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CATEGORY - ADMISSIONS DIRECTOR Q&A

Friday, December 19, 2008

Admissions Director Q&A: UCLA Anderson’s Mae Jennifer Shores

As we near the end of our Admissions Director Q&A series, we are pleased to bring you a recent interview with Mae Jennifer Shores, admissions director at the Anderson School of Business at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

As reported by BusinessWeek earlier this fall, Anderson is currently experiencing an application volume surge, in part due to the fact that more students seek haven in business school when the economy slumps. But in the BW article, Anderson’s dean also attributed the rise in applicants to the strength of the school’s entrepreneurship program and increased interest among candidates from Asia.

In the interview that follows, Shores provides a ton of information regarding social enterprise at Anderson, an area she feels applicants don’t always know enough about. She also gives some excellent pointers on how to craft strong and compelling application essays. (Hint: Don’t submit a 27-page answer when the question asks for 1,000 words…)

Clear Admit: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?

Mae Jennifer Shores: I wish applicants knew more about UCLA Anderson’s commitment to social enterprise. The school has a long track record of demonstrated involvement in social enterprise that predates much of the recent interest among business schools in the area. UCLA Anderson’s activities are unparalleled as they extend beyond student clubs and activities to include academic training and professional experience.

Social enterprise is found in the following academic, co-curricular and career areas:

• Elective courses: These include Leaders in Sustainability, Social Entrepreneurship, Business and Economics in Emerging Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Venture Initiation, Business and the Environment and others.
• Leaders in Sustainability Program: This multi-disciplinary program provides a mechanism for UCLA Anderson MBA students to pursue their interests in sustainability in collaboration with graduate students from across the university. The program prepares students who will be leaders in their professional fields to make key business and public policy decisions with an eye to sustainability. Students gain experiential knowledge by collaborating on client projects for local businesses, nonprofits and government agencies.
• Price Center for Management Development Program: This program offers industry-specific, executive development programs that are designed to help managers build essential skills as well as effective and profitable organizations. MBA students serve as teaching assistants or fellows in Price Center programs.
• Johnson & Johnson Health Care Executive Program: This program trains executive directors of community-based health care organizations, Head Start agencies and HIV/AIDS programs in Africa in health literacy. The program has effectively reduced work absenteeism, Medicaid costs for children’s ER or clinic visits by as much as 58 percent.
• Applied Management Research (AMR): As part of these projects, students spend 20 weeks examining a specific company, industry and strategic opportunity and develop strategic plans for recommendation and implementation. Past projects have included studying low-income Indian consumer attitudes and behaviors surrounding packaged foods and improving wait times at the nation’s largest free clinic.
• UCLA’s Net Impact chapter: The local chapter of national organization Net Impact is housed at UCLA Anderson. Net Impact’s mission is to improve the world by growing and strengthening a network of new leaders who are using the power of business to make a positive net social, environmental and economic impact.
• Careers in hundreds of organizations with missions involving social entrepreneurship, including the American Red Cross, Amnesty International, Hong Kong Trade Development Council, J. Paul Getty Trust, RAND Corporation, National Endowment for the Arts, US Agency for International Development, US International Trade Commission and others.

These opportunities are enhanced by the school’s location in Los Angeles, which has one of the most diversified employment bases in the United States. Los Angeles is home not only to small business (98 percent of firms hire fewer than 100 employees), but also to major industries such as finance, aerospace, biotechnology, defense, media and entertainment, high tech, health care and consulting.

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.). 

MAS: Once applications are complete (i.e., all required parts of the application have been submitted), they are sent out for review to individual committee members. Our review is holistic and based on the strength of the entire application. We read all files in their entirety rather than pre-screen applications based on academics, test scores or other criteria. We allocate whatever time is required to thoroughly read and assess applications. First reads can take up to an hour or more. Subsequent reviews may take less time.

Each file is read in its entirety and evaluated for the applicant’s admissibility in a given year. In the first phase of reviews, all applicants are either invited for an interview or denied without an interview. The number of reviews a file receives in this phase depends upon how clear the decision to interview or deny is.

The clearest decisions receive two to three reads. For those candidates who are interviewed, their application is read again in its entirety with the interview results included. Each file is read by two to five individuals before a decision to admit, deny or waitlist is recommended.

Following the post-interview evaluations, the committee meets formally and collectively reviews all the files once more, revising any decisions as deemed necessary based on group consensus. The makeup of our committee is very diverse, which allows for multiple perspectives in the evaluation process. The committee is comprised of seasoned admissions officers who represent formal training and direct experience in business, higher education and the not-for-profit sectors. Our varied, deep industry experience allows us to collectively craft a similarly rich and diverse class of students.

