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CAMBRIDGE ESSAY SERVICE IS FEATURED CONSULTANT IN WSJ STORY: HBS SAMPLE PUBLISHED

 
New E-Businesses Help Students Write,And Rewrite, Their Admissions Essays
By PAUL GLADER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 10, 2002

Hoping to major in marine biology at a top university, a wealthy Massachusetts girl laced her application essay with smiley faces and wrote that she once visited an aquarium, "sort of liked fish" and thought the movie " 'Free Willy' was so cool."Sanford Kreisberg, the founder of Cambridge Essay Service, wasn't amused. He advised her to research her field more thoroughly, gave tips on how to write more effectively and told her to "get the smileys out." Otherwise, "it would have been really damaging," he says. "This was just giggly and immature."
. . . .
"The reason you hire an editor is the same reason you don't teach your own child to drive. It is just better done with a third party," says Cambridge Essay's Mr. Kreisberg, 55 years old, who taught a course on writing personal essays to Harvard College freshmen from 1981 to 1989.What a service can do best is "stop the applicant from saying something damaging or politically incorrect," Mr. Kreisberg says. He advises students to steer away from "outward bound" or "climbing the mountain" essays. He says an essay can go back and forth 30 times before he and the client are satisfied.

"Here are examples of essays . . . . submitted to Cambridge Essay Service:
 

* * *A Harvard Business School applicant has refined the opening drafts of an essay in which he is asked to discuss a recent leadership experience. The essay editor, Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge Essay Service, advised the applicant to be "less prissy and more vulnerable" if he wanted to break out of the field of "high-scoring, blue-chip applicants." Mr. Kreisberg asked him to use a distinctive voice, quotes, real testimony, self-revealing details and drama. It took eight drafts, but he got in. Company names have been changed.

Before:

In my capacity as both a second year venture capital associate and leader of Elmbank Industries' [a portfolio company] 18 Employees, all of whom were older than me, I coordinated the creation and implementation of E-Elmbank, an Internet sales channel. Developing a strategy and project scope for E-Elmbank required innovative thought and initiative, and implementing the plan within the legacy business would prove a greater challenge.
 

After:

During my first trip to the headquarters of Elmbank Industries as a second year venture capital associate, Sam Rhodes, my supervisor, introduced me as the E-Elmbank.com project manager. Then he asked me to say a few words. I swallowed hard and started by asking the group of 18 for help. My self-effacing humor was overdone. I rambled. I patronized these workers, all of whom I would desperately need. Later, Sam waited until we were alone, touched me slightly on the shoulder, and said it was "a great start." My nervous and rambling speech had been a disaster, but my boss was sticking with me. I had just witnessed great leadership.* * *
 
 
 

Saturday, March 26, 2005
Ask Sandy quoted by AP in Darmouth Hacker decision
Mar 17, 2005

Dartmouth biz school says applicants were judged case-by-case
 

Tuck's decision won immediate praise from Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge
Essay Service, which helps students apply to business schools. "Bravo," he said.
"It shows real leadership; it's not involved in silly ethics grandstanding."
 

By TIM McCAHILL
Associated Press Writer
 

CONCORD, N.H.­ Applicants to Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business who tried to get unauthorized early looks at admissions decisions were judged case-by-case, and an undisclosed number were admitted, a dean said Thursday.

Tuck will monitor those who were accepted, and those who were rejected can reapply, Dean Paul Danos said in a telephone interview from Hanover.

Applicants to a number of top business schools tried to get admissions decisions by using a hacker's instructions in a BusinessWeek online forum. The affected schools all used ApplyYourself, an online admissions system.

Some, including Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, rejected all applicants who tried to get in. They said the applicants had been unethical or at least showed poor judgment.

Tuck decided the incident, though serious, merited a different response.

"We didn't think the offense reached a level that a blanket rejection of everyone should take place," Danos said. "As far as I'm concerned, everybody that we've admitted are people of the highest integrity. Obviously, in some cases, there was a lapse of judgment - and they made a mistake."

Danos said 17 Tuck applicants followed the hacking instructions. He declined to say how many of them were admitted.

"I'm not going to say anything about the specifics," Danos said.

Tuck is sending out acceptance letters this week, he said.

