• During the upcoming admissions cycle, Wharton plans to pilot a group interview exercise, which could become a mandatory application component in the future.
• Students often see class profiles as a set of preferences, but they only reveal the industries that students came from immediately prior to business school; industry experience is much deeper than it may appear.
• Wharton is seeking quality experience, not a target age or number of years of work experience.

mbaMission: So my first question is, Wharton kind of caused a stir when it switched to behavioral interviews last year, and I was curious why the change was made and what Wharton was trying to learn that it maybe couldn’t learn from its previous process.

Ankur Kumar: At Wharton, we’ve always been behavioral in our application process—both in the written application and also in the interview component. We’ve always wanted to get to know who our applicants are, and how they think. And so, understanding what defines each of our applicants as individuals is truly key for us.

What we did is tweak our interview questions, with the goal of getting at the core of what we wanted to learn about you—the applicant—in person. We always want to see how our candidates respond in real-time conversations, not unlike the conversations they have every day in their professional and personal lives.  We want to continue to understand how they behave in and navigate throughout those discussions, and conversations really give us a good sense of how they’re going to be as future MBAs and alumni.

mbaMission: So have you been satisfied with the results, and are you planning any additional changes to the process going forward?

AK: Every year, we’re amazed and blown away by the talented and accomplished applicant population from which we are very lucky to be selecting.  I always say that the hardest part of the job is actually selecting the people to join the class.  As any good admissions office will, we’re always looking to evolve our admissions process. Our essay questions are always evolving, our interview questions are always evolving, and that simply reflects the evolution and the innovation in our program. So evolving our process is just par for the course in our world.

One change we’re excited to announce is that, for the coming admissions cycle, we will be piloting a new team-based exercise. This exercise is designed to allow candidates to demonstrate, firsthand, their intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, teamwork and leadership skills, among others.

For this year’s admissions cycle, the pilot will essentially be a ‘beta-testing’ of this exercise. Any candidates asked to participate in the pilot this year will do so voluntarily, and without bearing on their applications.  More details will be forthcoming, but we are very excited about this new opportunity.

mbaMission: Sure, I see. As you probably know, applicants tend to adhere to stereotypes. So for many, Wharton is a finance school, even though it has, for instance, an enormous marketing faculty or the unique Lauder Institute and Lauder Program. What do you think Wharton should be known for that it’s not known for? What is a quiet strength of the school?

AK: I don’t know, do we do anything quietly here? [Laughs] Actually, there are probably two things I want to make sure to highlight.

First, our approach at Wharton to teaching business: it’s analytical, it’s data-driven, it’s fact-based, and it’s quantitative.  And that’s the case across all business disciplines that we are teaching. So often, that approach and those words that I’ve just used—“quantitative, analytical, data-driven, fact-based”—are mistakenly viewed as synonyms for “finance.”

While we hold the preeminent position in finance, we are also the only business program to be ranked within the top five in every discipline that we teach, and that’s the case whether you’re talking about management, marketing, business and public policy, operations or entrepreneurship.

From a candidate perspective, no matter what your interest is, at Wharton you don’t have to pick and choose… You literally can have it all.  We have 220 faculty; they span 11 academic departments and 25 research centers.  Wharton offers the most breadth and depth across business disciplines, compared to other top programs.

The second thing I would mention is how diverse Wharton is, in all senses of the word.  Our approach to learning is that students learn best from those who are different from themselves.  Bringing together people with a diversity of experiences and thoughts is at the heart of innovative thinking – it’s what drives innovation. So we seek to craft as diverse a class as possible, across different dimensions. Wharton has the most women—45% of the class—of any top business program; we have the most global top business program; and we seek mature students who bring a rich set of experiences to Wharton—professional, personal and academic diversity.

mbaMission: All right. Conversely, then, can you think of an area in which Wharton is perhaps not as strong? Or maybe an area the school would like to build on?

AK:  One challenge that every business school has is that business and industries are always emerging and evolving, and so naturally, we’re emerging and evolving as well.  

For example, clean tech is an example of where there wasn’t as much of an industry ten years ago—or even when I was in school—as there is today.   And so Wharton has evolved with it. You now see students coming into the program with backgrounds in these fields.  Programming has been developed around the industry; a student club now supports it; clean tech employers recruit our students, and there are broader initiatives happening across Penn. We are often on the cusp of trends, or evolving with them.

mbaMission: Right. So, aside from professional disciplines, would you say there is a personality type for which Wharton might not be the best fit? Is there a particular type of individual that you would expect to struggle in the Wharton program?

AK: As I mentioned earlier, the class is incredibly diverse. And I say diverse meaning in all senses of the word.  That diversity can  include industry background; it can include academic background; it can include geographic perspective—if you lived or worked somewhere in the world; it can include different experiences in life, professionally and personally.  And I know from me and from my own time in the program that a lot of the benefit that I derived, was from being able to learn from my classmates who had different academic, professional and geographic experiences.

And, as I said earlier, we have more women in our program than any other business program, and we remain the most global of all of our peers as well.  We have 73 different countries represented within the incoming class; 37% of the incoming class is coming from outside the United States.  Nearly 60% of our class has worked outside their home country, and they’ve worked in over 45 different countries, which is pretty amazing.  There are over 75 different languages that our students speak; three-quarters of the incoming class fluently speak a language other than their native tongue.   Over two-thirds of our students studied subjects other than business in undergrad.  So when you hear those facts, it’s hard to say there is a type of person who won’t succeed at Wharton.

mbaMission: Right. That’s great. So I’d like to ask about the faculty. Specifically, can you tell me about any professors who maybe aren’t known necessarily for their publishing or research work but rather for their speaking style, teaching style, unorthodox techniques—anything like that? Does anyone in particular come to mind? These are the types of things that are hard for candidates to get a sense of through a Web site.

AK:  There are many examples of our faculty who are quite innovative and are pushing the envelope in the classroom.  One example is [CIBC Professor of Entrepreneurship and eCommerce] Karl Ulrich, also our vice dean for innovation.  Karl teaches a course called “Innovation, Problem Solving, and Design”; the entire class is focused on developing a process around the formation of new ideas and the development of new products. He literally runs the class as an innovation tournament—students are constantly experimenting with different ideas and making prototypes, and at the end of the course, they have a product prototype upon which they can build a venture, as the output.  

Another professor who is also really popular is Kartik Hosanagar [tenured associate professor of internet commerce], who teaches a course called “Enabling Technologies.”  The class is an applied approach to new technology and new media; assignments include making viral videos and then figuring out what makes some more profitable than others.  You can see how real-time and applicable this is to social media and to the technology we’re seeing in the real world right now.

mbaMission: Right. Can you talk a little now about what a typical day in the life of a Wharton first-year student is like?

AK: How students spend their time outside of class very much depends on the individual and what they’re hoping to accomplish and what they’re interested in doing.  Any given student could spend their time outside of the classroom involved in any number of student-run professional or social clubs, as we have a hundred-plus clubs.  Or you may be doing research with a professor outside of your in-classroom time because you have a particular interest and want to study something more in depth with them. Students also have used their time outside the classroom to start businesses, so working with Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs or the Small Business Development Center.

Students also use their time outside the classroom to explore and have experiences in industries that they’re looking to get into. There’s a student who—we don’t have class on Friday—spent every Friday interning at a retailer here in Philadelphia because they were looking to get into the industry and wanted hands-on experience.  So, you’ll find students doing any and all of those things sort of in their typical day and week.

mbaMission: Right, okay. You know, you seem like a pretty nice person to me, but candidates have a tendency to really fear the admissions committees, feeling like their future is in the admissions committees’ hands.  I mean, do you see any reason for someone to be fearful of you at all?

AK: [Laughing] I think I’m a pretty nice person, so I hope not.  I’m an alumna, so I’ve been through this process myself. I certainly know what it’s like to go through the application process.

We are advocates for the applicant, so we truly are on the applicant’s side.  I certainly don’t take this responsibility lightly now that I’m sitting on the other side of the table. It’s a true privilege, to be part of setting the direction for Wharton.  So, no reason to fear; again, I’m an advocate for the applicant, and we want to bring in the best people that we can to the program.

mbaMission: Right. Now, when you actually pick up an application, where do you start, and how do you read it? Can you kind of walk us through the process a bit?

AK: Sure! I read every application, literally from the start to the end, cover to cover, so it’s as simple as that.

mbaMission: Are you trying to just get an impression of someone, or do you actually sit down with a checklist and weightings and that sort of thing?

AK: We know how much effort and thought our applicants put into their applications. And so our philosophy is one that is rooted in being holistic and being iterative.

We look at the application in its entirety.  We ask for information on all parts of an applicant’s background: academics, their professional trajectory and accomplishments, of course, the essays and recommendations—because we think it’s really important to get this well-rounded perspective on them.  We then have multiple admissions team members provide their input on an application before any major decision is made.

mbaMission: I see, okay. Wharton’s average GMAT has risen in the past few years to about 720. Is this linked in any way to a kind of confidence that with a 720—up from 710, or 700—someone can manage the course load better? In other words, is this number rising for a particular reason—other than, I guess, applicants trying hard?

AK:  When we think about the GMAT or the GRE—we also take the GRE also at Wharton—the score is never viewed in a silo; it’s all part of the holistic review of someone’s academic capabilities and academic achievements.  We consider their GMAT in conjunction with their undergraduate record, as well as what else was going on for them when they were an undergrad: were they really involved with extracurricular activities, were they supporting a family, were they working, that sort of thing.

There isn’t a magic bullet with the GMAT; there is no score that will get you in or keep you out.  You’ll see on our profile that there’s quite a wide range around that average. That says something about the way that we look at the GMAT, in the context of the other academic pieces and in the broader application.

mbaMission: Got it.  Wharton has been very clear that its waitlist is closed.  Can applicants really do nothing to advance their candidacy while they’re on the waitlist? For example, if an applicant were to submit a letter on his or her behalf from a current Wharton student, would you turn that letter away?

AK:  We want to maintain a process that is equitable and has parity in it for all of our applicants.  When someone is on the waitlist, it’s really because we’re waiting for all the moving pieces and parts of the cycle to sort of settle.  It’s not necessarily about needing more information on the candidates; it’s about seeing, quite literally sometimes, whether there’s actually a seat or seats in the class available.

mbaMission: Right. But to that point, Wharton has so many alumni; I’m sure that many feel that they have the right to your ear. So, does alumni contact really matter in the consideration of an individual candidate? Have you ever ignored the recommendation of a very well-placed, high-profile alumnus or alumna who’s connected to the school quite strongly and has kind of campaigned on behalf of a particular applicant?

AK: Our alumni have always been a very important part of our process. They are the stars of the show at our information sessions.  People don’t come to hear me speak; they come to hear from our alumni and the panel and hear about their experiences.  

Similarly, when our candidates are admitted, our alumni host them and have welcome events. And so, we welcome alumni recommendations, too.  We actually have a portal on our Web site for alumni that allow them to send their recommendations directly to me.  