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?

MAS: When my team reads essays we are looking for clarity of thought and cogency. We look for an ability to clearly articulate what has transpired in your personal and/or professional life, how this has shaped who you are today and how these experiences have led you to pursue an MBA at this time. The best essays are genuine and introspective. The best advice we can offer any candidate is to heed the advice of admissions professionals rather than the advice of well meaning, but less informed, friends, colleagues and even alumni of MBA programs.

The biggest mistakes candidates make arise from ill-conceived assumptions about what the admissions committee is looking for in applicants. As a result, many essays are clearly tailored with a false sense of impression management. These mistakes play out in the following ways:

• Over-editing one’s essays. While it is fine to receive input from others regarding the clarity of one’s thoughts in essays, overreliance on others to edit, fine-tune or carefully craft verbiage in essays often leads to sterile essays in which one’s own personal voice is lost. Essays may also read as if they were written by multiple authors. Both actions call into question the authenticity of your work, as well as your personal integrity.

• Crossing the boundaries of appropriate disclosure. As admissions officers we are interested in getting to know applicants as individuals.  Including details about one’s life are fine as long as they are relevant to your MBA candidacy. While it is fine to highlight, for example, that your mother was ill for much of your undergraduate experience and that your need to attend to her illness negatively affected your grades, we do not need to hear the intimate details surrounding her illness.

• Ignoring guidelines. Applicants are evaluated not only upon their academic, professional and extracurricular experiences, but also upon the judgment calls they make as part of the admissions process. There is flexibility in the word limits of essays, but wide divergence from specified guidelines calls into question one’s ability to act professionally or perform well on a team. For example, I will never forget the essay from an applicant that ran 27, single-spaced, pages. The applicant had disregarded the 1,000 word limit (the equivalent of three double-spaced pages). Exacerbating matters, the applicant submitted an additional five-page essay to explain his decision to submit 10 recommendation letters, rather than the requested three. My reaction was: “This is very sad because this is an incredibly accomplished individual. I would have some real concerns about this person’s suitability on a team.”

• Confusing Shakespearean prose for business school writing. Applicants are eager to have their essays sound sophisticated and polished, full of lively prose and witty observations about their careers. That’s fine. Yet a common trap applicants fall into is being overly verbose, losing sight of the main points they want to communicate. Keep in mind that we are assessing your communication skills, not assessing your ability to write prose in the style of William Faulkner.

• Focusing on impression management. Applicants are prone to relying upon any number of techniques to improve how they appear to admissions committee members. While candidates should present themselves in the best light possible, they should avoid any hint of misrepresentation that can come from using business jargon, exaggerating achievements and failing to recognize the contributions of others to their success. It is all too common for us to read essays that are intentionally peppered with vague phrases such as “I’m a socially responsible businessman” or “I want to work in the technology space.” If you don’t support these statements with real-life examples of what you want to do, it sounds contrived and purposeless. Similarly, embellishment of one’s accomplishments or focus on oneself to the exclusion of others calls into question one’s integrity and capacity for teamwork.

Avoiding these mistakes can dramatically enhance your candidacy and chances of admission. We receive upwards of 4,000 applications annually and draw a diverse set of talented applicants to our program. In a pool this diverse, the need to find some unique way to differentiate yourself from the others is not the critical element that many believe it to be. 

While we do admit exceptional individuals to UCLA Anderson who have worked on nuclear submarines, been Olympic athletes or achieved great success in investment banking, there are other candidates we find equally attractive. These individuals may never appear on the cover of Financial Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek or the New York Times, but they are striking and noteworthy for being well-rounded contributors to their communities, thoughtful, genuine and ready for an MBA.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Admissions Director Q&A: NYU Stern’s Isser Gallogly

With round two application deadlines fast approaching, we are beginning to wrap up our Admissions Director Q&A Series here at Clear Admit. Today we are pleased to add a recent conversation with Isser
Gallogly, executive director of MBA admissions at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Gallogly understands the MBA and its potential for changing people’s lives first hand. “I am on my third career,” he said. He worked in banking after college and then returned to business school to obtain an MBA as part of a career shift toward marketing. After almost a decade working for Unilever and Loreál, he decided to shift again toward education and academia. “I know how much an MBA has changed my life both personally and professionally, and helping others on that journey seemed to me to be a very gratifying job opportunity,” he said.