After the incident was discovered, the school formed a committee to investigate. Those involved were asked to write letters explaining their actions, Danos said. He said admissions decisions were based on everything in an applicant's file.

Some of those who followed the hacker's instructions, including all the Tuck applicants, saw blank pages, while others saw decision letters before their access was denied.

"To me that's irrelevant because it was the intent," Danos said.

Tuck's decision won immediate praise from Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge Essay Service, which helps students apply to business schools.

"Bravo," he said. "It shows real leadership; it's not involved in silly ethics grandstanding."

---

Sandy quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education Hack Story
http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/03/2005030901n.htm

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

"There's a generational issue," Mr. Kreisberg said. "The judges in this case have not grown up with the Internet. It's kind of like the traffic-court judge who doesn't know how to drive."

Wednesday, March 9, 2005
 

Harvard and MIT Join Carnegie Mellon in Rejecting Applicants Who Broke Into Business-School Networks
By DAN CARNEVALE
 

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said on Tuesday that they would not admit any of the 151 applicants who hacked into their business schools' computer systems to sneak peeks at their acceptance status. Carnegie Mellon University had announced a similar decision earlier. But not everyone agrees that the students should be automatically denied admission.

. . . .

Sanford Kreisberg, an admissions consultant who is president of Cambridge Essay Service, said the institutions that have made a blanket decision not to admit the applicants involved were overreacting. He said that he had talked to many of the applicants, and that many did not think that what they did was wrong. "It's somewhere between a prank and a hack," Mr. Kreisberg said. "Some people said they didn't realize it was wrong until later.

Some people were notified by an e-mail or by others saying, 'Check this out.'"

He also said that many people who grew up using the Web view the Internet differently than do older counterparts, who look down on the more freewheeling aspects of online life. "There's a generational issue," Mr. Kreisberg said. "The judges in this case have not grown up with the Internet. It's kind of like the traffic-court judge who doesn't know how to drive."
posted by Sandy Kreisberg at 6:59 PM 0 comments

 

Published on Thursday, March 03,
2005
Hacker Tips Off B-School Applicants
Students could check on admissions status a month early
By DANIEL J. T. SCHUKER
Crimson Staff Writer

Tipped off by an online hacker, applicants to several of the nation's top business schools, including Harvard Business School (HBS), could access internal files on the schools' websites and ascertain their admissions status a month early. The admissions websites were vulnerable for over nine hours yesterday before the hacker's instructions and the admissions letters were taken down.

. . . .
Sanford Kreisberg, a business school admissions consultant who follows developments at HBS closely, said that "this was probably not HBS's fault, but the software vendor's." Kreisberg added that the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Cornell College, had experienced problems with online admissions programs in recent years. "Things could be worse," he said.
posted by Sandy Kreisberg at 6:50 PM 0 comments

Ask Sandy on the TODAY show
I was on the TODAY show on March 9th 2005 talking about the HBS hacking flap: see this, if you dare:

windows media player or mac quick time
 
 

Expert: Applicants don't deserve rejection
JAY LINDSAY
Associated Press
MARCH 9, 2005

Business school applicants who peeked into their school's Web site to see if they had been accepted may have made a stupid mistake, but not one worthy of rejection, a college-prep coach said.

Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge Essay Service, which helps students apply to elite U.S. business schools, accused one of the schools, Harvard, of "ethics grandstanding." He was responding to Harvard's decision Monday to reject 119 applicants for following a hacker's instructions and visiting the school's admissions site for an early glimpse at decisions.

MIT followed suit Tuesday, rejecting 32 applicants, while Carnegie Mellon made a similar decision last week.

While the business world is getting battered by stories of ethical failures - such as fraud or excessive salaries - Harvard can make an ethics point by taking on an easy target instead of a more powerful constituency, Kreisberg said Tuesday. "They can swat it hard and preen," he said.

Three of the Harvard applicants told The Associated Press they believed the school overreacted, and they disputed that accessing what they considered a public Web page with their own identification numbers was either a "hack" or "unethical," as Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark said in a statement. All three spoke on condition of anonymity.
 