That said, having a recommendation from a Wharton alumnus or alumna is certainly not a prerequisite for admission. Most of our class doesn’t.  Again, this is due to our holistic evaluation process.

mbaMission: Assuming that you have a very strong applicant—the same, the exact same applicant—who can apply in Round 1, Round 2 or Round 3, can you reflect on whether his or her chances vary depending on the round? And if Round 3 tends to be more challenging, why exactly is that? Why give away so many places in the earlier rounds, knowing that more applicants are coming?

AK: We are pretty clear in our messaging that if you’re serious about coming to business school in a given year, apply in Round 1 or Round 2. Between those two rounds, it’s really your call, whether that’s early October or early January. But in Round 3, quite frankly, anything can happen.  There are years where we’ve admitted a three-digit number of folks [in Round 3], and there are years where we admitted no candidates in the third round.  If you’re serious about coming to business school in a given year, don’t wait until Round 3.

mbaMission: Right. You mentioned the GRE before, and I think candidates have this perception—it’s a myth, I would say—that the GRE isn’t viewed in the same way as the GMAT, as being of the same level of quality. And I was wondering if the admissions office at Wharton has ever really looked at and compared the GMAT data with the GRE data in any way. Have you done any studies like that?

AK: This past year, we accepted the GRE for the first time.  There are people in the first-year class who took only the GRE and were successful in our process. So from our perspective, we don’t prefer one or the other.

We offer both for a couple of reasons. One is, quite frankly, that some of our candidates are interested in pursuing dual or joint degrees, which already require the GRE.  Second, for Wharton, the GRE has been the standardized test that our own PhD program has taken for many years, and we know the quality and caliber of those students.  Candidates should simply take whichever test makes sense for them.

mbaMission: I forgot to ask something before, when we were talking about Round 3. So let’s say I’m a strong candidate, and for whatever reason, I could only get my application together in time for Round 3, and I ultimately didn’t get in. Would you say you have different expectations for me if I were to reapply in the next Round 1, which might be only a few months away?

AK:  There are a variety of reasons why someone may not be successful in our process. And I mentioned before, sometimes it really comes down to the logistics—unfortunately, sometimes there just isn’t a space available. So if an applicant is unsuccessful in Round 3 and they’d like to reapply, we welcome it.  We have many people who are very successful reapplicants every year; there isn’t a different threshold to cross when you’re a reapplicant.  

What we’re looking for is, in the time that you’ve had to reflect and to sort of think about your candidacy and identify some opportunities to strengthen, what have you done?  Of course, if you’re a Round 3 candidate, you’ve literally only had a couple of months. So tell us what you’ve been doing, tell us what you’ve learned, tell us what you’ve been thinking about—that’s all we’re looking for.

mbaMission: Right. We’ve seen a lot of news lately about changing class compositions at some of the top business schools, such as how Harvard is apparently moving away from finance, though the largest percentage of its class still comes from the finance industry. Wharton seems to have gone in the opposite direction. Do you have any kind of mandate for your class composition? Did your class last year include more finance candidates for a particular reason?

AK:  We see fluctuations every year in the make-up of our class, which is more a reflection of changes in our applicant population than anything else. There are emerging industries, emerging economies—in which an MBA hasn’t been a part of the conversation necessarily until now. We have people coming to us from such diverse backgrounds that really, the class profile only tells one small dimension of the story. 

The class profile simply shows the industries that our students came from immediately prior to business school, which is not an entirely full picture. However, if you look at the entirety of our incoming students’ industry experience throughout their careers, their industry experience is pretty tremendous and quite deep across industries and sectors. Using this broader perspective, the class has much more richness from industry experience than maybe that one data point necessarily indicates.

mbaMission: I think you’re right. I think people can sometimes really oversimplify or look at one thing as a trend in this arena. To finish up, do you have anything else you’d like to share about the Wharton program or admissions at Wharton? Something you want people to know for sure that they might not know already?

AK:  At Wharton, we value experience.  There is not a certain number of years of work experience or a particular age that we seek; rather, we value candidates coming into our program who’ve had a rich set of experiences in whatever industry they’ve chosen to work, for however long they’ve chosen to do that.   Having maturity and perspective and thoughtfulness—really being able to bring their reflections and their lessons and their questions to the program, to their classmates, to their professors—that is the heart of who we are, and our culture as well.

mbaMission: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time!

• Chicago Booth does not employ any quotas in its application review process but looks to enroll a diverse, smart group of students who fit well with the school’s values and culture.
• Ahlm discusses how an application is reviewed at Chicago Booth.
• Chicago Booth interviews 40%–50% of applicants, though depending on the strength of the applicant pool, the percentage can vary from year to year.

mbaMission: Chicago Booth is known for finance. What is it not known for that you believe it should be known for?

Kurt Ahlm: Chicago Booth is a breeding ground for critical thinkers. Our graduates are analytical problem solvers who can apply what they learn here to successful careers in any number of fields. Booth has strength in many areas beyond finance, including entrepreneurship and marketing. Our Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship provides unparalleled programming for our students, through labs in PE [Private Equity], VC [Venture Capitalism], Cleantech and Social Entrepreneurship, to lecture series and networking support, to helping students launch businesses through the New Venture Challenge. The Kilts Center for Marketing provides similar support to marketing students and recently entered into an exclusive agreement with AC Nielsen to share three major databases which put Booth at the forefront of thinking about marketing and consumer behavior. Partnerships like this show that Chicago Booth provides analytics and critical thought across a variety of disciplines beyond just finance.

mbaMission: Chicago Booth is probably equally well known for its flexibility—where students do not have a prescribed first-year curriculum, but choose classes from core offerings. Could you discuss some of the support that students receive to help them ensure they choose wisely?

KA: Chicago Booth offers the most flexible curriculum of any of the top business schools and has done so since its founding over 100 years ago. We have decades of experience behind us in creating a culture that supports a multitude of choices a student is faced with while they’re here. We have one of the largest administrative staffs of any of the top business schools, despite enrolling a class that is smaller than [that of] many of our closest peers. These staff members are experienced professionals who offer one-on-one support for our students and who create the best academic experience for them. When you couple this guidance with second-year students who serve as a valuable resource for first years, you’ll see that Booth is unmatched in the amount of resources and support it provides its students to help them make the best decisions in planning their curriculum and careers.

mbaMission: Sticking with the theme of what the school is known for… clearly, Chicago Booth has a variety of distinguished professors—Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel and efficient market theorist Eugene Fama, to name only two. Does the school have any professors who may be less well known for their research but are instead known for their teaching styles? Can you tell us about one or two “true” teachers at Chicago Booth and how they bring creative or innovative methods to the classroom?

KA: There are far too many names to choose from. Being in a Chicago Booth classroom is a very special experience, no matter who is teaching. The commitment to teaching is embedded deep in our culture, and it is something we not only take pride in but we it is something we are recognized for. Among the top ten business schools ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010, Booth was the only school to receive an outstanding rating for teaching. Students here can explore any class and experience thought-provoking and innovative ideas every day.

mbaMission: Does the admissions office have any directives at all to increase a “type” of applicant—to accept younger applicants, for example, or to increase the proportion of international students or women? Does the school strive to have each class reflect something specific?

KA: No. At Booth, we do not employ any quotas in our review process. We simply look to enroll a diverse, smart group of students, who fit well with the values and culture of Booth. Innovation and world-changing ideas are born in an environment made up of people of all ages, ethnicities, backgrounds, professions, gender etc. We want to maintain that same commitment to welcoming a diverse mix that has propelled us for generations.

mbaMission: Do you consult with the career services office before making admissions offers?

KA: We work with many offices at Booth to help us to understand how we can refine our selection process. Together we explore what attributes correlate well with success here and after graduation. Understanding how Booth students navigate their academic and career objectives during their two years is tremendously important to how we think about the application evaluation process. So although we leverage our community to help us understand and recognize fit, it is solely the role of the admissions office to select those students who are eventually admitted to the program.

mbaMission: When you read an applicant’s file, where do you start? With the candidate’s resume? With the PowerPoint submission?

KA: At Booth our process is iterative, with many committee members reviewing an applicant’s file before a final decision is made. We calibrate our review process to make sure we all are looking for similar elements of fit, but we all investigate the application a little differently. I tend to follow the order of the application: personal information, professional information, academics, essays (including the slide presentation), letters of recommendation.

mbaMission: No business school is for everyone—who would you say Chicago Booth is not for?

KA: I would say Chicago Booth is not for people who are simply looking for a credential to add to their resume. At Booth, the MBA is the culmination of two years of exploring your interests, engaging your mind and learning how to think critically about markets and organizations. There is no cookie-cutter approach here, no single way to get a degree, so unless a student is prepared to step in, create a path and leverage the full range of opportunities in front of them, this will not be a good fit.

mbaMission: For joint degree applicants, is there any “pull”? Meaning, if you want to accept a certain joint degree applicant, will you advocate on his/her behalf to help the applicant also gain admission to, say, the Harris School? Similarly, when a married couple applies together, do you make admissions decisions with the couple in mind—trying to bring in both spouses?

KA: All applicants to Booth have to be able to get into the program on their own merits. Although we want to be mindful of applicants applying with a spouse, partner or significant other, that will not tip the scale for someone who is not prepared to handle the challenges of an MBA program. My answer to this question is the same as the answer I would provide to a question on joint degrees.

mbaMission: How would you describe the tenor of the typical admissions interview at Chicago Booth?

KA: The interview process is not meant to be an intense experience, it is meant to be a conversation between two interested parties. It is an opportunity for us to meet a candidate and hear why they believe they are a good fit for Booth, while at the same time allowing the interviewer to convey what makes our program distinctive. Our goal at the end of the interview is to have both parties walk away feeling that they learned something meaningful from the conversation.

mbaMission: What advice would you give to a candidate to help him/her prepare to apply to Chicago Booth?

KA: Take time to thoroughly think through your objectives for business school. Why do you want an MBA? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain? How do you prefer to learn? How do all of these things put you in a better position to accomplish your short- and long-term goals? These are just some of the questions I push people to consider as they begin their application preparation. The more focused and on point an applicant is, the more compelling their application will be and the more prepared they will be to successfully start an MBA program. A two-year MBA program moves quickly regardless where you go, and if you have not fully vetted your reasons for being at that school, you can fall behind pretty quickly. The more thinking and planning you do on the front end, the greater overall success you will have throughout the entire MBA experience.

mbaMission: What percentage of Chicago Booth candidates are typically interviewed?

KA: This percentage can vary from year to year, depending on the strength of the pool, but in general we interview between 40% and 50% of those who apply.

mbaMission: How informed do you think candidates are in general? Do you think the average Chicago Booth applicant knows what he/she would be in for?

KA: Yes, because at Chicago Booth we strive to be as transparent as possible. Our staff and students work hard to be accessible; we push a lot of content out to prospective students through email, our Web site and a variety of social media platforms. We have a comprehensive campus visit program and we conduct receptions in cities around the world. Because fit with program is so important to our selection process, we try to eliminate any ambiguity about who we are and how to prepare to be successful here. So my guess is Chicago applicants are well aware of what to expect from this place by the time they enroll.