Indeed, Gallogly and his staff do seem committed to helping prospective applicants. “We want to be people’s partner in the application process,” he said. To this end, NYU Stern has a range of resources for the prospective applicant in the Applying to Stern section of its website, including admissions directors’ tips and advice, podcasts, interviews with the media and more. You won’t want to miss those or the transcript of our conversation with Gallogly, which follows.

Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at NYU Stern this coming year?

Isser Gallogly: Well, I have a lot to choose from. I think one of the most interesting things that we’ve been doing lately is a series of Market Pulse events. There is so much going on in the world right now, and we’ve been having panels with our star professors and noted faculty talking about the impact of the financial crisis on the global economy and solutions for the future. .

Really, it’s just part of what you get at NYU Stern. We are a dynamic, plugged-in institution. We really try to stay on the absolute cutting edge of what is happening in the world. What that means is that our students have incredible access to all kinds of people – from the dean of the school, Thomas Cooley, to Professor Nouriel Roubini, who was predicting the current recession a couple of years ago at the IMF, to Professor Ed Altman, a leading expert on corporate distress and default.

We are dynamic, forward looking, innovative, and we change. This was a different year, and in different years you do different things. That said, I could definitely see the Market Pulse events becoming an ongoing series. They have been so successful – some have been standing room only – and it’s very likely they will be continued over the course of next year. Obviously we are all hopeful that the economy will change for the better, but especially given current conditions, I think this new addition has been an exciting and valuable one for both Stern and the business community at large.

[Several portions of the Market Pulse series are available on video on the NYU Stern website. Click here to learn more.]

CA: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?

IG: There are two big misconceptions when you are an elite business school in New York City. The first is that Stern is a finance-only institution. The second is that the community may not be collaborative. Both of these ideas are not correct.

Of course, we are close to Wall Street and we do have a wonderful finance program, and people certainly come here to pursue careers in the financial sector. But we also have a phenomenal marketing program. In fact, we are ranked number five in research produced among top business schools.

Within marketing we have a great entertainment and marketing focus, and we also have expertise in the area of luxury and retail. On the marketing front, not only will you get to work with CPGs – Colgate, Kraft, Unilever, etc. – but we also have a lot of marketing opportunities with luxury/retail, financial services and pharmaceuticals. At Stern marketing is much broader in its range of industries.

And yet people don’t know as much about a lot of these things at Stern. We also have a wonderful program in entrepreneurship and social enterprise. Really, the list goes on and on. I think if people looked a little deeper, they would see we are very strong across the board.

The second thing that people think when they think of New York – for right or wrong – is that it can be a very aggressive culture. I think the surprise that people get when they experience Stern is that the culture is very collaborative, very diverse and very team based.

We have one of the highest percentages of women, we have people from all over the globe and we have people who bring experience from a range of industries, from investment banking to entertainment to marketing. But as different as they all are, what these people all have in common is that they respect one another and work together. And I think this collaboration is something that people are surprised about when they come to Stern.

So, to reiterate, we are much more than finance, and the culture here is incredibly collaborative. The students here are really down to earth.

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.).

IG: We obviously have three deadlines, but we employ a rolling decisions process, which makes us unlike some other schools that have a round system. We do provide notification deadlines as to when we will get back to you, but typically that’s the latest possible date and we try to get out our decisions as soon as we have them. We recognize that this is an anxious process, and we don’t make people wait unnecessarily.

Our process is holistic and individualist. Everyone gets reviewed by the Admissions Committee and every application is reviewed more than once, so it’s not just a single individual’s decision. And in some cases, the committee will debate considerably. In every case we just try to ensure that everyone gets a full and complete review and is seen from more than one vantage point.

One aspect I think is unique about our process has to do with who’s reviewing the applications. In some schools, students, part-time help or alumni are involved. But at NYU Stern all applications are reviewed by trained admissions professionals who are part of our full-time team. Occasionally we will bring in some help, but even then these are people who have been a part of our team.

The second point is that our interview process is very different than most schools. First of all, the interview is not optional, it is required. Second, the interview is by invitation only. We only do it if we are serious about the application. Between 25 and 30 percent of applicants are invited in for an interview. This means that we are not going to waste anyone’s time.

Almost all of those interviews happen in New York City with one of our admissions professionals. I always tell people that if you are applying to Stern, set aside the time and money to travel to New York and interview. We take it very seriously.

Our interviews are conducted almost exclusively by trained, professional admissions staff – individuals who are trained assessors of talent. We rarely have students or alumni conduct our admissions interviews – we think our students and alumni are terrific, but most of them are not professional interviewers. So our staff really invests the time to meet each candidate individually in the process. I do interviews myself.