 
 

The Harvard Crimson Quotes Sandy on HBS taking youngsters.
Business School Strategy Snags Younger Stars
By LAUREN A. E. SCHUKER
Crimson Staff Writer
THE HARVARD CRIMSON
NOVEMBER 6, 2003
 

http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/today/article349879.html
 

Some people are just ahead of the pack.

For Oliver Thomas, summers off from Oxford University meant time spent in an office tower, working with CEOs and top executives as an investment banker or accountant. For Lisa B. Schwartz 03, internships at the U.N. and the Supreme Court of the United States offered a chance to relax from the hectic pace of maintaining her 4.0 GPA. Thomas, 23, started at Harvard Business School (HBS) this fall after graduating from Oxford University. Along with ten other students in this class, he comes to the prestigious B-School right out of college. For these students, Harvard Business Schools Early Career Initiativewhich aims to attract students within three years of graduating collegewas just the ticket.

But it remains to be seen whether the initiative, which has been underway for at least three years, is rewriting the rules of HBS admissions, or merely acknowledging those students who are exceptions to them.

"This could be driven by competition over unformed brainiacs with law schools and even Stanford Business School, which has always trended younger," said Sanford Kreisberg, an independent admissions consultant who runs a much-followed thread on Business Weeks website about elite business school admissions called ASKANDY. “Ivy grads with nose-bleed GPAs and unclear career goals used to be hired for two years by investment banks and consulting shops during the boom. Now those kids, by default, go to law school, the haven of the unemployed and undecided. HBS may want some of that DNA.”

But Kreisberg questions the level of follow-through on the initiative.
”They have said this in the past, and results are slim,” he says. Yet those nose-bleed GPAs appear to be alive and well across the river, some the results of the Early Career Initiative.
Both Thomas and Schwartz arrived at HBS this fall, each superstars in their own right. Schwartz, whose 4.0 GPA also earned her a spot Yale law school, will be concurrently pursuing her J.D. and M.B.A., while Thomas hopes to use his HBS experience to help his mother country, England, land the 2012 Olympic Games. But Thomas says he doesnt feel that one has to be a super-star to come to HBS right out of college.
I dont think the word superstars is appropriate at all, he says, We are just people who have enjoyed opportunities and are enthusiastic about looking for ways in which to build ourselves and about experiencing different things and different people.
Thomas says he decided to apply to HBS on a whimhe went to an admissions presentation in London for future interest, and when he found out about the early career initiative, he applied. In matriculating, he ditched his offers from an investment bank and Proctor and Gamble in favor of crossing the pond for B-School.
I always thought that you had to be 25+ for the premier business schools, says Thomas, but I gathered from this presentation that that is not the case, and that a lot of people wait too long.

With summer jobs at investment bank Goldman Sachs and the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Anderson under his belt, Thomas appliedbut, he says, to be honest, I thought it was a massive outside shot that I would win myself a place.
Thomas sees his summer experiences as having been key to his gaining admission. I was really lucky that I had really high-quality experiences over the summer with those firms, Thomas adds. I never just had shadowing jobs, but was actually given real responsibility, so for someone my age, I managed to accumulate a significant amount of experience just in my summers.
A Shifting Focus
Efforts to gain a larger early-career student population at HBS come as a result of a variety of interestsfrom the pedantic to the practical.
We had created a self-fulfilling prophecy, where because we emphasized getting work experience, people started...getting a little more experience, and we started admitting more experienced students. HBS Dean Kim Clark told Bizforward magazine in September 2001. Currently, the average work experience of HBS students is 4 years.
We started hearing things, where a lot of companies have decided that they are going to try and keep their very best people from going to business school, he said. We were worried that we were going to start losing the very best people who would not ever go to business school.
In the mid-90s, HBS had about one to two students per class who came right from college, according to HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Brit K. Dewey.
A couple of years ago, the school started noticing some things about our admission candidates, says Shad Professor of Business Ethics Joseph L. Badaracco. One, we got very, very long resumesword had gotten around that it was to have twoeven threeentry-level jobs before applying. There was an experience creepand we ended up with students who had far too much experience, students who could apply for entry-level executive programs.
We were worried, Badaracco adds. We didnt want people to think that they had to work for McKinsey, then Goldman Sachs, and then apply to HBS after all that. But Badaracco says that the initiative does not mandate an about-face in HBS admissions procedures.
My hunch is that we will go more slowly, and try to get a sense of what the true experience has been for students right out of college, let a couple of years pass, he says.

