Only 12% of applicants made it into Harvard Business School last year. It's Dee Leopold's job to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Ms. Leopold, managing director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at HBS, joined the admissions office after graduating in 1980 and took over its top spot in 2006. Though she doesn't look at every one of the 9,000-plus submitted applications, Ms. Leopold personally reads applications for the 1,800 candidates invited to interview. About half of those are accepted.

Harvard is accepting more engineers than in the past, as well as students with international experience.

Ms. Leopold spoke with The Wall Street Journal about how Harvard makes admissions decisions and what really stands out in a B-school application.

Edited excerpts:

WSJ: How long do you spend on each application?

Ms. Leopold: Ten minutes minimum, and if you aggregate all the times I go back, probably 30 minutes or so. I sweep over, look at everything, and then go back.

Everybody goes in different piles -- things that I need to spend more time on, things that I trust my quick judgment on. I kind of go into hibernation after interviews. By the end of that period, I need a chiropractor.

WSJ: Candidates share who they are through their essays. How important are they from your perspective?

Ms. Leopold: I think people overestimate the role the essays play in the application. They're very, very helpful for the candidate, and they're a really good platform for starting a discussion in an interview, but we don't admit people because of an essay.

I don't need to have too much of a dramatic arc. There are some essays where I start reading and all of a sudden I feel like I'm in the middle of a very well-written novel. It can get overdone and overcrafted.

Sometimes the challenge in the essays is to be honest and to be clear. It may be helpful for someone to say, 'I have no idea what you're talking about.' De-jargonizing is helpful.

WSJ: Do you ever have waves of certain kinds of answers?

Ms. Leopold: For a while, people were getting advice that when we asked for three accomplishments you had to give one professional, one personal and one community service. I don't know where that came from. They got to be a little formulaic.

WSJ: From whom do you like to see recommendations?

Ms. Leopold: We have a question that says, 'Please describe the most important piece of constructive feedback you have given the applicant.' If a person can answer that, they know the candidate well enough. We don't run around giving constructivecriticism to virtual strangers.

The best recommendations have a lot of verbs. They say, 'She did this,' versus adjectives that simply describe you.

WSJ: Do you ever question your admission decisions?

Ms. Leopold: Sure. This process isn't perfect. We're like very experienced country doctors who see a lot of patients.

We're screening out undesirable qualities that would be toxic in our community. We like to think that our arrogance detectors are pretty good. We're looking for confidence, with humility.

I was interviewing at the Harvard Club in New York and the person I was supposed to interview was engaged in conversation with a mother and a daughter. They were adorable, but they wouldn't let him go. He knew he had 30 minutes, I'm standing there, and he had such grace and composure to treat these people well. That's a beautiful thing to watch.

WSJ: What do you want to see when somebody reapplies?

Ms. Leopold: You have to strike a balance between submitting the exact same application that didn't work the first time versus changing everything so it looks like you've had some out-of-body experience and you're a totally different person. Lots of times successful re-applicants use the same basics, but they simply reflect on it with another year of maturity or judgment.

WSJ: People pore over the class profile for insight into whether they'll fit. Are you seeing any trends in terms of who's applying, or who's attending?

Ms. Leopold: That class profile's really a result, versus the plan. We don't have a template.

I do see more people coming from entrepreneurial backgrounds, and we have more engineers. We've always had a really healthy mix of citizenship, although it is getting more difficult to classify a person by their passport.

I'd love to find a way to tell that narrative. We're going to try something a little different this year, asking [admitted students] to answer some questions: How many have been involved in a start-up? How many have worked abroad? That might not show up in their most recent work experience, which is the way we have captured a class before.

Melissa Korn

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• international [,intə´næʃənəl]   a.国际的，世界的   (初中英语单词)
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• challenge [´tʃælindʒ]   n.&vt.向....挑战；怀疑   (初中英语单词)
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• admission [əd´miʃən]   n.接纳；承认   (初中英语单词)
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• reflect [ri´flekt]   v.反射；反响；表达   (初中英语单词)
• healthy [´helθi]   a.健康的   (初中英语单词)
• abroad [ə´brɔ:d]   ad.海外；到处；广泛   (初中英语单词)
• harvard [´hɑ:vəd]   n.哈佛大学   (高中英语单词)
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• seeing [si:iŋ]   see的现在分词 n.视觉   (高中英语单词)
• narrative [´nærətiv]   a.叙述的 n.记事   (高中英语单词)
• aggregate [´ægrigeit]   v.&a.&n.聚集；共计   (英语四级单词)
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• classify [´klæsifai]   vt.把...分类(归类)   (英语四级单词)
• undesirable [,ʌndi´zaiərəbəl]   a.&n.不受欢迎的(人)   (英语六级单词)
• arrogance [´ærəgəns]   n.傲慢；自大   (英语六级单词)
• profile [´prəufail]   n.侧面 vt.画...侧面   (英语六级单词)
• insight [´insait]   n.洞悉；洞察力；见识   (英语六级单词)