Furthermore, the interview is not blind. The interview is 30 minutes long, and we are not going to waste people’s time by asking them to tell us why they want to go to business school. We’ve already asked that in the application. We want candidates to take it to the next level in the interview. At the same time, these interviews are conversational, they are not interrogation.

Last year our selectivity was 14 percent, making us more selective than most other business schools in the world. So, we want to make sure that we are screening not only on paper but in person as well. I think anyone who has done a job interview has seen some wonderful resumes and then been surprised during the interview that the person was somewhat different than he or she appeared on paper.

It is our responsibility in admissions to make sure that the quality of the Stern network is as high as possible, which is why we have trained professionals conducting all of our interviews with candidates. It’s the only way we feel we can ensure the consistent high quality of students at Stern.

Really, though, it’s in the benefit of the applicant. The applicants typically like the opportunity to have 30 minutes speaking directly to a member of the Admissions Committee. This is their chance to make their case in person.

Not only do we want to make sure that applicants are the right fit for us, we want to make sure we are the right fit for them. When they come to visit Stern as part of the interview they can have lunch with a student, visit a class, and have a tour of the school. All this helps them make an informed decision as to where to attend.

So our approach to the interview is unique and a bit different – but we think that this special part of our process really does get us the best possible talent.

Getting back to the application process as a whole, people have three notification possibilities. There is the invitation for an interview, the waitlist or the one no one wants, which of course is to be denied.

After a candidate goes through the interview, we typically get back to them within three weeks. Last year we admitted between 50 and 60 percent of those who were interviewed.

In terms of how we notify candidates of our decisions, we do almost all of it with an online status check. This allows applicants to see where they are in our process 24/7. When people’s status does change, we also send them an email.

When people are admitted we do try to have the person who conducted the interview give them a congratulatory call. Those are special calls to make. Every once in a while, these calls catch people by surprise, but for the most part we find that candidates stay pretty much on top of their online status – they watch that pretty closely.

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?

IG: There are obviously a lot of dos and don’ts. But one of the most important dos is to answer the question asked. In one of our essay questions, we ask about applicants’ short-term and long-term goals. But we find that a lot of people do not explicitly state both a short- and long-term goal. The question asks for this explicitly, so to answer it is an important thing.

Another piece of advice I would share is that applicants should take their time to choose their schools carefully and apply to only the schools they would be thrilled to be admitted to. Then, they should take the time to customize their essays specifically to those schools and to the questions they ask.

Do not just try to use the same essays to answer different questions. Take the time to really answer the question asked. That’s so much easier to do when you have fewer essays to write because you’ve done your homework in advance and know where you want to go.

Also, do your spell check. Now, a typo is not an automatic disqualification, because we know people are human and make mistakes. But let’s just say this: It certainly doesn’t look good. When your essay is only 500 words long, to have one of those words be that glaringly off, it’s just not ideal.

When we are reading the essays, we are really looking to make sure that people have thought things through, have clear direction and have passion. A lot of people are writing what they think you want to hear. But what we really want to hear is what they are dying to say.

People spend too much time thinking about how to get into business school and not enough time thinking, “Is business school really right for me and how will it help my career both in the short run and in the long run?” Think about that first and then the essay is going to be really easy because you will have done your homework.

Sometimes people just think, “I’m really not happy doing what I’m doing now and I might be happier in this area so I’ll just go to business school.” But the ones who are most successful in business school and in life are the ones who have taken good stock of who they are, what they want and how business school will help them achieve their goals and dreams.

Friday, December 05, 2008

Admissions Director Q&A: Peter Johnson of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business

As many of you are no doubt well aware, the second round application deadline for the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business looms just around the corner on December 9. For any of you working to put the final touches on your application, you won’t want to miss this recent conversation we had with Peter Johnson, Haas director of admissions.

Johnson has been working in higher education for more than 20 years and has been at Haas for the past nine. He loves the opportunity it gives him to interact with some really fascinating applicants and students, he told us.

In the transcript that follows, Johnson shares interesting details about the many experiential learning opportunities available to Haas students, talks about how excited he is to have long-time Haas finance professor Rich Lyons return to the school as its new dean and imparts some valuable advice to prospective applicants about how to approach the essay portion of their application.

Our thanks to Peter Johnson for making time to chat with us. And lots of luck to all the Haas applicants out there!

Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at Haas this coming year?

Peter Johnson: Well, that’s a very open question of course. I could come up with a lot of answers, but if forced to choose one my answer is probably our new dean, Rich Lyons, who arrived in July. He returns to the Haas School after a year and a half on sabbatical working as chief learning officer for Goldman Sachs. He’s been on the faculty as a professor of international finance for many years, but many of us here are really excited to have him come back in the role of dean.