There had been a very strong tradition of having people come to HBS right out of college, but then, the word was out on the street that you had to wait to go to B-school, Dewey says, noting that eBay CEO Meg Whitman came to HBS directly from Princeton University. Conventional Wisdom kept reinventing itself. So we looked at our applicant pool and said where are the amazing folks who want to come out of college?

Furthermore, faculty felt that HBS signature case study teaching method was enhanced by a diverse age-range in the classroom, according to a Harvard Magazine article by Cizik Professor of Business Administration David A. Garvin. The method, which uses real-life business examples to spark discussions on organizational problem-solving, relies on students with different experiences and points of view chiming in, Garvin wrote. The Early Career Initiative was born out of this reactionand with brochures and postcards printed, HBS admissions offers are doing more than ever to help spread the word that there is no right time to apply to business school.

Everyone seems to think that having oneor even twojobs after college will make you a more competitive candidate at this place, Dewey says. Very few people apply right out of college. But we dont feel that there really is a right time to apply, and its up to each individual to take stock in where they are now. We want people to think about HBS as an option right out of college. But some say they are concerned about the larger implications of the change in student demographics.

Kreisberg says that the change in targeted applicants comes at a time when HBS is undergoing what some call an academizationturning away from a management school into a technical school. He says that having more students come directly from college might hurt HBS in the long-run, as it pushes the academization process further. "If 20-30 percent of the class were new grads, it would be a sad trend towards more unreality over there," Kreisberg says. “Their vaunted case method is devolving away from a Socratic dialog among experienced young adults towards problem sets for whiz kids. “
Indeed, some at HBS concur with Kreisberg regarding the dangers of academization.
Too many of our cases are turning into glorified problem sets, says Chair of the MBA Program W. Carl Kester in Galvins Harvard Magazine article. They have a methodological line of attack and a single, preferred, right answer. They are exercises in applied analysis.
He points out that action-skills of diagnosis, decision-making and implementation, now all receive less attention in the schools MBA curriculum. Regardless, HBS marches on with the initiative.
As part of this plan, the HBS Admissions group visited over 30 college campuses this fall to help undo the misconception that business school is not an option for recent graduates. HBS receives just under 10,000 applications a year and takes roughly 1 out of 10 students, according to Dewey. While only 100-200 of those applications are submitted by students on the cusp of graduating from college, the one-tenth acceptance rate applies equally well to that group, Dewey adds.
Admitted, But Accepted?
Although changing admissions policies and procedures is one hallmark of the early career initiative, the integration of early-career students into the HBS community is also part of the equation.
Badaracco says that teaching HBS classes to a mixed audiencewith students right out college and students with heavy job experienceis harder in one way, and easier in another.
It makes it harder because we rely heavily on students discussions and insights, he says. We want students to have some real-world experienceand its just not an even playing field.
Despite Badaraccos reservations, however, students who have matriculated at HBS straight out of college seem to be content with their choice.
None of us have a problem with the classes and with having less experience in the job world than some of our classmates, Thomas says, referring to his early-career peers. We were all obviously a little apprehensive at first, but the school really made an effort to make us feel so welcome, so Im just happy the way its been so far. I am definitely treated as an equal.
Thomas adds that there is no sense of inferiority, either in the classroom or outside of it. We are in a position to contribute just as much as the rest of the class, he says. Everyone, no matter their background or working-world experiences, seems to universally have a wealth of leadership and life experiences. My classmatessome of whom are just arriving on campus from Iraq, some from McKinseyare a truly fascinating group of people.
Thomas says he hopes to go into consulting and plans to work for the London bid for the 2012 Olympic Games this summer.
Schwartz, who plans to go into government in the future, adds that she enjoys the challenge of HBS classes. I love the style of learning at HBS. The case method combines an academic and practical focus that I find so engaging across all my classes, she says, remarking on the collaborative nature of HBS classes. Everyone wants to help each other as much as possiblewe just went through our first round of midterms, and there was definitely a mind-set that everyone is in this together. Schwartz says the social life was also an easy transitioneven for the younger crowd.
Everyone at HBS has such different experiences that my coming straight from college is another unique background, she says. Of course, I stand out because I am youngerI have a lot of friends here who are 30, for example, so I went to my first 30th birthday party last week.

