Journal Fortunato_NC's Journal: My name is Verlin Henderson, and I'm one of the HBS 119 2

The article is already available online, and if you've done the soul-sucking registration required, you can view it here.

Being quoted in a major New York City news daily has been a goal of mine since I first saw the Wall Street Journal as a child in my local library. (What can I say, I was a strange child.) I came close last year, when I was interviewed for a WSJ article on the Google IPO, but that article ended up being cut from the Journal and only being available on their website. When Tom Zeller, the author of this article, approached me via Cafe Press, I was a bit apprehensive, since I still have applications pending at other schools. But I realized that if my stance on the HBS 119 matter made any sense at all, I shouldn't be afraid to go on record about it.

I talked to Mr. Zeller for about 45 minutes on the phone, and at the end of our conversation, he asked me to send him an email with my thoughts on the whole matter. Here's the text of the email I sent him later that night. I feel like it explains my thoughts on the subjects discussed quite well.

Tom,

In hopes that your editor will get you the space you want, I'm just going to go ahead and try to do a braindump, to get all my thoughts on the whole HBS/ApplyYourself matter down. I recognize that since I'm one of the students who saw a ding letter, I can speak a little more freely than those who saw a blank screen and feel like HBS or the other schools might change course (although by this point, I think the genie's out of the bottle).

Best of luck with your article. If you'd like to talk some more, my number at the office is (XXX) XXX-XXXX.

--Verlin Henderson

On "hacking":

You asked me if I would consider this hacking. I think I may have hemmed and hawed a bit too much previously. It's not hacking. It's cracking, but it's not very technically sophisticated cracking. brookbond's realization that you could cut and paste the URL from one school's acceptance letter to another was probably obvious to several other people at the time of his posting, and some of those people may have ended up among the dinged, even though they discovered the flaw independently. ApplyYourself could have made the "hack" much more difficult by using the HTTP POST method instead of the HTTP GET method, as we discussed over the phone.

Now, I forgot to mention this earlier, but there is what I consider a real hack in the history of b-school decisions. Ironically enough, it impacted HBS as well. Several years ago, an HBS applicant realized that Harvard created student's email account names with a distinct pattern, something along the lines of using your first initial, middle initial, and the first six letters of your last name. (i.e., Verlin Henderson's email address at HBS would be vrhender@harvard.edu) He then sent an email to his theoretical email address every few minutes. When the emails he was sending stopped bouncing back as undeliverable, he knew he had been accepted, even though decisions were not due to to be released for several days. I believe that this particular hacker ended up attending and graduating from HBS despite his transgression.

On ethics:

Definitely, there is an ethical component to this. If you took the shortcut and attempted to view your decision early, you're guilty of a minor ethical lapse. This doesn't make the applicants unethical people, however. Applicants are under a lot of pressure. I get questioned about the status of my applications three to four times a day, and I would imagine other applicants are in the same boat. Some people saw an opportunity to get the answer to a question they hear everyday, and they tried to take advantage of it. Was it wrong? Definitely. But to end the consideration of these students' applications for this relatively minor violation is akin to permanently revoking an individual's drivers license for being convicted of speeding.

On the other hand, brookbond, the individual who posted the technique on the BW forums, acted with forethought and malice. He knew that by posting those instructions, he was going to cause a lot of problems for HBS. Obviously, his actions go beyond unethical - he was being outright vindictive. The ethical move for him would have been to alert ApplyYourself to the problem as soon as he became aware of it.

On HBS and other schools' reaction to the whole thing:

There are a lot of players here. The most important one is HBS. Like I said before, I think if HBS had not been the primary target of this whole mess, the firestorm would not have happened. In fact, I understand a similar incident occurred a few years back with another school (I believe it might have been the University of Chicago GSB), and I don't remember hearing about that at all. Of course, I'm repeating something I read without attribution on the Internet, so take it with a grain of salt.

Ironically, though, HBS, renowned though it is for teaching leadership, seems to be the follower here. The first school to announce it was rejecting all of the "hackers" who checked their admissions status was the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Of course, they didn't have too much soul-searching to do - only two applicants checked their status. Would either of those applicants have gained admission prior to the fateful posting? We'll probably never know. Once Tepper announced its decision, however, several other schools followed suit relatively quickly.

It's important to note that the impact of brookbond's post would have been much worse had it come during the middle of the US business day, when many prospective students are discussing application issues on the BW forums. Would HBS or any of the other schools have dinged 500 (or more?) applicants outright?

I suppose the main point of this is that the reaction was overblown in comparison to the offense. Stanford (and possibly Tuck, we won't know until tomorrow) did the best job handling the situation. They treated their applicants like adults who made a mistake, and gave them the chance to answer for their actions. Obviously, the attempt to access the decision should have an impact on the applications of the "hackers", but alone, it is simply not sufficient evidence by which to judge a person's character.