What does that mean for the school? I think we are going to see a further sharpening of the school’s brand identity, and I am expecting a lot of new programming through our Leading Through Innovation initiative. So I think having him back as dean is a very good thing.

CA: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?

PJ: One of the things I wish more applicants knew more about is the breadth and depth of the experiential learning opportunities we provide for students. One of the opportunities that lots of applicants seem to know about is the international business development program, which has been running for 18 years and through which we providing consulting services to businesses across a range of industries on international projects.

But beyond this we also have the Haas@Work Program, in which we provide services to companies who are looking for solutions to a particular business problem. Some of the recent companies that our Haas at Work teams have been involved with have included Disney, Cisco Systems, SunPower and Lam Research. So it really is a broad variety of different industries with different types of business problems.

We also provide students with corporate social responsibility experiential learning opportunities though our Center for Responsible Business. These students get to work with businesses interested in strengthening their social responsibility initiatives. And then there’s business innovation and strategy. For instance, lots of companies are looking to change their technology strategies.

So, as you can see, we have many, many experiential learning opportunities students can choose to be involved in while they’re here. And, in fact, if you talk to alumni about their most rewarding experiences here at Haas, you will find that it’s these experiences that many of them talk about the most.

One great way to see a little bit more about what’s going on with regard to experiential learning is to visit our International Business Development website at www.ibdclass.blogspot.com. There you will find a range of different blogs about the projects that students were working on this past summer as well as some projects that are coming up.

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.). 

PJ: Well, once a candidate clicks submit that is the beginning of a fairly complicated process that starts with the materials being printed and matched with transcripts and placed in a hardcopy file. Given the volume of applications we receive, we haven’t tried to go to an online reading process.

After the files are assembled, each file then goes to a first read, which is typically a longer read than the others. How long the read takes depends on the individual reader, but this first reader reads the entire application carefully, highlighting key aspects and making a recommendation about whether he or she thinks the candidate should move forward in the review process. In terms of who conducts this first read, it’s going to be someone from our admissions staff. We do not use student readers.

The file then goes on to the second reader, who does basically the same thing. At that point, if both agree that an application is not competitive, the process is pretty much finished. But any other combination of recommendations means that the application goes to a third reader.

Then, one of a few things might happen. Either the candidate will be invited to an interview, be slated for being placed on the waitlist, or be slated for denial. In the case of those candidates we are invited for an interview, we communicate with them and offer then an invitation to interview. When the results of the interview come back, the committee convenes and discusses, and a decision is made.

Candidates who are placed on the waitlist also will be invited to interview prior to a decision being made. Certainly not all of those who are invited to interview will get admitted, but getting invited to an interview is always a good sign. At Haas, we don’t admit people without an interview, so that’s one of the key pieces along the application road.

Sometimes people interpret an invitation to interview as indicating that perhaps there is something wrong with their application.  That would definitely not be the case. In an average year we are able to invite between 25 and 30 percent for an interview.

As to what happens with candidates on the waitlist, we use the waitlist throughout the cycle in a variety of ways. Those placed on the waitlist during round one are reviewed again at the end of round two. In some cases, these applicants may receive an offer at that point. In other cases, they will be released from the waitlist. And in still other cases they will remain on list for the third round. So in this way, it is only at the very end of the process that our waitlist functions as a traditional waitlist, in that applicants receive a spot in the class based on a spot becoming available where one might not have been available before. 

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?

PJ: What we are looking for in the essays is a clear sense of who the candidates are beyond what we can see on their resumes and transcripts. What are they passionate about? What are their goals? What are the experiences they have had that have helped prepare them for a rigorous MBA program?

A key mistake I see some applicants make is that they approach the essays with the intention of writing something they think the Admissions Committee wants to read. When they do that, they usually squeeze out any individuality, and the result is something very generic.

Another piece of advice I’d offer to prospective applicants is that, as they look at our essay and short answer questions, they should think about how they would answer if a friend or family member were asking. Of course, you’ll want to go back and clean it up a little, but I think the people who are most successful are the applicants who are able to more authentically present a complete picture of who they are.

Some will get another chance to do this in the interview, certainly, but given the volume of applicants to Haas, the written application has to be compelling enough to move applicants forward to the next stage, so they should view this as a real chance to show who they really are.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Admissions Director Q&A: Bruce Delmonico of the Yale School of Management (SOM)

With second round deadlines approaching at many schools and prospective applicants eager to learn as much as possible about the various MBA programs and their application processes, we’re working hard here at Clear Admit to reach admissions directors at each top program as part of our ongoing Admissions Director Q&A Series. A big thanks to Yale SOM’s Dean of Admissions Bruce Delmonico, who cleared time in his schedule this week to take part.