• Fuqua is focusing on expanding international diversity and has grown application volume in its daytime program by 21%, with increases in international applications for all programs
• Ms. Hargrove suggests that candidates apply as early as possible without sacrificing quality
• Ms. Hargrove explains Fuqua’s unique approach to interviews—sometimes by applicants’ request and sometimes by the school’s—and discusses how to prepare for one

mbaMission: The first question I always ask the admissions office when I do these interviews is what do people not know about Fuqua that you believe they should?

Liz Riley Hargrove: Hmmm, interesting question! I think it would be our recent work in defining and developing an education and research strategy based around industry verticals in consulting, finance, energy/environment, IT/media, health care and consumer goods. Fuqua has nine research centers now, and if you include the new research centers we launch this year, we will have a dedicated research presence in each of our industry verticals, allowing for a greater depth of access to the most important leaders and firms in these industries.

This is quite an innovative approach and will allow us to identify cross-disciplinary opportunities to broaden students’ exposure to the industries and firms that are driving the global economy of the 21st century. The centers support the students’ academic and career exploration, and the focus on industry verticals really differentiates Fuqua from other business schools.

mbaMission: Okay, great. I think that you know that at some schools, you’ll have a professor who might be really well known for his or her research, but at Fuqua, are there any professors who are known among students for their teaching style? What they’re like in the classroom?

LRH: Yeah, I can think of several. As I think you know, I’ve been at Duke for 17 years now, and I love that our faculty are not just one-dimensional. It’s true they are known for being ranked #1 in the world for their research productivity, and that’s such an important distinction for our students, because the faculty are bringing their research into the classroom often before it’s published. But they aren’t just great researchers—they also win teaching awards. One person who immediately comes to mind is Gavan Fitzsimons, who is on the marketing faculty. He is just a really fun, engaging teacher and gets raves from the students, who love the dynamic in the classroom. He holds students accountable for the material—and for being late for class! His philosophy is that students will learn the most when they are having the most fun, and his classes are really engaging and inspirational. And, behind his casual approach and casual dress, there is a brilliant marketing professor.

We have lots of prospective students who come to Durham to visit Duke. If you come to campus and experience a day in the life of a student, you can visit a class, have lunch with students and tour our facilities. Gavan’s class is always well received by visitors, and he always welcomes prospective students. I love that he asks prospective students to introduce themselves, and in their introduction, they have to tell either an embarrassing story about themselves or they have to sing—which you’d think would be really, really intimidating, but everybody in the class is cheering for them. I’ve heard some really funny stories over the years, and have heard about some not-so-great singing.  It’s all in good fun, though, and is a way to break the ice and make people feel welcome.

mbaMission: Do more people sing or tell embarrassing stories?

LRH: You know, I’ve never been asked that question—I’m not sure!

mbaMission: And Fuqua was able to lure him away from Wharton, right?

LRH: Why, yes, yes we did!

mbaMission: And, didn’t his sister and his brother-in-law also just join the faculty recently as well?

LRH: Yes, I was just going to say that. They just joined the Fuqua faculty this academic year, so we have a lot of Fitzsimonses running around.

mbaMission: I imagine that when you are recruiting in that mold and you’ve got one great guy, you’re going to want to grab a few others as well. Is there an academic area that you think the school is trying to develop right now?

LRH: Duke is a place that is known for having balanced excellence as it relates to the academics, and we encourage students to take advantage of all of the interdisciplinary opportunities that exist at Duke, so whether you are interested in marketing, finance or energy, you will have access to the best faculty and an innovative curriculum to support the learning environment. Our health sector management [HSM] program is a great example because it immerses students in multidisciplinary learning opportunities inside and outside the classroom and draws on our vast resources in the health care industry. Students in HSM take a variety of required and elective classes designed to give them a strong understanding of the health care market—it’s also one of the largest health care-related business programs in the country.

mbaMission: You mentioned that you’ve been at Fuqua for 17 years. How would you say admissions at Duke has changed over those years?

LRH: I have loved my time here at Fuqua, and I joke with the students that I’ve been here for 17 years, and all they need to know is that I was 12 years old when I started!

mbaMission: Right!

LRH: Certainly, technology has changed the way we implement our admissions processes and has impacted the way in which students gain access to information about our school, which is great. Once upon a time, the only way to request information on our programs was to phone or fax the office and request to get on the mailing list. Now applicants have and expect instant access to information. There is also the expectation that admission offices are keeping up with technology and that we will communicate with prospective students in a very transparent way.

mbaMission: Is there an area of the world that you’d like to see Duke make inroads into with respect to recruiting students going forward?

LRH:  In the time that I’ve been at Duke, we have made significant gains with respect to our international diversity in the student population. Our dean, Blair Sheppard, who is in his third year at Fuqua, is leading us in an exciting direction, and our global strategy is designed to connect Fuqua to the most important regions in the world. We have dedicated regional recruitment teams based in Russia, India, China, the United Kingdom and the Middle East. This has obviously expanded our ability to reach prospective students, and we’ve seen more international diversity in our applicant pool as a result. So to answer your question, several years ago I would have said that there was a need to develop a broader range of international diversity, and we’re able to achieve that now because of the way we are connected in these important regions.

mbaMission: You mentioned that the dean has been around for three years now and that globalization is his hallmark, that’s one of the big changes that he’s undertaken. And I think you mentioned in a BusinessWeek article recently that the application volume has risen. What can you say about this trend, and where do you see the application volume going?

LRH: Yes, applications to the daytime program were up 21% this year, but we also saw significant increases in our one-year Master of Management Studies program, our Executive MBA programs and our Cross Continent MBA program for working professionals. In all of our programs, we saw increases in international applications where we have dedicated resources.  I won’t claim that we’ll see another double-digit increase in daytime applications this year, especially given the economy, but we’re working hard to connect with prospective students, and it is a definite bonus for students in these regions to have the ability to speak with a Duke staff member in person.

mbaMission: It sounds like an amazing strategy, actually. Could you take us through what the application review process is like and how it works at Duke? I think people sometimes perceive that there’s some sort of secret code that they can crack as opposed to it being very much procedural. So can you shed some light on this process?

LRH: I’m sad to report there’s no great mystery. At Fuqua, there are four application rounds to choose from.  The early action round is very early—October 1^st—and then there are three subsequent application rounds. We will admit students from each application round. My advice to applicants is to apply as early in the process as you can without sacrificing the quality of your application. Clearly, there are more available seats in the class in the earlier rounds and fewer seats available in Round 3, so it’s best to apply early, but only when you know you’ve put together the best representation of who you are and what you will bring to Duke.

As far as the actual process goes, all applications are submitted and evaluated online, which is incredible, because we now have the ability to read and evaluate applications from anywhere in the world via a secure online system—no more paper files to carry home in the evening. Once an applicant hits the submit button, our operations team ensures that all of the required materials have been received. Each file is then organized via our online system and distributed to an admissions committee member for an in-depth evaluation. Each application is read independently, from cover to cover, by at least two members of the admissions committee and then presented to the admissions committee for discussion and decision. There is equal weight assigned to all factors in the evaluation process, which means that our decisions are typically never based on any one factor. My job as the dean for admissions is to build a class that represents a microcosm of the world. Each student’s story is unique and allows us to create the diversity that is so important to the student experience at Duke.

mbaMission: Is there any advantage to applying in the early action round as opposed to in a later round?

LRH: Well, if you apply in the early action round, you are indicating to the admissions committee that if admitted, you will enroll at Duke. It’s very early in the business school application process, so we expect to see applicants who know that Duke is for them.  You have to be ready for the commitment to apply in the early action round. Again, we will admit students from every application round, but as the cycle progresses, we will have fewer available seats in the class.

mbaMission: Who would you say is the right kind of person for Fuqua? Whom do you think Fuqua works for or does not work for?

LRH: Successful Duke MBA candidates and students come in many forms. Broadly speaking, the best candidates for Fuqua have the ability to demonstrate “fit,” and by that I don’t mean to imply that there is a cookie-cutter mold that you must represent. “Fit” is demonstrated when applicants can articulate their own story and ambitions in the context of Fuqua’s story and ambitions. Fuqua students learn when to be strong team players and when to step up and lead.  These are interwoven concepts at Duke and are not mutually exclusive. We are looking for evidence of these abilities throughout the application. We want students who go beyond what is expected of them to have a true impact in their personal and professional lives.

mbaMission: People always call us and ask, what is the way to get into the school? But there is no formula or “type.” Fair to say?

LRH: Correct, there is no formula or type—honestly. When we are building our class, there are multiple dimensions that are important, and it’s incredibly important to be authentic in this process. The worst thing an applicant can do in the business school application process is to misrepresent who they are and what they’ve done. You don’t have to be anyone other than who you are, but you do have to be able to articulate your story. You are more than your GMAT score or the sum of your years of work experience. We may admit students who have lower GMAT scores because they are amazing in all other aspects of their candidacy.  We may also deny candidates with very high GMAT scores because they are one-dimensional and are not as competitive on those other important dimensions. Applicants really have to take the time to understand what our program is about and then make the connections throughout their application. Be who you are.

mbaMission: Right. Do you see the application changing dramatically over the next year or couple of years? Do you think Duke would ever embrace a bit of a push toward PowerPoint presentations or audio or video files?

LRH: Yeah. I love the way technology has improved how we connect with our customers, and we embrace it. I can absolutely see us utilizing different mediums in the future to better enable students to present their qualifications and create a more personalized approach to the evaluation model. A few of my peers are experimenting with video uploads as a part of the application process this year. I’m very curious to see how this works for them and how it can enhance an applicant’s ability to represent themselves in a virtual world.

mbaMission: I noticed that Duke’s average age is a touch older than that at other top schools, or should I say some schools are getting younger? Is that incidental or is it by design?

LRH: The average age at Duke has been 28 for the past couple of years, so we haven’t been intentional about increasing the average age. We typically admit fewer students immediately from their undergraduate experience, and that is intentional, because we also offer a one-year Master of Management Studies [MMS] program for students without postgraduate work experience. The MMS program is ideal for students who want to strengthen their business skills and knowledge but don’t have the typical MBA profile of four to five years of work experience.

mbaMission: Do you have any advice for people who are applying with partners? Is it advantageous or disadvantageous to do so? And the same thing with joint degree programs. Are people evaluated separately? Together?

LRH: For joint degree programs, we think that one of the advantages of coming to a school like Duke is that you’re not just a Fuqua student, you’re a Duke University student first, and that opens up all of the resources of the university to you. We currently have joint degree programs with law, medicine, public policy, environmental engineering and the nursing school. In most cases there is a joint admissions committee process and a lot of coordination of effort between the two schools. There are admission requirements that you’ll need to meet for each degree program, but we have streamlined much of the process so it’s less burdensome.

The Fuqua Partners Organization is by far one of the best advantages for students who are married or have a significant other who will also be joining them at Duke. The Fuqua Partners network exists to welcome, support and provide activities for partners and families in the Fuqua community and I love their motto: “All the Fuqua fun, minus the homework.”

