~A CLEAR ADMIT EXCLUSIVE~
As many of you may know, former Wharton Admissions Director Thomas Caleel stepped down in June, and a search for his replacement is currently underway. Of course, the important work of the admissions office cannot be put on hold. Anjani Jain, vice dean and director of Wharton’s Graduate Division, has stepped in as interim director until Caleel’s successor is named. He is supported by a veteran staff of senior and associate admissions directors led by Judith Hodara, who joined the Wharton Admissions Committee in 2000.
Amid a busy season of travel to admissions events around the globe, we managed to catch up with Judith last week on the road. She shared enthusiastically about the new accelerated three-year JD/MBA program that the Wharton School will offer in collaboration with the Law School of Pennsylvania beginning next year.
In her answers below, she also helps demystify the application process for prospective applicants and offers some advice on how applicants can let their true voices come through in their essays. So read on!
Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at Wharton this coming year?
Judith Hodara: As we recently announced, the Wharton School and the Law School at the University of Pennsylvania are launching an accelerated three-year program leading to both the JD and MBA degrees. We’re really excited about this new opportunity to add to our joint and dual degree programs.
Students in the new program will spend the first year in Law School and the following summer in four Law and Wharton courses designed specifically for the three-year JD/MBA. The second and third years will include a combination of Law and Wharton courses, including capstone courses in the third year and work experience in law, business, finance, or the public sector in the summer between the second and third years.
Applicants must be admitted by both schools in order to enroll in the three-year program. Students in the joint program will be required to meet the Law School’s mandate to perform 70 hours of supervised legal work in a pro-bono setting in order to graduate.
CA: Walk us through the life of an application in your office from an operational standpoint. What happens between the time an applicant clicks ‘submit’ and the time the committee offers a final decision (e.g. how many “reads” does it get, how long is each “read,” who reads it, does the committee convene to discuss it as a group, etc.).
JH: Once an application is processed by members of our operations team, it is assigned to one of the student readers who are members of the admissions team. This first read is then shared with members of the admissions committee who re-read the file and make further recommendations on extending an invitation to interview.
If the invitation is offered, the application waits for another read once the interview report is recieved. The interviews are blind, so the interviewer will not have had access to the application beforehand. All of these applications with interview reports are then discussed in a series of committee sessions, and the final decisions are sent out 10 weeks after the deadline date.
CA: How does your team approach the essay portion of the application specifically? What are you looking for as you read the essays? Are there common mistakes that applicants should try to avoid? One key thing they should keep in mind as they sit down to write them?
JH: We are hoping students will be true to themselves when they write about the things that matter to them. They should keep in mind that we really do read the WHOLE application from start to finish. The essays do tell us so much about the applicant, both in terms of the content they choose and how they are able to express themselves.
There are not really common mistakes beyond assuming that the reader WANTS or NEEDS to read something specific; these become the applications where the applicant does not allow his or true voice to come out and leaves us wishing we knew more.
