and specific sentences because if you also take a single sentence and you say I want this to convey x, y, and z and help me polish that then that's a very powerful way of doing that. Notice that I point to the prompt so it's very important how you prompt it and to be specific and it is important that you know what you want to get out of that sentence or that paragraph. Beyond that the simpler use case is to say make this more concise show me three different ways of doing so and that can help you rejig and shift your language but then you've got to go back in there and say okay this one makes sense but it cut out the main point so I'm going to grab this one and make it my own and and reinsert right what what I have written. So those are some ideas and some examples of how it could be helped it could help you to ideate and and polish your ideas and then help you on the how to write right and and actually get it down on paper. I think that's really helpful and again I I'm hearing a consistent throughline from you and you are the expert on AI I am not but I hear you saying again we're talking about ideas that are your ideas that AI is helping you make stronger and more cohesive and more compelling and more concise we're not looking to the AI to give us ideas we're looking to it to make our writing and our thinking stronger and more compelling. Correct. Well now I'm a warrior and I I worry about everything and I'm imagining if I was applying to business school you know I might say oh you know I see that I'm going to need to sign this attestation talking about how I have and haven't used AI and folks that's something to take very seriously and because you know even though I don't know anything about I don't know much about AI I do know that you always want to be honest and candid completely honest and candid on these applications. So I might see that attestation and get nervous and say to myself I'm not going to use AI at all anywhere on my application because I want to be able to say that when I fill out this attestation you know is there a world in which people do that or are they missing out are there risk with that are they leaving assets on the table that could make their essays stronger in the case of essays stronger and more compelling. Yeah that's such a great point because the right the attestation is legal writing and it does feel very you're committing to that language you're you're attesting this is true and I would say that as long as the work is yours and you're using a tool to improve how you're writing and and I think this also means something a little different different people but at the end of the day this is a very new technology and we're only scratching the surface of how it can help some people use it to publish emails today other people use it to do entire workflows and and remove teams or replace a large portion of teams behind the scenes. I am as a technologist I'm a believer that every function will be impacted and top schools do recognize that there's the risk of can admissions possibly think that I did not write this essay and I would say generally from a big picture perspective now that the cat is out of the bag in AI is it's so available to everybody that that is a fear whether you use it or not and and so sorry sorry to say that even if you didn't use AI I think that the risk is out there but if you're using it as a tool and you're ensuring that the words sound like yourself and and I think actually the the best test to make sure that the essay sounds like you is a very new technology tool which is a family member and this is something that I'm sure you've told candidates as well Chandler to have someone very close to them read their essays and let them know if that sounds like them because at times people can sort of get in their head and say well I think Harvard Business School wants me to sound a certain way and so then you're writing doesn't reflect to you your stories how you sound and a family member could say this doesn't sound like you at all right and that could be an independent AI so I think this very like no tech solution is a great way to go but then on the other side of like what are you missing out in my opinion is you're missing out and showing this institution that actually does expect you as a leader to potentially lead people using AI that you're skipping the opportunity of understanding how to use the technology to upskill yourself and others so if you stick to the tips that we discuss today and you may also have new ideas of how to use it but again it's a tool and not doing the work for you I think that the reward is that you're upskilling yourself and you're doing it through the process of this application and you end up knowing yourself better you end up as a stronger writer you may be an international student that doesn't international applicant that doesn't work and speak English every day or write in English every day but going through the exercise and having an AI reflect your thoughts and polish your writing and you read it and you understand it and you pick up the grammar and the structure then that's upskilling yourself through AI and I think that's a big reward. I totally agree and I love your point about that that close friend or the family member to read your work and and give you honest and candid feedback about whether or not it sounds authentic whether or not it sounds like your voice and that's as you said that's true independent of AI I've spoken to so many people who use you know five syllable words when a one syllable word would get the point across and I just want to highlight what you were saying really really really folks speaking your own voice speaking a way that is true and authentic and resonant with who you are that's what they want they don't want you pretending to be someone else and they don't want you using AI to sound like someone else I I couldn't agree with that more and I I think we've all used AI to polish an email before and it will drop in a line and says this is an unparalleled opportunity and you're thinking to yourself I would never use the word unparalleled. Writing essays is nothing different if it's using words that you would never use you want to go in there and make them your own if you would never say that or you don't tend to use a lot of which you know or you tend to use shorter sentences versus long thoughtful ones again take that idea and make it your own but I think the reward there is to to have a different viewpoint right on the way you write and now you have one additional input but not something that's writing your essays