As far as advice for couples applying to the program, if you know that your enrollment decision is a joint decision and that’s important to you, I would encourage you to apply in the same application round. You’ll have the option on the application to list a spouse or significant other if they will also be applying to the program. This gives the admissions committee a head’s up that this is not a singular decision and that there is a potential impact. It doesn’t advantage or disadvantage you, but from my perspective, it’s good to know this information up front.

mbaMission: Got it. Can you explain the interview process a bit? For instance, what can one expect, what is the process itself?

LRH: Yes, the interview is a very important component in our admission process.  It is our goal to interview everyone who will be admitted to the class. That being said, we offer two interview options. We have an “open” interview period from September 16^th to October 16^th . During the open interview period, anyone can visit our campus in Durham and conduct an admissions interview to be included as part of the evaluation process. After October 16^th, interviews are by invitation only and occur in Durham as well as in locations around the world.

mbaMission: How would you describe the tenor of the interview?

LRH: You should prepare for your admissions interview in the same way you would for a job interview, but you will find that our interviews are very conversational. Interviews are conducted by current students who serve as admission fellows, alumni and admissions staff. Applicants should think of the interview as a way to let us know who they are, what motivates them and how they will contribute to the program. It is the chance for applicants to differentiate themselves from other candidates. At Fuqua, we look at the whole applicant, not just quantitative skills, language abilities or career success. We are interested in learning about their interests and passions and how their background will contribute to the class. Because of Fuqua’s student-driven culture, we have high expectations for students to be active members of their academic community, so we look for what an applicant can contribute to the class dynamic and learning environment. We also look for why Fuqua is the right school—how do the individual’s goals align with and support Fuqua’s goals and vice versa? Finally, we want to get to really know our students, so the interview should reflect that authenticity.

mbaMission: Right. Is there anything else you’d like people to know about Fuqua?

LRH: Yes, it might be interesting for your followers to know that Duke offers the MBA degree in several program formats. We’ve talked mostly about the daytime program, but our Cross Continent MBA program is the best global alternative to a daytime program format because you can live and work anywhere in the world while pursuing your MBA. For promising young managers, this is a very attractive feature since you do not have to interrupt your career or relocate. There is a minimum of three years of work experience required. We also offer the Weekend Executive MBA program, which as the title suggests, is delivered on-campus in Durham on an alternate weekend format. A minimum of seven years of work experience is required. Our Global Executive program is our most senior level MBA program and is targeted at executives who are looking to take the turn into the C-suite. A minimum of 10 years of work experience is required.

mbaMission: Great. I really want to thank you for your time.

LRH: It was a pleasure, Jeremy.

For more information on Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business or 13 other top business schools, check out our mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

JJ Cutler: Well, given that I did not have deep expertise in admissions per se, I think that the changes that we’d like to make are still yet to be implemented. So I don’t think we’ve necessarily made any transformative change yet. It has taken me some time to get my arms around the admissions process, how it works. It’s changed a lot since I went to business school over ten years ago, and most of what I’ve been working on is understanding the strategy, understanding the process, understanding the vision, the goals of the school, making sure that admissions is aligned with those things. I mean, we’ve had great directors in here before me, and a great and talented team, so a lot of it has just been trying to understand what is happening and listening and learning over this past year. And now I think that part is a little more complete. It’s time to think about the changes that need to be made, and most of that will be implemented moving forward.

mbaMission: Okay, good. So the first question I usually ask is related to how people, as you know, often subscribe to stereotypes about certain business schools. What do you think Wharton is not known for that it should be known for? What are the underrated aspects of Wharton?

JJC: I think there are quite a few. I mean, because we’re a fairly large school and because we have a long history, I think the list of underrated parts of Wharton is pretty long. For us, I think it’s things like marketing and, in particular, interactive media, which is somewhat new and has become a real deep strength of ours. Real estate is an area that again, some people know about and some people don’t. It’s a real area of strength for us. And health care is a real strength of ours. Again, I think that some people know about it, some don’t.

Our entrepreneurial program is, from my perspective, second to none, and it’s varied and it’s deep, and it has a long history. And I think that’s sometimes an underappreciated part of our program. We have a fairly aggressive retailing initiative that over the last few years has really picked up a lot of traction and momentum. So I mean, those are probably the ones that come to mind more immediately as parts of Wharton that are maybe a little less known sometimes, but you know, impressive, deep and with long history.

mbaMission: Great. Is there a stereotype out there that you’d want to debunk with respect to the school? Something that you think people perceive about it that isn’t in fact true?

JJC: I think for us, the myth that is most associated with Wharton is that we are most well known for finance. And with that myth, you get a lot of other misperceptions  that are built around that. So you get rumors like, “We only want people with really strong quantitative backgrounds. We only want people who want to major in finance. We only want people who come from the investment banking world. We only have people who go work in investment banking after school.” So it’s kind of one myth around finance, and built around that are a lot of other myths about our students, about the culture –  that we’re cutthroat, that you have to work at a specific firm to come here, that you have to work at specific kinds of firms when you leave here.

So my basic sense on all of that is they’re all just misperceptions . We want well-rounded people. We get applicants from all over the world, across every industry. We have people who after business school go work in every industry. We certainly like people who are going to be able to handle our academic program, and our academic program is a fact-based, analytic, data-driven approach to solving problems. But we also want people who are creative. We want people who are intellectually curious on a variety of dimensions, not just on the harder quantitative skills. So that’s what we look for. And again, I think that because we have one of, if not the best finance departments and finance curriculum amongst our peers, we want to celebrate our heritage in the quantitative disciplines and our expertise in finance, , but we also have built over the years excellence across a whole lot more than that.

mbaMission: Definitely. So, you know how applicants are always on their toes and concerned that if they step out of line the tiniest bit, they’re going to be done in this process. Can you walk us through how an application is read at Wharton and also what state of mind it’s read in?

JJC: Sure. I’ll start with the process. And I’ll just tell you exactly how we do it, and then we can go from there. Every application gets read a minimum of three times. So typically, the first time that it’s read, it’s read by one of our graduate students. And it’s a fairly competitive process to become one of our graduate assistants. The graduate students read an application fully, all the way through. They’ll look at your academic performance, they’ll look at your essays, they’ll read your recommendations, they’ll look at your extracurriculars and other activities, and they will, of course, look at your work experience, and they will kind of summarize and rank all of those different features, both individually and then they’ll provide kind of a holistic summary.

Then the application gets read a second time in totality by one of the members of the Admissions Committee. And then I will typically read every application a third time. At that point, we’re really just trying to decide, do we want to interview this person or not? So, depending on how the application is doing at that point, we’ll either invite the person for an interview or the process will end for that person. And that typically happens about midway through each of our three rounds.

The interview can then take place. One of our alumni can do the interview in the city where the applicant lives or works. Or, the applicant can come here to our campus in Philadelphia and interview with one of the graduate students or Admissions Committee members. And then the Admissions Committee, we also will do what we call hub interviews at locations around the world, and typically we choose those locations to be central and accessible to where large numbers of applicants can interview with one of the Admissions Committee members around the world.

And then the interview report is placed into the file, and the file gets recirculated and read a fourth time by a member of the Admissions Committee. It is not the same person who read it the second time. At that point, we make a decision, and depending on how the round is shaping up, it may get read a fifth time or even a sixth time. Most applications at that point, it gets pretty competitive. It generally requires more reading and more discussion in a committee format before we will make a final decision, which could be “admit,” it could be “waitlist,” and it could be at that point the application is denied. And that’s the basic process. I could certainly go into a lot more detail about interviews, about how we do them. We can also talk more to your question about the mindset and the philosophy, so…

mbaMission: Right, just to be clear: are these progressive stages, where once an application gets past one person, it moves on to the next person and then past that person to you, or do all three stages occur no matter what a reader’s perspective on the application is along the way?

JJC: It’s the latter, not the former. All three stages occur regardless. I mean, the first person could fall in love with the applicant or not like the applicant at all—it doesn’t matter. It still going to get a full and complete second read by an Admissions Committee member and still will get reviewed by me before any final decision is made. So everyone’s application gets read three times, regardless of what the first reader thinks, to be perfectly honest.

mbaMission: Okay, great. I’d love to hear a little more about the interview process. How would you characterize the interview?

JJC: Our interviews are blind, and that’s, I think, a really important distinction for applicants to know about—what kind of interview you’re preparing for and what kind of interview you’re going to have. In our process, the person interviewing you has not read your application beforehand. So they will see your resume at the time of the interview, but they will not have met you before, they won’t have any preconceived notions about your application. This also means people need to be prepared to tell us a little bit about themselves, to kind of get the ball rolling. We won’t have the application, so we won’t be able to ask very specific questions about background or experiences. And I think some people prepare thinking we know those things ahead of time, and obviously, if you assume your interviewer knows those things, you handle the interview differently. So it’s really important to be prepared for different schools and different styles.

mbaMission: Okay, and going back to what I mentioned earlier, what can you tell us about the typical perspective of the readers as they go through each application?

JJC: I would say the overall perspective, and this is true for the interview, but it’s true, I think, for the whole process, is a positive perspective. So, we’re not looking for reasons to deny someone, we’re looking for reasons to admit someone. We appreciate that most of our applicants have put a lot of time and energy and thought and introspection into putting their application together. It’s hard. You have to make a lot of choices and decisions about what things you want to tell about yourself, how you’re going to use a limited amount of space to talk about yourself. You have to make a lot of hard tradeoffs about things you can tell us and things you don’t have an opportunity to tell us. And you know, for people who really throw their everything into their application, it can sometimes be, in a good way, a painful process, because you’re digging deep and you’re holding up the mirror. You’re thinking about your life and where you’ve been and where you want to go.

So we take that into consideration, and we read with an eye toward wanting to find all the good things about an applicant. We look for their strengths. We look for things that make them stand out, that make them unique. We look for their accomplishments. We look for positive parts of the application. Now at the same time, everyone has something, or more than one thing, in their application that they need to overcome. For some applicants, it might be their undergraduate GPA, which you can’t change once you apply. You can’t go back and do anything about it. So other parts of that application need to work harder to overcome those pieces, whether it’s somebody’s essays or recommendations or their work experience or their undergraduate performance. Everyone has something they need to work hard in another area to overcome. So we’re looking for how people choose to do that.

We think a lot about the judgment that goes into the application, and, as I mentioned before, you have to make hard decisions. I’m as much interested in why you chose the topic you chose as I am about the answer itself. I’m much more interested in how you think through the problem of why you picked this, what you’re trying to tell me about yourself by the recommender you chose, by the choices that you’ve made, by the decisions that you’ve been forced to make, by how you handle those things. I’m more interested in your thought process than necessarily interested in the answer itself or the story itself.

