Lesson #1: apply early

If you are considering INSEAD, do yourself a favor and apply round 1.

Reason number one is housing. This is really relevant if you are like me, going to Fonty and want to share a house / chateau with a group of 5+ students. After spending a lot of time searching recently, my grand idea of living in a chateau has evaporated and I am now depressingly seaching through the remaining large houses on www.bonapart.org hoping that the pictures of run-down rooms or furniture have somehow improved since the day before. In the end, the most important thing for me is to end up with a great group of roomates. To me, great means a group where no one is from the same country and everyone is easy-going, fun, and eagre to learn from the others. One of the most rewarding elements of my career to date has been the growth I have experienced by working with people of so many nationalities in 5 countries across the America's, Europe, & Asia. The diversity of the INSEAD class is one of the main reasons I chose to go to there and I want to use my living environment as a tool to help me gain the most from this.

The second reason to apply in round 1 is that being accepted early means you have more time to enjoy one of the best periods of the MBA. Let's call it P0; that's the time between knowing you are going to INSEAD and the day you actually start P1. P0 is great because your romantic ideas of how great the MBA is and how much you will get out of it haven't been tarnished by reality. In addition, things that may have stressed you out before can now simply be taken is stride as you know it will only be x more months before none of it is relevant anymore.

Plus, just because it is P0 doesn't mean you cannot start the socializing part of the program. In fact, I have been able to meet with about 10 future classmates in the last few weeks. I think that with a short program and rather large class size like INSEAD's, networking with classmates before the program starts is really valuable. While going to a school confined to a few villages in France certainly facilitates bonding with classmates, I expect that in one year from now I will look back and be amazed that the program has gone by so quickly and I haven't been able to get to know nearly as many as I had hoped.

The final reason to apply early is that it seems that R3 & R4 have very few seats to compete for. The statistics I have seen showed that 385 seats had been offered through R2. Even after adjusting for yield, I would say that the later rounds are going to be relatively more competitive. Good luck to those of you still waiting for an admissions decision and even better luck with housing if you are admitted!