Delmonico’s answers to our questions about Yale SOM in general and the application process in particular follow. As you’ll see, when asked about exciting developments taking place on campus this year, he had trouble limiting his answer to just one. We think that’s great. The more he wants to share, the better!

Read on to learn about some of the new things in the works in terms of Yale’s curriculum, international exchange opportunities, diversity initiatives, Tony Blair coming to campus, a new dean taking charge and more. You’ll also benefit from Delmonico’s inside tips about how to write winning application essays, and you’ll get a preview of just what happens to your application after you hit “submit.”

Clear Admit: What is the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at Yale SOM this coming year?

Bruce Delmonico: Just one? It’s tough to limit it to a single development, so I may need to take a few liberties here.

At the outset, I think many of the exciting things happening this year at SOM flow from the new core curriculum we rolled out three years ago, in the 2006-2007 academic year. We feel that this new, Yale integrated MBA curriculum really redefines what management education is about by making the learning much more multidisciplinary, much more contextual, and much more real-world than other MBA curricula. Many of the changes happening this year enhance these aspects of the curriculum.

Thus, for example, we instituted a semester-long international exchange program that is being implemented for the first time this year. As part of the exchange program, some Yale SOM students are spending the first semester of their second year at LSE in London, IESE in Barcelona, IIM-Bangalore or Tsinghua University in Beijing, while students from each of those universities are studying here at SOM. (One of the SOM students doing his exchange in Bangalore actually just won India’s prestigious “Numero Uno” award.) We feel this exchange program complements the first-year International Experience trip and further enhances the international focus of the curriculum.

In addition, SOM joined the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management on July 1. The Consortium is one of the premier organizations promoting diversity in American business. Our membership in the Consortium is just one way in which SOM is demonstrating our commitment to diversity. Just as the international exchange program highlights the importance of developing our students’ international perspective, joining the Consortium demonstrates the importance of diversity to the SOM experience.

Beyond these two developments, the one thing that has garnered even more attention this year is Tony Blair’s arrival here on campus as the Howland Fellow at Yale, through which he is teaching a seminar on religion and globalization being offered jointly by SOM and the Yale Divinity School.

This course is just one example – albeit the most prominent one – of the ways in which the various Yale professional schools collaborate to provide our students with a broad, multidisciplinary education. (Beyond Prime Minister Blair, we also have added roughly a dozen new full-time faculty here at SOM, including Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick, both of whom have recently joined us from Wharton.)

And, of course, perhaps even more exciting than anything else going on is that we have a new dean here at SOM – Sharon Oster, the Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship and director of the Yale SOM Program on Social Enterprise. Dean Oster has been at SOM for 26 years and knows the school inside-out.

In terms of her priorities as dean, I would call them the “Three C’s”: curriculum, campus and community. Specifically, she is committed to: (1) continuing the great work that has been done so far with the new curriculum; (2) ensuring that the new SOM campus stays on track to open in the 2011-2012 timeframe; and (3) fostering the SOM community, particularly by strengthening the connections between faculty and students. Everyone here at SOM is excited to have her as dean.

Sorry about the lengthy response – there’s a lot happening at SOM that I wanted to make sure I captured.

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.). 

BD: After an applicant submits an application, we make sure it is complete by adding to it any supplemental materials that were submitted separately. Once complete, it is then sent out to read. Each application receives two independent reads by different members of the Admissions Committee.

Applications are read in random order and, as a result, applicants can be invited to interview at any time in the round. Applicants also can be invited to interview at any point in the admissions process – whether early in the round after a preliminary review of the file or later in the round after a first or second read (or, in some instances, after coming before the Admissions Committee). Typically, we will invite roughly a third of applicants to interview and will extend offers to roughly 40 percent of the people we interview.

Once an application receives two reads and, if applicable, an interview, it comes to the Admissions Committee for a decision. The Admissions Committee meets regularly throughout the year to make decisions.

Admissions decisions are made collectively by the Admissions Committee using a consensus decision-making model – all members of the committee must agree on the decision.

Although we try to release decisions as soon as possible and will release some decisions before the posted decision deadline, the majority of candidates will learn the outcome of their application on or a little before the deadline date. Because applications are reviewed in random order, the timing of an admissions decision is not an indication of the final outcome.

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?