Each person, when you look at them in an application, it’s a bit like a puzzle, and you’re trying to put the pieces together and see if it hangs together. You’re looking for consistent themes, you’re looking for trends. You’re looking for what people have done already and trying to decide what will happen to them after they come through our program. And you’re thinking about all the different constituencies that you’re representing as you’re reading. You’re thinking about the faculty. You’re thinking about alumni. You’re thinking about employers. You’re thinking about other students, you know? It’s almost like the weight of those people is on your shoulder. So in our case, we’ve got 85,000 alumni. We’ve got over 200 faculty. We’ve got another 800 or more students. We’ve got all our employers that come to recruit. We’re trying to think about how this person will feel to all those different constituents.

mbaMission: So you talked a little about how it’s not a punitive process. That said, are there any pet peeves of yours or major mistakes that you feel candidates regularly make that they’re just not aware of?

JJC: I think the overall mistake that I see consistently is people who feel, who are trying to write or do things that appear not to be genuine, that appear to be designed to get [them] into business school. Right? I mean, for the most part, the best people and the best applicants are people who are just doing great things because they love them, because they want to do them, because they’re good at them, and they enjoy them. And it doesn’t feel like there’s a sort of strategic packaging together that’s taking place. It doesn’t feel overly orchestrated or forced. And I think that’s the biggest thing I see, is that people are so programmed or rehearsed and prepared and coached that they lose their own inner voice. That they lose their own passion, and when that happens, it’s just hard to know what’s authentic, what’s real, what’s genuine, and what is designed to be strategic or calculating.

Now this is not to say I don’t want people to be prepared. It’s not to say I don’t expect the quality of the presentation of the application to be very high. It should be. People should be prepared. People should be thoughtful. But there’s a difference between being thoughtful and prepared and being overly scripted and strategic and programmed. And that’s the biggest mistake that I think I see, is that it feels like people oftentimes do things or say things that they think we want to hear as opposed to just being true to themselves and being honest and real, and letting us decide, relying on us and our judgment and our expertise to determine whether the fit is there and what the next step should be.

mbaMission: Right. We put a tweet out asking for questions from applicants out there who are interested in Wharton, so we have a few from applicants who responded.

JJC: Okay, I think I saw that.

mbaMission: So here’s one. How has Wharton been affected by shrinking endowments? How has the school weathered the storm? Are scholarships down, for example?

JJC: Actually, both the University of Pennsylvania and Wharton have a long history of being a little bit more conservative and pragmatic with the way in which we manage our finances. In the boom times, I think that might have hurt the school, but in the last couple of years, in a relative sense, we’ve actually done quite well. So our endowment has not been as affected as other similar schools’, and the university in general has been able to weather the storm much better than others.

So in fact, our ability to fund financial aid on the MBA side is up a bit. And last year, we were one of the schools that was able to put together a very compelling international student loan for students who were outside the United States and did not have a co-signer. We were able to put together a very compelling offering when the CitiAssist program dissolved. And part of that is predicated on our brand, and part of that is predicated on the way we’ve managed our resources. We’ve been somewhat conservative for a period of time, and in this environment, that approach seems to be serving us quite well.

So overall, I would say the crisis hasn’t really affected us. If anything, it’s been good for us. We’ve been able to attract higher quality faculty. We’ve been able to hire staff, when other schools have not been able to do those things. There’s been a bit of a “flight to quality” in times like this—you know, the power of the brand is even more important—and for our school, that seems to have been a positive development.

mbaMission: Okay. Here’s another Twitter question: if I opt for the health care major or the Lauder Program, for example, and there’s higher demand for these programs, will my chances of being admitted be negatively affected? Will I only be compared against these pools?

JJC: For both the Lauder Program and the health care program, the process works roughly the same way as for every other student, with the difference being that you have to declare your intent to join those programs at the time of application. And those are the only two programs where those are binding decisions that you have to make up front. To the extent that more people apply to those programs, then yes, those programs do become, by definition, more competitive. You are both compared with the other applicants within those programs and compared with the overall applicant pool. And I would say that’s no different than anyone. So to some extent, every applicant is compared to applicants who have similar backgrounds and similar experiences and look similarly to other applicants. At the same time, every applicant is also competing with every other applicant. So in that regard, the Lauder and the health care applicants are not judged any differently than any other.

mbaMission: Got it. This is another question we received via Twitter: every program claims to have strong alumni, great professors, etc. What do you think truly differentiates Wharton from other top programs? What is Wharton’s unique value proposition?

JJC: Let me start by saying that I think, to some extent, we and our peer schools are far more similar than we are different. I think that for people who are applying to Wharton and are choosing between Wharton and other schools in our peer group, at the end of the day, there are more similarities than there are differences. Having said that, I think the biggest difference for students, for applicants, is the culture and the fit. And everyone says that. On some level, you can compare faculties, you can look at the numbers of alumni in different countries, you can look at the facilities. At the end of the day, you’re first and foremost picking a place that you’re going to live in for two years, and at this point in someone’s life, two years is a long time. It’s almost like picking a family. You know you want to find a place that you feel comfortable in, that seems to be a good fit for you, that’s going to challenge you, but that’s going to do it in a safe and comfortable way.

And I think for every applicant, how they answer that question is more about them than it is about the school. They need to come and touch it and feel it and meet other students, and get to know the faculty, understand the teaching styles and philosophies. They need to meet some of the alumni and see how that feels. And so I think it’s a very personal question on some level.

mbaMission: That was a great answer. Building on that, the Visit Wharton Program, would you say it’s to a student’s advantage during the application process to attend? Do you have any preference for people who’ve taken the time to visit the campus?

JJC: No, not really, and I’m thinking of how many of our students now who are from countries where it’s not easy to get to and from Philadelphia. Given how much [information] is available online and given how many alumni of ours are spread throughout the world, I certainly don’t think there’s any advantage from an application standpoint, in my view, in visiting or not. Do I think it helps the applicant make a decision? I do. So I think it helps applicants maybe understand their priorities in terms of which schools to apply to, and I certainly think once you get admitted, if you’re making choices between schools, I’d strongly encourage trying to visit. But it doesn’t help your chances in admissions. I would recommend it more from the applicant’s standpoint than necessarily from our standpoint. We don’t have any preference for people who’ve been here or not.

mbaMission: Okay. So, the dreaded third round—should it really be as dreaded as candidates believe? There’s definitely a kind of “don’t apply in the third round” philosophy out there. How do you feel about that philosophy? What would you tell applicants about applying in the third round?

JJC: Well, “dreaded” is a strong word, but I think it’s fair to say that the third round is not the ideal round for a really strong applicant. By the time we get to the third round, the reality is that a lot of things have already happened. So our ability to make decisions in the third round is different than it is in the first round. So my advice is to always use the third round as an absolutely last resort. So again, I would never say “dreaded,” but I think if you’re serious, and if it’s possible, you should apply in Round 1 or 2. Third round is—and we’re very clear about this on our Web site—just significantly less optimal for an applicant than Round 1 or Round 2.

mbaMission: Another thing you’ve been very clear about on your blog is that you don’t want to hear from people on the waitlist. But candidates seem to believe that there’s some trickery in this, that they can beat down your door in some way, and that this is some sort of test. So can you be unequivocal both in terms of candidate communication and third-party communication about candidates who are on the waitlist?

JJC: Sure. The first thing I’d say is, if you’re on the waitlist, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, by definition it means you are admissible. It means you are quite competitive, and it means you’re sort of still “in the mix.” Right? So your application is still viable, and you’re still in the discussion. It’s just that we need a little bit more time to see a few more different things, mostly things that are outside the applicant’s control, before we can make a final decision one way or the other.

So the first point is, we’re very serious when we say we don’t want people to contact us. It’s not a joke. It’s not a test. It’s not a trick. We really don’t want to hear anything else. And there are really a couple of reasons for that. One is we want to be fair to everyone. Two is the factors we’re waiting for have nothing to do with the applicant at that point. They’ve put their application together, like everybody else, and we are unable yet to make a final decision on their application. And that’s almost all about not yet having enough information about things external to the application. So more information about the applicant isn’t what’s causing our decision not to yet be made. It’s that we need more time to see what happens with other things that are outside the application. And that can be around class size. It can be that we need to see what the next round looks like. It could be that we need to see what decisions are made by other applicants.

So, we really don’t want more information. It wouldn’t be fair—we don’t want to allow people to reopen and resubmit materials unless we do that for everybody. And we really don’t need any more information at that point. We’ve decided that you are admissible; we just need a little bit more time to get a little more information before we can make a final decision. And so that’s how I would characterize the waitlist situation

mbaMission: It seems that Wharton will occasionally offer a deferral that hasn’t actually been requested by the applicant. You’ll admit someone, not for this class, but for the next class. How frequently does that happen and under what circumstances? Does this happen primarily to candidates who are on the waitlist?

JJC: At least from my time here, I can’t really think of a situation where that’s happened, but my sense is we would only offer a deferral in response to a request from a student, and we offer them pretty rarely. As I think I’ve said [elsewhere] before, a deferral is a fairly unique and special situation where you’re basically guaranteeing someone a spot in a future class. So we don’t take that decision lightly. I can’t think of a time where we’ve ever granted a deferral without someone requesting one first.

And I think the relationship between the waitlist and deferrals is…well, I don’t think there is a relationship. I think they’re totally independent, separate things. The waitlist is really about the current year. Deferrals are really, to some extent, unique situations for people who’ve already been admitted. Not waitlisted, but admitted. And for whatever reason—personal, professional—they would prefer not to come in the year they originally intended but would rather wait one more year. To me, those two things are completely disassociated.

mbaMission: Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. So how do you feel when someone says that Wharton is their number one choice? Is that at all credible to you?

JJC: It depends. I would say for the most part, it’s not that it’s not credible, it’s that it falls into the space of maybe an applicant telling us what they think we want to hear. Now I do think there are applicants who tell us that we’re their first choice, and then they have a lot to back it up with, either because of people they know or things they’ve done, or because they have a specific interest that aligns with something here. I mean, sometimes that’s credible. I think people tell us that because they think we’re concerned about our yield. They think that I’m trying to manage the yield, and to be perfectly honest, that doesn’t factor in at all.

I think for us, the rankings and the yield percentages and all of that, they kind of all matter in a big sense in terms of our brand and our reputation. But we’ve been doing this a long time, and we’ve been innovative for many years, in all parts of our program. And I think our brand and our reputation are quite strong. Plus, the rankings can sometimes be volatile; the methodologies are not always perfectly transparent. So to the extent that people think that telling me Wharton is their first choice because they think that is going to help me manage some statistics for a ranking or a poll, that’s completely false. It just does not factor in. If they’re trying to tell me Wharton’s their first choice because they’re trying to communicate their passion for the school to me, then sometimes that can be credible.

mbaMission: I see. Okay, last question. What can you tell us about the summer and full-time job searches? I know you’re not in charge of career services, but do you have anything to share on the topic? How do you think students have been faring

JJC: I talk to a lot of students anecdotally, and I work very closely with my counterpart in career management. As I mentioned before, employers are an extremely important constituent, and I think at the end of the day, students come [to business school] in part because they want to make their careers better and, for a variety of reasons, they’ve hit a certain point in their lives and their careers and are using this as an opportunity to invest in themselves, to either do something different or new or to move more quickly, or to make a difference in a different part of the world or some sector. So I’m very interested in and follow as closely as I can the employment trends.

