你是否曾经思考过，成功申请哈佛商学院（Harvard Business School）需要满足哪些条件？GMAT高分是毫无疑问的。哈佛每年招生900人，收到的申请数量却超过9,000份，而且申请者的GMAT平均分都在700分以上。

    那么，申请者怎么才能脱颖而出？迪•利奥波德1980年获得哈佛MBA学位，已在哈佛商学院工作多年，近六年来一直担任招生主管。我们不妨听听她高见。

    利奥波德总有办法让紧张的申请者在最后一关、也就是面试中放松下来。她告诉他们，比如她到时候会查收一下电子邮件，因此请他们写下3、4个问题，面试结束后她可以问他们这些问题。有一次，遇到一个特别紧张的面试者，利奥波德提了一个自认很容易回答的问题：“假设今天是新年前夜，你有很多新年计划，你希望在新的一年能在哪些方面取得进步……”

    结果，这一招居然不管用。可怜的家伙还是坐在那儿，如坐针毡。最后，他说：“我希望能做事更有条理一些。”

    “好，”利奥波德说，当时她想：“接下来我该说什么呢”于是，她让他举个例子。

    “我本以为这趟行程该带的东西都带了，”他说。“但昨晚我到了波士顿，住进酒店的时候已经晚了。时间已经是周日晚上的10点。我打开行李，这时，我发现居然没有准备衬衫，而第二天一早9点我就得去哈佛商学院面试。”

    利奥波德开始有了兴趣。他当时正穿着一件衬衫，干净雪白，熨得平平整整。“你怎么办？”

    “我穿上了我的大学生联谊会T恤，”他说。“然后做了一块广告牌挂在身上：‘我愿意拿T恤交换一件正装衬衫’。然后，我走到了街头。”

    录取！“这就是我们希望在现实生活中看到的，”利奥波德解释称。“也就是能想出办法的人。不抱怨，不装腔作势，就是这么简单。”

    那位申请者的年龄不到20岁。他参加的是哈佛商学院的“2+2计划”，即在每届MBA招生中为大三学生留出约100个名额，这些人会保留学籍，完成本科学业并工作两年后在进入哈佛就读。

    Have you thought about what it takes to get into Harvard Business School these days? Stratospheric board scores, that goes without saying. Harvard receives over 9,000 applications for 900 spots, and the average score on the GMAT for the applicant pool -- the applicant pool -- is over 700.

    So how does one stand out? Dee Leopold, who earned her Harvard MBA in 1980 and has been working at the B-school for many years, the last six as director of admissions, offers some clues.

    Leopold has tricks she uses to put nervous applicants at ease during their final hurdle, the mandatory interview. She'll tell them, for instance, that she's going to check her email, and invite them to jot down three or four questions she can ask them when she's finished. Once, when faced with a particularly anxious interviewee, she tossed him what she thought was a softball question: "Let's pretend it's New Year's Eve and you're making a list of resolutions of what you're going to be better at this year…."

    It didn't help. The poor guy sat there, miserable. Finally, he said, "I'd really like to be more organized."

    "Okay," Leopold says she was thinking, "Where am I going to go with this?" She asked him for an example.

    "I thought I'd packed really well for this trip," he began. "But I got to my hotel late last night, 10:00 on a Sunday night in Boston. I unpacked, and I realized I have a 9:00 Monday morning interview at Harvard Business School and I don't have a shirt."

    Leopold perked up. He was wearing a shirt now. Clean and white and neatly pressed. "What did you do?"

    "I put on my fraternity tee-shirt," he said, "made a sandwich board that said 'Will barter for dress shirt,' and went out on the street."

    Accept! "That's exactly what you want in real life," Leopold explains. "Somebody who's going to figure it out. No fuss, no fanfare, that's it."

    That applicant was barely 20 years old. He came in through Harvard's "2+2 Program," which sets aside about 100 slots in every class for college juniors who agree to postpone their enrollment until they've finished school and worked for two years.