BD: The essay portion of the application is an important one because other than the interview, it is the one way through which an applicant can speak directly to us. It is also the one element over which an applicant has the most control at this point – their GMAT and undergraduate records are already in place by the time they apply, as is their work experience. And once they select their recommenders and send them the recommendation form, that is out of the applicant’s hands as well. So the essays are the main way in which applicants can improve their application.

The main piece of advice I can give applicants on essays is very simple: answer the question. Too often, we will read essays in which the applicant has something to say, but it bears no relation – or just tangential relation – to the essay question. We give applicants a good bit of leeway in terms of essay topics, but we do expect them to stick to the topic.

A related piece of advice is not just to answer the question, but to do it clearly and concisely. Pay attention to the word limits and stick to them. Don’t feel as though more is better. Beyond the substance of what you write, we are looking to make sure you can articulate yourself clearly and directly in writing, so keeping it simple is a good thing.

Finally, the last piece of advice I can give is to write what’s important to you. Many times, applicants will write what they think we want to hear. It’s clear when this is the case. We care about authenticity and are not looking for you to tell us what you think we want to hear; we want to hear what’s most important to you. If you write about what matters to you, your essays will not only be more compelling, but they will likely be written more clearly as well because it’s easier to write about things that matter to you.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Admissions Director Q&A: Columbia Business School Assistant Dean Linda Meehan

Before joining Columbia University in 1989, Linda Meehan’s pursuits included teaching and running a home business, among others. She moved to Columbia Business School (CBS) in 1993, where she serves as Assistant Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid.

Dean Meehan recently took time out of her busy schedule amid CBS’s rolling admissions process to answer a few of our questions. Read on to learn about some of the interesting new elective courses the school will offer this spring, as well as just how the admissions process unfolds for CBS applicants.

Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change or event happening at Columbia this coming year?

Linda Meehan: Columbia Business School is leading the charge in this new era of business school education, starting with some of our natural advantages: our cutting-edge faculty research and a focus on experiential learning, a powerful alumni network and our location in the city of New York.

Our rigorous core curriculum provides not only the business essentials, but also the leadership skills and networking opportunities that last a lifetime. The following are two elective courses, available to students in spring 2009, which exemplify the innovative offerings of our robust curriculum:

“The Future of Retirement Wealth”
Retirement wealth, including 401(k) and IRA balances and assets in corporate and state and local pension plans, represents a significant fraction of global financial wealth. The United States and many other countries around the world have been undergoing fundamental change in this arena. In addition, the economic crisis of 2008 is introducing a new set of challenges for the retirement wealth system. This course will use the tools of economics and finance to analyze important questions about the future of retirement wealth.

“The Marketing of a Nation: Israel”
In this hands-on, project-based course, students will be given the frameworks and tools necessary to create a marketing campaign to increase American audiences’ awareness of all that Israel has to offer. The course will present a variety of conceptual frameworks from marketing, branding and strategy; offer relevant case studies and background research; and cover relevant industries such as hi-tech, tourism and lobbying. Class time will be divided between lectures, industry guest speakers and intensive group work. Teams of three to five students each will work throughout the week to develop the goals, strategy and implementation for their marketing campaigns. In the final class session, students will present their campaigns to members of the Israeli consulate.

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.)?

LM: An individual application may be reviewed independently by two to three individual members of the admissions committee before the application is presented to the larger admissions committee for a final decision to be rendered.

At any given point during the reading process, the first reader, the second reader or the third reader may request for an interview invitation to be extended, but the application also may make its way to the final admissions committee before an interview invitation is extended. Interviews are generally conducted by alumni in the applicant’s local area. Interviews are blind so the only information an interviewer has about the applicant is that which is shared by the applicant. Generally, an applicant will send a resume to the interviewer.

Once the application has been reviewed, the larger admissions committee, which I chair, will render a final decision on an application.

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?

LM: Essays are one portion of the application over which the applicant has complete control. It is important that the essays are constructed carefully and thoughtfully. Be sure to answer the question we have asked. There is no magic formula that, if you plug in the answers, will provide you with the perfect essay. Tell your story. Be genuine and be passionate. If you are excited and genuinely enthusiastic about what you are writing, your story may inspire the reader of your application. Remember what you choose to write about tells us as much or more about you as your answer itself does.

A pitfall applicants may encounter is trying to look for that magic formula mentioned above. Be true to yourself and your story. Our students don’t come from a cookie cutter. Each one is unique, and so are you.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Admissions Director Q&A: Liz Riley Hargrove of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business

As part of our continuing series of discussions with admissions directors at top business schools around the world, we are pleased to offer this recent interview with Liz Riley Hargrove, Associate Dean of Admissions at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Hargrove has spent almost her entire professional career at Duke. After starting in undergraduate admissions at North Carolina State University, she joined the staff at Duke in 1993 and has been there ever since.