Most of what I can tell you is anecdotal from having talked to students, and my sense is that our students are doing quite well. I think there are fewer jobs. I think the jobs that are there in the traditional spaces are more competitive. And I think that there are fewer jobs in the traditional spaces. So what I hear from students is they’re looking at things they didn’t originally think they’d be looking at when they applied. I hear a lot from students thinking about entrepreneurial pursuits, either [joining] small businesses that exist today or starting a business of their own, or higher growth businesses that they’re trying to break into that may not have been on the radar screen before. I see a lot of people looking at different industries that they had not originally considered.

I think people are much more prepared and concerned and are spending their time more wisely. They’re not throwing all their resumes out there and hoping one sticks. They’re being much more disciplined about what they want to pursue and what they’re passionate about. And I think people are being a lot more flexible about the macro trends and trying to sort of rethink and recalibrate both short-term expectations and short-term priorities. But with all that, my sense is that our students are doing quite well. And I think that speaks partly to the school, partly to our students, partly to our alumni, and partly to our career management office. And the combination of our brand and the students who come here—they’re resilient, they’re smart, they’re disciplined, they’re creative. You combine that kind of person with the resources and the alumni base, and you have groups of people who are very up to speed on what’s happening in different parts of the economy and are trying to make this challenging situation an advantage, and playing to their strengths and to the school’s strengths as well.

So mostly what I’m hearing is what I think you would call cautious optimism. But in some ways, we’re talking about this sort of crisis being an opportunity that’s too good to waste, that there’s a flight to quality, that brand matters, that this is a time when people can really leverage their capabilities and play to their strengths. So that’s the anecdotal answer. I don’t have data, but we’ve lived through downturns before. We had one earlier; in the last decade, in the early part of the last decade, we experienced a downturn. And so we’re looking very carefully at what happened during that downturn, what happened afterward, the data and statistics, in terms of jobs. Tactics we deployed to manage through that downturn. So we certainly have lived through this type of environment before and feel good that we will continue to make headway through this one as well.

mbaMission: Great. Is there anything else that we didn’t cover that you feel you would like to communicate to the people who will read this interview?

JJC: My only final thought is I would encourage people to apply. I think you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, right?

mbaMission: Right.

JJC: I think people sometimes choose not to apply to Wharton because they think, you know, we’re this kind of school or we’re that kind of school. Or that we want people who are this age or that age, or this gender or that gender, or this country or that country, or this industry or that industry. And what I’d like to do is encourage people to apply. I can’t admit someone if they don’t apply, and there’s no way of knowing if you don’t apply. I’m always trying to encourage people who think of themselves as different, or think they don’t fit the profile, or think that they’re not a Wharton person. I always encourage those people to apply. And so I would just like to encourage people, when they’re thinking through the process, to consider Wharton and to apply, and let the process and the system take over from there. And I think it’s a great time to go back to business school. I think it’s a great time to be at Wharton, so I’m looking forward to seeing great applications this year and in the years to come.

mbaMission: Great, great. Thank you so much, JJ. You’ve been really generous with your time, and I really appreciate it.

JJC: No problem!

• Kellogg’s plans for the size of its class and its new building
• Her plans to review the open interview process at Kellogg
• Her advice to applicants who are a few years away from applying to business school
• The differences between applying in rounds one and two and more…

mbaMission: Hello, Beth. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. I’ll start with the same question I ask all Admissions Directors: What is Kellogg not known for that you feel it should be known for?

Beth Flye: That’s a great question, and my response to that would be finance. Schools, like companies, can have a reputation for being known for X product or X service, and I think a number of business schools fall into that as well. And while we do have a strong reputation in marketing, and we’re very, very proud of that, there are other fantastic academic programs here at the school. The one I would highlight as far as the immediate response to your question would be finance, no question about it. And why do I say that? I think it’s for a number of reasons. I think it’s the curriculum we have in particular, also the faculty. In terms of the output side, for students that want to make a career change—let’s say they’ve been in a different functional role or different industry, and they want to work in a finance functional role or financial services industry—it’s a great place to be.

Another thing, too, is if you were to ask me what the most popular majors are here. We have an array of majors, and there are three [that are most popular]. I call them the big three, and they may slightly change from year to year as far as what is first, but they are finance, strategy and marketing.

mbaMission: So, you enrolled the biggest class in Kellogg’s history this year, and I’m curious, are you expecting to scale things down or keep things consistent going forward? Was the increase accidental because of yield or was it by design?

BF: Our plan in terms of enrollment goals for the total enrollment for 2010 is that we want it to be on par with the class we enrolled this year. We did have a goal of bringing in a few more students. We came in at the high end of our goal range, plus about seven to ten extra students beyond that, which is fine. From a service standpoint, space standpoint, everything was okay on that front. We wanted to bring in a few more students, and we were able to do that. This handful extra that we had, that was on the yield side. Our goal is to be [within] roughly the same range for this coming year as well.

mbaMission: We talked a tiny bit about marketing a moment ago. The big Kellogg stereotypes involve marketing and teamwork—can you talk about how teamwork is really manifested at Kellogg?

BF: I believe in the philosophy here about teamwork. It’s actually very simple but powerfully true. I see it every day, not just with the students; teamwork is a way of life at Kellogg. It is a way of life that we think works for a number of reasons. Really, the bottom-line philosophy is to come up with the best ideas, to truly be innovative, to truly get to not just diagnosing a problem in a situation but also coming up with what’s going to be the strategy and plan for a solution. In order to do all of those things, the belief here is not to saddle one great mind with such goals and tasks but to put together a group of great minds. And that is where you’re going to get the absolute best approaches, again, whether it’s ideas, whether it’s solutions, whether it’s a strategic path. And it sounds very simple, but it is very true. And that’s coming back to the quality factor. I think that it starts with the input side, which is the admissions side.

So again, how is teamwork manifested in the classroom? It really starts with the class that we bring in. We want the best and the brightest and the most interesting and, of course, people that want to be at Kellogg. I think one question that people ask me a lot is, “Hey, I very much embrace teamwork, but will I have a chance to shine on my own?” And the answer to that is, “Of course.”

I think that’s one thing I would want to let your clients know or let the world at large know. That, hey, yes, you still are here to develop, and there will be numerous opportunities to do that as far as individual contribution. What we do here is work together, and students become very, very attuned to learning how to identify what other members of the team bring to the table, given the situation. I think our students become just really skilled in identifying the skills and talents of people very quickly and then learn how to employ those skills and talents and put them to work in a situation. Our recruiters comment every year—and we get a lot of great feedback that they see this more so with Kellogg grads than with most other B-school grads—that they [Kellogg students] have such an ability to be flexible, in terms of not just of getting along with people, but [also] working with others and learning very quickly how to draw out the skills and talents of their team members. That in and of itself, I think, is an enormous skill.

mbaMission: You mentioned recruiters on campus. I know that your main role is not in career services, but can you speak a little bit on what you’ve seen in terms of companies coming to campus this year versus last and the number of interview slots and that type of thing?

BF: Sure. The good news is, I’ll call it The Portfolio of Recruiters—you know, the companies that we’ve seen in the past couple of years—they are returning, and we are very excited about that. That’s a great thing. What is maybe slightly different, depending on the specific company, and maybe in some cases depending on the industry, is that the companies are more cautiously optimistic. When I was out on the road, I was down in Charlotte and did a presentation hosted by Wachovia, and a couple of alums on the panel that worked there were telling me that. Saying, “We’ve got X, Y, Z hiring goals, and we’ll be coming up there.” And that was great, and I heard similar messages from a couple of other banks, just for example. The great news is that there seems to be this vibe of cautious optimism.

However, some companies may not have as much of a robust or expansive on-campus interview schedule this year. So, for instance, Company C that was here last year will be back, will be recruiting Kellogg students, but it may not have as big an interview schedule this year. And to me that’s not surprising. I think the great thing, the biggest takeaway, is that it doesn’t sound like we lost anybody. That is great.

mbaMission: That’s fantastic. When I was at Kellogg a little more than a year ago, it was mentioned that some land had been staked out for a new building, and I was curious as to whether a new campus is going to be built. If so, have these plans been delayed?

BF: Great question. Let me tell you what I know. Plans are still in process as far as a new building for the Kellogg School. Just to give you kind of a leadership point about this, Northwestern has a new president that started this year, and I haven’t met him. I hope to at some point. I hear great things, and so I guess my question is: What’s the official status? Where are we in the plans? I know fundraising efforts are going on just as they have been, and they are in high gear, both at the university level as well as in Kellogg Development. Are we any closer to absolutely confirming a location, or when are we going to put a stake in the ground? I don’t have that information, but from what I gather, from what I know, this is still a go. Absolutely still a go.

And that’s a great question. The school has grown, and I would want, the school would want, prospective candidates to know that they absolutely will have the resources that they need as far as infrastructure to be successful here. That comes first and foremost. But ideally? We have some goals that we want in a new space. We have grown. We need, literally, some more space. And that’s going to happen.

mbaMission: I have a couple of questions about the application process itself. First, can you walk us through the life cycle of an application at Kellogg?

BF: Sure, absolutely, glad to elaborate about that. Essentially what happens is once the deadline day hits and people have submitted their applications—they’ve been hitting “submit” buttons before the application deadline, but after that time, I mean—what we do is then download on our end and begin processing. And that’s the simple term there [processing], but it’s a very important part of our operation. It’s assembling one’s application materials into a physical application file. As we put together those applications, and as they’re complete—and complete means we have everything, we have all the application components, all the information so that file is ready to go into the evaluation flow—basically the large majority of the files are going to be read by three people, and the first stop is with a member of our Student Admissions Committee.

Then it’ll go to an officer on my team who will see it, and then it will come to me. And believe it or not, now and then we may have some really difficult cases in which two of the three of us are really on different planes or all three of us are very different, and we have a process where we’ll bring in a fourth person. So the reason I highlight that is that there are lots of ways you can evaluate applications to business school, and while I would not say that ours is absolutely perfect, I think we come pretty darn close. We take it very seriously. A lot of time is invested on the evaluation side, and I never take it for granted that someone has made an active choice, as well as has made an investment to apply to Kellogg. And so by gosh, we absolutely owe every applicant the most through evaluation that we can give. And that’s exactly what we do.

In terms of what happens after a decision, well, within each of our deadline periods, we don’t have a primary decision release date. We do have a date, I believe it’s January 11 for Round 1, for which we let the folks in Round 1 know, “Hey, the latest you would hear from us would be January 11,” but we don’t pull the lever on January 11 so that all decisions go out. I don’t have an exact date handy, but I would say the latter part of November, we will start releasing decisions. So it’s almost like a mini-rolling basis with an application round period. That’s how that works.

mbaMission: Okay. So when you read an application, do you start with the applicant’s resume? Do you start with the essays? How do you actually approach reading each application?