There are theories that HBS and other schools are grandstanding on ethics here, because of the negative light that the recent spate of corporate scandals casts MBA graduates. Perhaps. I would hope that these programs don't feel the need to grandstand. Business education has a history of over 120 years in the United States, and the majority of business school graduates have done great things - created literally millions of jobs and founded or invested in companies that have made our world a better place. The actions of a few criminals who just happened to go to business school shouldn't overshadow the contributions that thousands of other MBAs make. Besides, most of the leaders of the corporate scandals weren't MBAs at all. (reference: http://www.whartonjournal.com/news/2002/09/30/Perspectives/Mba-Scapegoats.Should.Hold.Their.Heads.High-284806.shtml)

On t-shirts (Yes, I know you were waiting for this part!):

I still haven't sold a single item. (Note: I was wrong about this - I had sold three shirts, I just didn't know how to work Cafe Press's reports at the time I sent this email. I sent Tom a correction, and he included info on the three shirts I'd sold in the article. It's up to four now.) Like I said, the only people who would buy this stuff can't wear it anywhere, lest they be seen. Of course, I put the store up not expecting to sell anything. I do hope some of the unfortunate saw it and got a laugh out of it.

For kicks, here's exactly how I made the designs: The original designs are actually documents made with the TextEdit program that comes with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. The font is Georgia, and the point sizes range from 24 to 72. I picked the crimson color by eye each time, so the different files might not have lettering in the exact same color, although it's definitely close. I set the documents to print in landscape, and printed them to an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file using Panther's built-in .pdf creator. I then opened the resulting file with Mac OS X's Preview app, and exported the contents into a .jpg file. I uploaded the .jpg files to CafePress.com, wrote a product description (in only 200 characters, no less!), and clicked okay. It took me more time to decide which graphics to put on which shirt style than it did to actually create the graphics.

The text on the back of the shirts has gotten some notice. One poster on the BW forums called me a "Bush-hating goon". I'm actually a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, although I will cop to working for the Kerry campaign and voting Democratic in the last election cycle.

On what happens to me next, and what I've learned from the whole thing:

I hope the other schools where I've applied have a sense of humor. I *really* hope the other schools where I've applied have a sense of humor.

As I mentioned in our phone conversation, I'm a longshot at just about everywhere I applied thanks to my academic record. Getting kicked out of college does not do wonders for your graduate school applications. I was hopeful that 9 years of work experience, carrying a 3.94 GPA at the school I did graduate from (The University of Wyoming, thanks to their wonderful online BS in Business Administration program), along with a 750 GMAT score would show that I'm not the same person as the 20-year old who flunked out of NC State in 1996. Perhaps choosing to view my decision early shows that I haven't changed as much as I thought I have.

Given the chance, though, I know I'll make a positive impact on whichever program I end up attending. I know the same is true for the rest of the HBS 119, and the applicants from the other schools. At this point though, I just hope we get that chance.

What have we learned from this? Well, most MBA applicants spend way too much time on the Internet discussing these things. Over the last week, there have been tens of thousands of posts about what, after all, is just a bad coding decision on the part of some programmer who probably doesn't even work at ApplyYourself anymore. I've learned that a harmless peek isn't so harmless sometimes. I've learned that sometimes a small ethical lapse is a big deal, and I've learned that even if something sounds reasonable at first glance, it might be problematic if you stop and think about it. Hopefully, people will be able to laugh about this a year from now. I really hope we won't still be arguing about it on some message board somewhere.

Seeing as this email is longer than the article, I'll hazard to guess Mr. Zeller's editor didn't get him the space he might have hoped for. That's too bad. I feel like a realistic debate about how HBS's decision affected real, honest-to-God people could have come out of an article that wasn't just a rehash of what we already know. We know that HBS rejected 119 applicants in order to make a point about ethics. What would be nice to know is whether or not that was the right way to make the point or not.

This story is slowly dying, but there are a couple of rattles left in the body. I've already been contacted by other media outlets - If I believe that the end result will contribute something new instead of covering the same tired ground, you may see me on TV or hear me on the radio.

At any rate, what's done is done. HBS has dinged the lot of us (but not officially so until March 30th, lest we be guilty of knowing our decision early). Some people on the Business Week forums propose "continuing the fight", but I would suggest that the members of the HBS 119, the MIT 32, and especially the Tepper 2 would be better off spending their time considering their own next moves. Some of us have admits for other schools. Some of us were HBS or bust, and are facing decisions on reapplying (Just for the record, I'd recommend against reapplying to the school that feels like you're guilty of hacking into their computer system). Some of us might choose to give up the MBA dream altogether. We are all at a crossroads, just as we would have been on March 30th. One door has closed. Many remain open. Choose wisely.