Staff Writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.
 

Harvard Crimson Quotes me on Rankings
HBS Blocks Media Access to Students
By DANIEL J. HEMEL
Crimson Staff Writer

Harvard Business School (HBS) will not give students e-mail addresses to BusinessWeek, the magazine that publishes a popular ranking of the nations business schools based in part on student satisfaction surveys. Wharton dropped from first place in the 2000 survey to number five in 2002. HBS placed third overall both years. It placed fourth in the student satisfaction category in 2000, and 14th in that category in 2002.
. . . .

According to business school admissions consultant Sanford Kreisberg, any survey which put Harvard and Wharton out of the top five would be laughed at. BusinessWeek will get the data they need to have Harvard and Wharton in the top five one way or another, Kreisberg wrote in an e-mail.
 
 

The Harvard Crimson Quotes Me on Rankings 2.
Magazine Gives Third Place Ranking to HBS
THE HARVARD CRIMSON OCTOBER 15, 2002
By LAUREN A. E. SCHUKER

Harvard Business School (HBS) maintained its third-place ranking when Business Week released its biennial rankings of the top U.S. business schools last week. According to Business Week, HBS now ranks behind both Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management and The University of Chicagos Graduate School of Business. The University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School, traditionally ranked among the top two programs in the country, fell four places this yearfrom first to fifth.

. . . .

Sanford Kreisberg, founder of Cambridge Essay Service, an admissions consulting firm for applicants to elite business schools, dismisses the Business Week rankings. "From an applicants point of view, the top three schools are still Harvard, Stanford, Wharton," he said. "And that is not likely to change year to year, as these rankings seem to do. Those places are, and remain, the hardest to get into and have the most clout with peers."

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 June 23, 1999

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By PAMELA MENDELS

[below an early story about web-based admission consultants, which after reveiwing all of them, the author wrote to me and said,

Thank you, Sandy.
You more than anyone else I interviewed gave me a real sense of what the business is all about. I only wish I could have worked into the story the successful essays cited by the Stanford/Harvard alum mags [which I had pointed out presented outlier essays about handicaps, etc. and mystified the process] , but I didn't have time by deadline to confirm/get comment from the university end.
 I will, indeed, keep you in mind for future stories. And if anything newsworthy crosses your desk, please give me a holler.
Pam Mendels]

          Controversy Over College Application
          Essay Sites
 

          Part of what is driving the services is the competition to gain entrance to
          elite colleges like Harvard, where about 18,200 students apply for one of
          the 1,650 freshmen slots. Fierce competition for acceptance into the
          top-tier business schools is helping, too.
 

          Then there is the Cambridge Essay Service, run by Sanford Kreisberg, a
          freelance writer who taught expository writing at Harvard for years.
          Kreisberg has been working privately with students on essays for about
          15 years, he said, once relying solely on fax, telephone and in-person
          communication. Now, with his Web site, about 30 percent of his
          business comes from overseas, as students from as far away as Pakistan
          and Lithuania grapple with the essay requirements of American colleges
          and universities.

          "The Web has allowed a small player like me to operate internationally,"he said, adding: "This is a perfect e-mail business."
 

          "I say 'look, what do you want to say here? What's your thesis? Could
          you provide more detail -- and write it again.'" Kreisberg said. "I can't
          write [the essay] for them. It's their experience."

          Perhaps most important, some admissions officers fear the services take
          advantage of the nervousness students and parents feel in applying for
          college and graduate school. "What bothers me is a lot of these services
          are, in essence, capitalizing on anxiety about the application process,"
          Furstenberg said.

          Kreisberg refutes that. He says that it is application essay writing that is
          anxiety-producing and he can assist in making it less painful.

          As for feeding inequity, company officials assert that unfairness has long
          been part of essay writing. The student who has a well-educated parent
          with time and a grasp of writing, or the student who is enrolled in a better
          suburban school with essay preparation courses, or the student whose
          parents pay for a writing coach all benefit from an unlevel playing field,
          they say.
\
 
 

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