BF: For me, my approach is as follows. I look at the data form section, or Part One as we call it. Here are just kind of key points. Who is this person? Name? Where do they live? Where did they go to school? What did they put down as far as grades, degrees, GMAT scores, brief work information, etc.? For me that is getting a snapshot. It’s kind of saying, okay, let me just sketch out who this person is. Sometimes I’ll go straight to the resume right after that. The resume is also to me a very nice snapshot about a person, obviously on the work front. So that’s what I do. I also see the evaluations that the two readers ahead of me have made. I then read as much as I need to read to arrive at a decision. Do I do an absolute word-for-word, cover-to-cover read on every file? No. Decisions would probably never go out! That’s the responsibility of the two readers ahead of me. But like I said, there are times when I will say, “Hey I really want to do a cover-to-cover read.” So that happens. Absolutely. That does happen.

mbaMission: Kellogg is one of the few schools left that has an open interview policy. It has to be grueling. Some schools, notably Darden, have made a switch. How and why do you stick with it?

BF: That’s what our policy still is for this coming year. Our policy is, we require you to request an interview, and we don’t admit anyone without some form of an interview. Whether it’s an alumni interview or one on campus, and in some cases—and this would be if someone is remote or we don’t have enough alumni—we’ll do telephone interviews. I do believe interviews are incredibly critical. I think business schools interview for similar reasons that companies do or any organization that is hiring someone. And for me, that means putting together, especially for those of us who later evaluate applications, putting together the two “Ps,” the Paper Perspective—that tangible, written information that these guys have submitted as part of their application—with the in-person, or People Perspective. And that’s very, very helpful. It has worked.

I will say that I am presently very interested in stepping back and taking a look at not just the policy but the interviewing model and looking ahead. Would there be a change for this year? Of course not. Not at all. But it is something that I want us as an institution to take a look at. It’s almost like giving our interview policy, giving our interview model, a physical. Is this in the best interest of the school? Is this model, this policy serving us well?

mbaMission: We find that applicants often want to reduce their applications to a science. Is there a “Kellogg” way to get into Kellogg?

BF: I know that your audience would love for me to say yes, and there are days when even I wish that there was a yes to that. But I would say no. But in my saying no, please know that it’s not a negative answer whatsoever. If anything, I think it’s positive. There are some areas with the application criteria that if you think about an application and visualize it like a pie chart, you’ve got one slice for essays, and you’ve got one slice for quality of work experience, once slice for interviews and so forth. The great thing both for applicants and for those of us in admissions is that no person is the same. That is something I am very conscious of with every single application I read. That’s a good thing.

I advise people to put together the absolute best application you can, and I think a big part of that, as clichéd as this is going to sound, is really just being who you are. Not trying to be who you think we want to read about or who we want to hear in an interview. Just be you. I think that’s where candidates sometimes fall into that trap of, “I’m trying so hard. I want my tone in the essays to be this.” They want to get in. I just think that first and foremost, getting back to the idea that it’s not a science, the most important advice, honestly, is to be yourself. Be yourself. To me, an application is a platform. Here’s another way I like to think about an application, it’s a different type of platform to educate us about who you are. Plain and simple. That responsibility does lie with the candidate. Educate us about who you are through this application.

mbaMission: That question was a setup! People constantly call us up at mbaMission and say, “What is the Harvard way to get into Harvard or the Kellogg way to get into Kellogg?” As if there’s one secret formula the Admissions Committee is withholding only for the school’s favorite consultants or candidates. People will say, “Kellogg is a marketing school, so I’d better tell my marketing story.” But if you’re not a marketing person, and your best story is about supply chain, then tell your supply chain story.

BF: Exactly. I think that’s an excellent point. I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s not a science. Do we like to see, as an example, really great academic performance? Sure we do. Who wouldn’t? Do we like to see people who have progressive work experience and have demonstrated promotion? Of course. But is that a guarantee of admission? No. And again, the good news is, we’re looking at all that criteria together holistically. We really are. Again, if you think of it like a pie chart, not everybody’s chart is going to be the same. Every single one will be different. And that, to me, is a good thing.

mbaMission: Here’s another typical question we hear: Will a spelling error, typo or grammatical mistake kill an application?

BF: My response to that would be, not necessarily. But I think there are a couple of things that really are pertinent for candidates to employ when they’re applying to Kellogg, or to any school, for that matter, and that are really critical in life, whether it’s work, outside of work, and those are good judgment and good self-awareness. We know applicants aren’t perfect. Sometimes Spell Check, when you meant to say “form” and it dispensed “from,” yes, that can happen. So if I see that one time, is it a deal breaker? No, not necessarily at all. Now if I see it scattered around, the first thing I’m going to be thinking is, “Wow, this person didn’t seem to invest a great amount of effort here.” That’s troublesome to me. See the difference?

mbaMission: Yes, absolutely. Similarly, then, do you read applications in search of reasons to reject a candidate or reasons to accept the applicant? I think people sometimes feel as though the application process is a punitive one as opposed to one in which the Admissions Committee is truly seeking to learn about the candidate.

BF: I think that’s a great question, and I’m just sitting here thinking to myself, “How do I do that?” I think with me, I guess my lens is, I’m looking for somebody great. I guess I have a positive attitude with every application that I pick up. We have an extremely competitive pool, but what that means is that we’ve got a great, great pool in terms of quality, in terms of composition and diversity. And that’s exactly what we want. Do we have a tough job in admissions on selectivity? Sure we do, but that’s exactly what we want. Whether you’re hiring somebody or admitting somebody to business school, you want to have the so-called pick of the litter. For me, I’m looking for the positive points, but if there is something there that is not as competitive, on average, it’s almost like in my mind, “Okay, note to self, what are some noteworthy points?” And those noteworthy points may be all really great as far as positives. Or it can be a mix. And that takes a little bit more thinking time as far as making an evaluation, making a decision. In some cases—and I’m happy to say, not many cases—there may be, just looking across the board, signs that the applicant is just not competitive. What I mean by that is, they don’t have the work, they don’t have the grades, they didn’t do well in the interview. But overall, we have a great pool.

mbaMission: So Round 2 is upon us. Are there any disadvantages to applying in Round 2 rather than in Round 1?

BF: For Kellogg, absolutely not. I’m glad that you brought this up. This relates to some very common questions that we get: “When should I apply? Should I do it for Round 1? Do I even have a prayer in Round 2?” And my response is the same. Number one, apply when you’re ready. It takes a lot of time, effort, a lot of thinking [to apply]. It’s a project. It really is. It’s not something that’s meant to be rushed. So for Kellogg, if someone for whatever reason does not feel comfortable applying in that first round, but they’re thinking that second round is really going to work, they should go for it. Absolutely.

In addition to applying when you’re ready, I would strongly encourage that if possible, apply in one of the first two rounds. Are we going to shun those who apply in the third round? No, not at all. The reasons that I say that are, just looking at history, most of our applications come in during the first two rounds. Therefore, we select a large proportion of the class from those first two rounds. Related to that, we’ve had a trend where our yield suddenly was significantly higher than maybe what we had forecast. That suddenly becomes a factor for us about how many more people we can admit. That’s why I’m saying, aim for one of the first two rounds if possible.

mbaMission: What would you say to someone who is two years out of college in terms of shaping their candidacy going forward? What advice do you have for someone like that?

BF: You mean, they’re looking at business school in their future but not applying right at two years out? Is that correct?

mbaMission: Exactly.

BF: I think in terms of just their work, they’re on a work path, even though their career may change, and it may change a few times. I think, make the most of your work experience. Not to sound like your parents, but absolutely do the best you can. A question related to this that I get a lot is, “What should I be doing? What type of work should I be doing?” I don’t see that as an issue. I think, follow your heart. And whatever you do, do it extraordinarily well. That is what I would say. Make the most out of it. Learn as much as you can where you are, and then apply those learnings in your work and career going forward.

The other thing is, if someone is looking ahead, be proactive. If you think you may be going down the business school path in terms of applying, what are some things that you can be proactive about? Go ahead and take the GMAT if you haven’t. I really do think there’s a lot to be said for test performance for those who have not been away from school too long versus if you take it 15 years later. Nothing wrong with 15 years later, but why not take it when you’re still relatively fresh coming out of undergrad? I would definitely do that. I would also go ahead and research schools. Get a feel for programs, from admissions to curricular offerings to career management. Go ahead and become knowledgeable about the business schools out there. What does an admissions process look like?

I would also say that if someone did not have the most competitive academic record, then show us that you can do the work. Take some classes. That’s not just going to help you as an applicant—it’s like spinach. It can only be good for you. I always tell people if you’re thinking ahead, think about where you can be proactive, not just as an applicant, but also envision yourself as a future student. What can you do to try to be as successful as you can? Those are just some of the things. And I think on the personal, extracurricular front, schools are looking for well-rounded people. Whatever your passions are, dive in headfirst. We don’t have an approved list of extracurricular activities; that’s not what we do. But I would say, make the most of your life, not just when you are in undergrad, not just academically and not just professionally. What other passions do you have? Go with that.

mbaMission: You’re like a myth destroyer here! This is the kind of information we give to candidates all the time, so it’s great to have it corroborated by you.

BF: Honestly, I will say from my working standpoint, thank heavens there’s not a short list. I would be bored to tears, and I think business school would be a boring experience. Just like on the work front, we’re not concerned about exactly what your title is and how marquee of a company name you have. What have you been doing? What did you learn? And it’s pretty exciting when you see somebody coming from Wall Street, and then you see somebody coming from the military in Israel, and the next thing you know, look at this, a rabbi is applying. It’s just incredible. My advice would be to just follow your heart, and do those things on the professional front, and do them extraordinarily well.

mbaMission: Is there anything else you want people to know about Kellogg or applying to the school? Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think is important for people to know?

BF: One of the things I think makes Kellogg incredibly unique is that we are about diversity. That has many meanings, not just that we have a variety of all kinds of students here, and we want that. We also have a diverse portfolio of majors and elective courses and that translates out. Really bright, interesting, unique students marry that with the diverse curriculum we’re offering, and what does that attract? That attracts a really diverse base of companies and industries. And we have historically fared very well in downward times with the economy, and I think a lot of that has to do with not just the quality of the students that we have here but again the diversity factor that really starts in admissions and goes all the way through the school and translates out on the recruiter side. That’s one thing I would highlight.

A second thing, which we touched on, would be the myth of “I can’t apply in Round 2.” Absolutely you can. Absolutely. I certainly hope we’re going to see a nice robust and high-quality pool in Round 2.  The third thing I would say is on the financial resources front. This has been a priority, and it continues to be a priority that we want to do as much as we can to help admitted applicants on the financial aid side. We do have financial assistance that admitted applicants can apply for, both U.S. citizens and permanent residents. We have an array of merit-based scholarships, no separate application required, and then we also have our Northwestern Loan Program. We never lost our loan program, and this is university funds. So, as you know, a number of schools last year suddenly lost their programs because the bank that they were working with pulled the plug. Our loan program is still in place, and I definitely think it is a reasonable program in terms of rates and so forth. And this is especially key for our international applicants.

And then related to financial assistance, for the military folks who have served post 9/11, we are a participant in the Yellow Ribbon Program, and we’re very, very proud of that. And so all the information about how many folks we can award funding to, the matching, etc., we’ve got that all on our Web site. But I wanted to let you know Kellogg is participating in that.

mbaMission: Thank you again, Beth. It has been great talking with you, and I really appreciate your time.