    哈佛和大多数一流商学院一样，多年来一直希望MBA申请者至少应该具备一定的工作经验。从十年前开始，哈佛商学院就已经停止了招收完全没有工作经验的本科毕业生。但利奥波德称，为此哈佛损失了太多优秀的申请者，因为希望早日完成学业的学生们都申请去了法学院、公共政策学院和博士生项目。2+2计划是“走进本科校园，汇聚学生人气”的一种方式。利奥波德称：“然后我们可以谈谈MBA学位，它不只是打开一扇门，而是让很多门都保持开启状态。我们不想让你现在就入学。但不妨从现在就开始考虑考虑？”

    哈佛商学院最希望通过2+2计划吸引“科技、工程和数学专业的学生。他们不太懂商业，但最终仍会从商，并且有所建树，因为他们知道如何做事，如何制造，如何思考。”利奥波德称，哈佛可以在这个基础之上传授商业技能，合作技巧和说服艺术。“有点像既会反手，又会正手。”

    利奥波德和她的同事们每年到访约60家本科学校，宣讲2+2计划，有些学校传统上并非不是哈佛的生源地。（“我们喜欢位于密歇根州弗林特的凯特林大学（Kettering），”即前通用汽车学院（General Motors Institute），以工程学院和合作项目著称）如果说有什么问题的话，那就是这个项目近年来太成功了，产生了利奥波德称为“松鼠钻进喂鸟器”的现象，也就是喧宾夺主的问题。

    被利奥波德比作“松鼠”的是“那些还在娘胎里就知道自己将来希望成为投资银行家的人”，他们把2+2计划视为捷径。倒不是利奥波德对投资银行家有什么看法。（“我有一些最慷慨、最友善的同学就在华尔街工作。因此，我绝不会，你明白的……”）利奥波德说，只是松鼠虽然很可爱，但却具有一定侵略性，它们最终挤走了鸟儿。接着，她讲了另一个故事。

    “故事发生在招生办公室的楼下，”利奥波德说。“当时所有人都在楼下集合，个个都很紧张。他们在想，招生办公楼简直比牙医诊所还可怕。我下楼叫一个人，带她上楼面试。远远地，我看到这位年轻姑娘在楼梯半道停住了。她说：‘稍等，我得下楼一趟。’她说，她刚才告诉坐在她旁边的人，到了3点钟就应该自己上楼去面试。“我必须得和他们说一声，不是这么回事，到时候会有人带我们上楼。”

    “这些事情真的会触动我，”利奥波德说。“这么年轻，在全力投入一件事的时候还能够想到别人，真的很了不起。”录取！

    译者：老榆木

    Like most top-tier B-schools, Harvard has long preferred that its MBA candidates arrive with at least some job experience. It stopped accepting students straight out of college a decade ago. But according to Leopold, Harvard was losing too many fast-track candidates to law schools, public policy schools, and Ph.D. programs. The 2+2 option was conceived as a way to "get on a college campus and attract a crowd," Leopold says. "We could then talk about this degree that doesn't open one door, it keeps many doors open. We don't want you to come now. But what if you think about it now?"

    The students Harvard wants to attract most through 2+2 are "STEM people -- science, technology, engineering and math. People that don't know a lot about business, but they're going to end up in business, and they're going to be really good at it because they know how to do things, make things, think through things." Start with that, Leopold says, add what Harvard can teach -- business know-how, collaborative skills, the art of persuasion --and "it's like having a backhand and a forehand."

    Leopold and her colleagues promote 2+2 with visits to about 60 college campuses a year, not all of them traditional Harvard feeder schools. ("We love Kettering in Flint," the former General Motors Institute, known for its engineering school and co-op program) If anything, the program has been too successful in recent years, giving rise to a predicament Leopold describes as "squirrels at the bird feeder."

    The squirrels in Leopold's analogy are "people who've known they want to be investment bankers since they were in diapers," and see 2+2 as a shortcut. Not that Leopold has a problem with investment bankers. ("Some of the most generous and kind classmates I have are on Wall Street. Therefore I would never, you know, geez….") It's just that, well, cute as they are, squirrels are aggressive, Leopold says. They crowd out the songbirds. Then she tells one more story.

    "It happened downstairs in the admission office," Leopold says. "Everybody congregates down there. They're all nervous. They're all thinking this is worse than the dentist's office. I go down to pick someone up and bring her upstairs for an interview. And this other young woman I was watching from a distance, she stops halfway up the stairs and says, 'Wait, I need to go back downstairs.' She had told the person sitting next to her that she should just go up the stairs at 3:00. She said, 'I have to tell them no, someone will come and get you.'

    "Those are the things that really get me," says Leopold. "Wow, when you're so young and self-absorbed and you can already think about somebody else, that's, like, really beautiful." Accept!