for you yes yes and then I think to you know these these technologies are changing so quickly we're recording this podcast today in one month or three months or five months they're going to be newbreakers and things are going to change and schools are going to come out with additional guidelines so I just want to share a caveat with our listeners that this is Chandler Ved having a high level conversation with the information that we have at this particular moment recognizing that things will change and if you have a question if you're working on your you know NYU application and you have a question about AI you can call the admissions team at NYU and ask them you can call them from a payphone anonymously if you want to exactly yes yeah so so we're giving general guidelines you know in high level counsel but there are you know operator standing by at each of these schools who can give you very specific um application you know they're getting these questions and and in my experience they would love to have a conversation because they want you to do well they want you to create a great application they want you not to worry that you are somehow breaking the rules so they're there to answer any questions that you have but um I I want to wrap up with you of it because you've got so much and I know that there's going to be future conversations on future podcasts but anything you'd like to leave our listeners with today and I did want to just throw out um maybe a question about AI detectors I know that that's something that's out there that our listeners may not be aware of and and specifically interested if you have any comments about about that yeah I think that's a great um topic to end on so AI detectors are being used um through anecdotal information where where that um admissions offices may be using these from a technology perspective um they are another AI that's trying to identify AI so it's an AI trying to figure out if there's an AI behind the writing and it has been also prompted to look for certain patterns certain language um the interesting part about the AI detector is that it could unfortunately detect the use of AI if you're writing um to to a general voice so if you were using very general business terms like I I hope to uh tap an unparalleled opportunity which I think I just threw in every generic word possible in there um it it made detect AI right because that's the patterns looking into so instead of being concerned about the patterns or or how to backwards engineer it and avoid it um I think that going back to the tips that we talked about earlier and not assuming that AI is going to do the work for you it's sticking to uh chunking out like hey help me with the sentence and then even you know taking those suggestions and making them your own you're you're going to have no problem uh within AI detector uh saying that um the the work was AI um some will detect some percentage some will detect um I've heard stories of a hundred percent detection on something that was written by somebody um and I think the only kind of corner case um that I've heard which is quite interesting is that if AI was actually trained on your own writing so like let's say you authored a book or or several blog posts or um the you know you're maybe even your comments from reddit because um many AI tools were trained on reddit data it could have actually picked up on your writing so outside of that corner case which is really specific um in which case if you did write a book and it detected let's say you're writing to be very AI then maybe a full disclosure would know would be appropriate to say hey I wrote I wrote a book I happened to to check my writing but this is my own and I just want to disclose that that that's a very edge case but beyond that um sticking to doing your own work is going to reflect your thoughts and your capabilities which are also going to come across an interview and we hadn't touched up upon that um till this moment but I think it's very very important to say that the essay is always one component of the application and and whether you get admitted or not so if you didn't do the work if you didn't do um the self-reflection that's going to come across in an interview and it doesn't matter how great these essays were because AI wrote it for you you're not going to be successful because what you reflected in an interview is not going to match what's in the essays yeah but I totally agree and I think I think your comments about the AI detectors are really good you know I've spoken with clients who who use maybe they use AI to sort of push their thinking and and help them with editing and then they use an AI detector to take a look and say oh it flagged this sentence in that sentence let me take a closer look at those are they too general do they not sound like me and maybe you look at it and it's a sentence that you totally wrote yourself and you're fine with it and you leave it in but it's just another tool another resource to give you some insights as to what they might see um but but I I think your central truth here about centering your ideas centering your authentic voice centering your vision for what you want to do with your life and for that to be consistent across your essays your letters recommendation your interview that aligns with you know the whole point of this podcast so that's this is why you're such a fantastic guest event thank you so much for joining us and I do hope you'll come back to talk with us again oh absolutely excited to talk about AI anytime well if y'all are looking for more great free resources please be sure to check out our blog I was just looking at it and there is all kinds of great school specific essay information information on you know this changing world that we're living in and all kinds of resources for each step of the application process so take a look at that join us next week and until then be bold be authentic as of it has reminded us today and have a solid plan we'll talk more next week thanks so much for listening to this episode of B-Schooled from Stacey Blackman Consulting if there's ever something you'd like us to cover please email us at [email protected] we'd love to hear from you we'd also encourage you to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode and finally if you're planning to apply to business school at some point make sure you have signed up for our weekly Stacey Blackman Consulting newsletter and download our free personal branding guide both can be found on staceyBlackman.com under the hot topics menu thanks and until next time [MUSIC]