Congratulations on getting your Round 1 applications in.
That said, when you talk to applicants, very few of them put their first-choice school in Round 1. Most submit to a safety school, or treat Round 1 as a rehearsal, and save the school they actually want for the Round 2 deadline at the end of the year. That is the real strategy for a large share of applicants.
This article is for those of you whose first choice is in Round 2 — four things worth doing in October.
1. Prepare seriously for Round 1 interviews anyway
You have just submitted, and you want to start on your Round 2 essays. That instinct is understandable. But first, assume an interview is coming and prepare for it.
There are three reasons.
You get to run the full application cycle once
Going through every stage of the process has an outsized payoff. Submitting essays, receiving the invitation, scheduling, preparing, sitting the interview — once your body knows that sequence, the weeks after you submit to your first-choice school feel completely different. Experiencing it for the first time at your dream school, versus experiencing it for the second time, is not the same thing at all.
A different school does not mean different preparation
You might think practice is pointless when the school is different. But most of what you are asked — your career so far, why an MBA, why now, what you learned from failure — is common across schools. The foundation you build for a Round 1 interview carries directly into Round 2. Only the school-specific part, Why this school, needs swapping out.
The year-end holidays will eat your time
This is the most practical reason. Most schools set their Round 2 deadline in the first week of January. And across East Asia, the New Year holidays and Lunar New Year arrive back to back. Traveling home, family gatherings, closing out the year at work — it becomes hard just to find someone to run a mock interview with.
In other words, there is almost no real window to start Round 2 interview prep from scratch. Getting it to a finished state now, in October, is itself the gap between you and other applicants.
2. Audit what you left unfinished in Round 1
Submitting Round 1 will have shown you where your application is weak. Do not stop here — close the gaps you still can.
Test scores
If you are not satisfied with your GRE or GMAT score, it is worth continuing to sit the test. For both the GRE and the GMAT, you choose which scores to send. If a retake comes out lower, you simply send the better score. The downside risk of retaking is effectively zero.
There is a cap, though: five attempts per 12 months for both tests. Deciding to "just take it every month" will burn through your allowance before the year is out. Check how many attempts you have left, then decide in advance where to spend them between now and the Round 2 deadline.
Raising your score matters beyond admission decisions. At a good number of schools it feeds directly into scholarship selection. If a few points decides whether a non-repayable award comes attached to the same admit, the cost of one more sitting pays for itself.
What to do at each score range is covered in detail here.
Related articles:
GPA
If you are not confident about your undergraduate record, it is too early to give up. Using a credential evaluator such as WES, a Japanese transcript may convert into something closer to its real standing. We have covered the procedure before — worth a look if you have not started.
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3. Book coffee chats with current students
October is the best month of the year to hear from current students.
It comes down to timing. The class a year ahead of you enrolled only one or two months ago. The campus, what the classes are actually like, the gap between expectation and reality — all of it is still fresh in their memory. And full-blown recruiting has not started yet, so they have relatively more time. These conditions line up only once a year.
After the new year, they get busy with internship recruiting and reply rates visibly drop. If you are going to reach out, reach out now.
What you want is not what the brochure says. What differed most between what they imagined and what they found. Which class disappointed them. Where they struggled as a Japanese student. That kind of firsthand material is what turns the Why this school section of your Round 2 essay into something nobody else could write.
4. Go all in on your current job
Finally, the thing most often overlooked: put everything you have into the job you are in now.
As application prep reaches its peak, the work in front of you starts to look like a countdown to departure. Slacking off here is not the rational move.
First, your resume keeps updating. The Round 2 deadline is in January. Any result you land before then is another line you can write. Your application materials can be improved right up to the moment you submit.
Second, your relationship with your recommenders. The managers and colleagues writing your letters are watching how you work right now. A letter about someone who visibly coasted once study abroad was decided reads differently, between the lines, from a letter about someone who stayed at full effort to the end.
And the biggest one: you keep your options open. In a tough hiring environment, the value of holding several options rises every year. If you leave a strong record behind and depart with your colleagues cheering you on, you retain the reassurance that there is somewhere to return to in two years. That reassurance is the foundation that lets you take real risks while you are abroad.
Preparing to study abroad and doing your current job well look like a trade-off. They point in the same direction.
The three months to Round 2 are denser than the six months that led to Round 1. Interviews, tests, coffee chats, essays, and your day job — running them in parallel only works if you decide up front what has to be finished by when.
Use Gradigo to manage your application progress. Work backward from the Round 2 deadline and clear the tasks one at a time.