In the interview that follows, Hargrove shares her excitement about Fuqua’s plans for global expansion, describes the school’s philosophy of collaborative leadership and provides an important tip for applicants to help ensure that you’ve adequately answered your essay questions. So read on!

Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change or event happening at Fuqua this coming year?

Liz Riley Hargrove: Fuqua has just announced a plan to expand our campus to become the first globally embedded business school in five countries simultaneously. We will have a physical presence in India, Russia, China, the United Kingdom (probably London) and Dubai. We just announced it at the end of September.

For prospective applicants it means that Duke will be one of the first business schools to actually be on the ground in all of those locations. We have revamped one of our EMBA programs – our cross-continent program – and students in that program will be able to take classes in those regions of the world. We also will have career services and other resources on the ground in those regions. So it will definitely benefit our full-time MBA students in terms of curriculum, faculty and career services options.

CA: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?

LRH: I would say that a lot of people, just from reading our website, aren’t really familiar with the kind of culture that our students experience here. We are of the philosophy that Duke is a collaborative leadership culture. In other words, we believe students can be both collaborators and leaders, as opposed to having the philosophy that those two things are in opposition.

Everything at Fuqua is designed to give students the opportunity to work in teams but also to define and refine their leadership skills. I think students are closer as a result. They challenge each other to be better and to improve and to continue to get better.

We have lots of ways for students to practice what they are learning in a low-risk environment. Our students are not passive participants in their business school education. They are actually encouraged to be a really great part of helping to Fuqua to be a really first-rate school. For example, our Career Fellows help their fellow students in the job search process, and our Leadership Fellows help peers work on leadership skills. Students here have the opportunity to really get involved with the running of the school.

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.). 

LRH: Once an applicant hits the submit button our operations team takes over. They download all the applications and print them, and then they are put into folders with labels and divided up for reading among the Admissions Committee, which is approximately 20 people. Each application is read at least twice and most often three times before the Admissions Committee meets to discuss it. It takes 45 minutes to an hour to read one application.

The first reader uses an evaluation criteria we have established. As part of that criteria, an applicant’s undergrad record, GMAT scores, essays, recommendations, interview, community involvement, leadership – all are assigned equal weight in the process. I really like that because an applicant can have a blemish on his or her application but still be a great fit, and if we’re looking at the applicant as a whole being instead of just one component it really allows us to create the diversity that we want here. It’s like creating a mosaic.

Once each file is read, we have an Admissions Committee meeting where each file is discussed and a vote is taken. In the case of a tie, I break it.

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?

LRH: There are a couple of things in the application process that applicants control and then there are things they can’t do anything about. Their undergrad record, GMAT scores – those things are what they are. But everything else they can control. The essays and the interview really give the applicant a chance to differentiate themselves. So they are a key part in terms of us getting to know why they want to come and their potential fit.

We want students who really want to come to Duke, so we are looking for evidence of why they chose Duke and why they think it’s a good fit for them as individuals.

In terms of the most common mistake we see, that would have to be applicants who don’t answer the essay question. We see that a lot. For instance, in answer to a question about how an MBA fits into short- and long-term goals, many candidates will tell us what they want to do right after they graduate, but not tell us anything about their longer-range plans.

My one piece of advice to applicants as they sit down to write their essays is this: Have someone read your essays without giving them the questions. If they can tell you what the questions were after reading your answers, then you have answered the questions.

Again, while the essays are only one component of the application process, they are a really important component.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Admissions Director Q&A: London Business School’s David Simpson

Were you working feverishly to complete your application to the London Business School (LBS) in time for last week’s round one deadline? If so, you’re probably wondering just what happened after you hit the submit button. In the interview that follows, David Simpson, LBS associate director for marketing and admissions, takes the mystery out of the process, walking us through each and every step.

As the most recent participant in our continuing Admissions Director Q&A Series, Simpson shares information about a new one-year management masters program at LBS geared toward people without work experience in the business world. In discussing the school’s full-time MBA program, he highlights the remarkable diversity of the LBS class. And in closing, he provides some concrete pointers on how to write strong application essays, as well as how to prepare for the admissions interview.

So whether your application is already in or you’re preparing to submit in a later round, you won’t want to miss what Simpson has to say.

Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at LBS this coming year?

David Simpson: In August 2009, London Business School will be launching a new Masters in Management pro