• Darden’s reasons for shifting and introducing some flexibility into its previously standardized curriculum
• Darden’s introduction of Skype-based video interviews and shift away from an open interview policy
• Neher’s encouragement of first round applicants and discussion of the changing application volume in the various rounds

mbaMission: My first question is the question I ask everyone and the one I’m most interested in personally. What is Darden not known for that it should be known for? What are its hidden strengths, and what are the special gems or programs you think people should know about?

Sarah Neher: That’s an interesting question. I wish we were so well known that everyone knew all the things about us that I think are wonderful. I’m always surprised when somebody says, “Well, Darden’s a finance school, right?” and I say, “Well, Darden’s a general management school.” But I get the opposite, also: “Well, not too many people go to finance,” and then I say, “Well, actually 40% of our class will go to finance.”

It’s just such an interesting question, because I think it is dependent so much on people’s own lens and their own perspective when they start the research process. I think one of the things that I wish people did know more about is really how innovative we have become in recent years, and I think that that’s in part because of the great research going on at the Batten Institute, but it’s also because our faculty are really invested in sustainability and innovation and entrepreneurship, and those are all areas that there’s just a lot of learning going on. And so what we’re teaching, the cases we’re writing, they’re all changing by the month. And it’s really dynamic and exciting. It’s being integrated in the first year, but you can also spend your entire second year doing courses in these areas, because the second year is so flexible. So, I think that’s probably what I would say at this point.

mbaMission: What do you think Darden does uniquely well?

SN: I think that we teach people how to make decisions extremely well. And that’s really through the case method and the level of personal interaction that it requires. Decisions are not just about analyzing data, they’re also about understanding people and their motivations and their perspectives. And I think that you will learn that here, from the combination of the case method and the level at which you’re going to be expected to participate, and that you’re going to want to participate with the faculty and the staff, and your clubs and activities.

mbaMission: Is Darden working to strengthen any particular academic areas?

SN: Well, I would say last year’s hire was in the sustainability area—strategy and sustainability, environmental sustainability. That was certainly an area that we were strengthening. We’re good there now, and [Samuel L. Slover Professor of Business Michael] Lenox is really amazing and impressive. And then this year, we’ve hired a few faculty, two women, and I’m not sure if there’s a third person—but they’re in different areas, so I don’t know that that’s really a trend.

mbaMission: Darden made significant changes in the admissions process when you came on board, switching from open interviews to interviews by request. What was the thinking behind that change?

SN: The biggest reason I felt like we needed to change that was really just a fairness issue. What I saw the first year I was here was, because international students were rarely able to come here for an interview, they were on an “interview by invitation” process. They did not get to interview before they applied. And domestic students or international students living in the United States, if they had enough funds, could come here beforehand. And I felt like that was not the best way to get the best class possible or, really, to treat everyone equally.

In addition to that, when I met with my peers at other schools, we were all trying to figure out ways that we could reduce the economic burden on people applying. And requiring people to make a trip to Charlottesville before they could even apply seemed like an undue burden. And it seemed like it was limiting the diversity we could have in the class in international, socioeconomic and geographic [ways]—it was limiting us. And we have seen that diversity grow in our application pool with the change. It has really nice side benefits, like allowing us to travel more in the fall, because we’re not having to be here to interview. But those weren’t the underlying, core issues. And the first year, we thought, “Oh, if this doesn’t work, we’ll switch back, no big deal,” but it has gone really well.

mbaMission: How do you make sure people really understand what they are getting into at Darden, with regard to both the workload and the case method?

SN: I don’t think anyone can really understand what it’s like to be in business school until they come to business school. And Darden is certainly uniquely participatory, and that requires you to be on your toes and do your preparation in a way that isn’t true at a lot of places. I think, luckily, that’s pretty well known, so [applicants] at least know it’s going to be more work than other places, from a preparation standpoint, but I think unless they come and visit a class or meet with our faculty, that’s hard to really get a sense for.

What we did do this year was create a really wonderful video of [Associate Professor] Peter Rodriguez teaching an actual case class, and that has really helped people understand that level of participation and why you need to do the work to be prepared to discuss in class. We’ve gotten really good feedback from that, and we’re doing one this fall that will be on how you teach accounting in the case method, with [Robert F. Vandell Research Associate Professor] Luann Lynch, and I think that will really help people understand how it works but also what it takes to be a part of it. Using more video, I think, is really the only way to get [the case method] across to a broader audience that can’t come here. You can actually watch the video of the full class as well, which is about 75 minutes. So, if you really want to see a full class, you can. [Watch the Darden Case Method Video featuring Professor Rodriguez online at www.darden.virginia.edu/html/standard.aspx?menu_id=635&styleid=2&id=812 ]

mbaMission: Darden moved from a rigid curriculum to a more flexible curriculum. Can you comment on what some of the specific changes were and how the switch has been received?

SN: The first-year curriculum had always been a prescribed core for the entire year, and what we found was that in the third quarter—so, in the winter and early spring—people were really identifying what their summer internship was going to be. So now you can take three electives in your fourth quarter, in addition to two core classes, that are really designed to prepare you for that internship.

So, whatever you’ve chosen to do your internship in, you can take courses that will support that. Some are general, the electives, but for the most part, if you’re going to go into finance, you can take “Valuation” with [Associate Professor] Yiorgos Allayannis, and really get that out in your first year, so you’re ready to go right into that bank and wow them. And [that class] was one of the most popular second-year electives, so why not make it available earlier? Or, you can take advanced topics in consulting with [Professor] Jeanne Liedtka and really be prepared to be client ready for the summer, not when you graduate, and really, again, close the deal on the job. And that has gone really well. People have felt very prepared for their internship; they’ve loved the electives. It’s not a huge choice list, so they’re still able to work in their learning teams; a lot of them are still taking the same classes, so it hasn’t created a bunch of movement. But it’s really allowed people to do well, and people are getting jobs at the end of the summer, which is ultimately what a lot of people are interested in.

I don’t know this summer if we’ll see something radically different. I don’t think it will be impacted by the courses [students] took fourth quarter—it will be the economy—but I think it’s gone well. I don’t think there are any changes planned for the first year, and the second year is completely flexible already. I know that there are committees looking at everything, as there always are at Darden, but I think anything that would change would be several years away, and we’d have a lot more information about it before anything would change.

mbaMission: Speaking of jobs, how did summer students and both first- and second-year students do with their job searches?

SN: Really great. Obviously, we were very concerned. We were really fortunate that, because we’re a general management school, we had companies step in as banks disappeared. Because, suddenly there was no Lehman Brothers, Barclays took all of those people. We had other companies—Danaher, Honeywell—that came in and were excited to get a chance at those people. So, I think we feel really great about it and like things went well, but we don’t yet have final stats. We also have a very proactive career development office and a very helpful faculty; they’re very helpful.

The career development office led what they called goal sessions, which were basically lead-generating sessions for students, by function, with faculty and staff that had either worked in that function, consulted in that function or who teach in that function. And those generated a lot of opportunities for people to tap the network that is Darden. The alumni were already being tapped, but this was to really get the faculty and staff in that have a lot of connections. We did the same for internships. This is what this place is—it’s connected, and we are going to help everybody. So, I was helping people find internships, and so were people on my staff, and it was much easier. I know all the students, so I can sell them really easily. I’m obviously confident in them, and it was really fun, actually, to find some connections that worked out into jobs.

mbaMission: What would you say to someone who is applying who is unemployed or has been laid off? Can you compare the Admissions Committee’s view of someone who got laid off three months ago with that of someone who might have been laid off a year ago? Is there a difference, in your opinion?

SN: There is. I have a higher expectation of what you should have been doing in the interim, the longer ago you were laid off. So, I want to see that you’re doing something with your time that’s going to move your plan forward. I would expect to see people take some time to figure out what that plan might be—they might be changing course; they might be going in a totally new direction. And that’s fine, but I want to see them, after a little bit of time, figuring out what that is. So, if they’ve been laid off for three months, I think that’s reasonable. After three months, I think people need to be volunteering, or they need to be finding another job. If they’re not looking for a full-time job or can’t find a full-time job, we want to see them trying to volunteer or shadow people in the industry or function they want to enter. I had someone this year who got laid off but knew they wanted to start a restaurant someday—maybe not even right after business school, but that was sort of a side passion for them. So they ended up working as a waitress and then got into the kitchen a little bit and got to do some managing, and spent five months working in a restaurant. And that’s because it was something they were passionate about. It wasn’t for the money; it was to learn something on the ground that they could put into practice. And that would be great to talk about in class: they fired people, they hired people, they dealt with a lot of interpersonal issues and that will be good fodder for class and for learning, and also help advance the person’s life plan.

mbaMission: How are candidates’ files reviewed at Darden?

SN: Each file is reviewed at least three times, and it may be reviewed as many as eight times, because there are eight people on the Admissions Committee. We spend a lot of time with your file. It is very important that we read everything about you. We don’t triage by score—every reader gets a set of files, and they’re randomly assigned initially so that we really are treating everyone equally and giving everyone the same amount of time. And we will read everything that comes as part of your application: your essays, your recommendations, everything. The first two readers combined will make a decision about whether to invite someone for an interview. If someone’s invited for an interview, that could be here, or if they’re overseas, that could be overseas. Or, we’re going to be trying Skype this year. We’ll also do some by phone.

mbaMission: Will the Skype interviews be with video or without?

SN: Both, probably. We’re going to try the video and see how it goes. We’re going to use video with some of our recent grads this summer. We already know them, so we can see if we actually can get a sense for them via the video or not, and see if it’s a distraction. But I think we’re going to at least try it in some places. Next. the evaluation comes in from the interviewer, it’s read again, and then it’s read by me last, and I will review all the files and make all the final decisions. If [the application] doesn’t go to interview, it will come to me sooner, after a second read instead of after a third read.

mbaMission: When you read the application, how do you do it? What do you read first?

SN: I am looking at what my previous readers have highlighted for me, but I’m also going to look at most of the transcripts, the interview. You would be amazed at how often the interviewer uses the same language to describe someone as the recommenders do. It is uncanny. You are who you are. I think our interview process draws that out a little bit because it’s a little bit longer and a little bit more personal than some, but you can’t really trick us. Someone who’s recommending you has known you for a while, and the interviewer often uses the very same language to describe someone. That is so comforting, to feel like you’re really getting an accurate picture of someone. And then you read their essays and get that. When I’m reading, I’m looking for inconsistencies, to make sure there isn’t something that I’m missing or that doesn’t make sense to me. But if everything is consistent and we want you to be a part of our class and we think you’ll add value, then it’s an easy decision. The hard ones are in the middle, where something is inconsistent or we’re not sure we’re getting enough of a picture of you. That’s challenging. It’s also amazing, the stories people have and what we learn about business and different parts of the world and the United States. It’s just a wonderful job. I love to hear people’s stories.

mbaMission: In those cases where people are “in the middle,” what happens?

SN: Sometimes if we still don’t feel like we know who you are, that’s a problem in and of itself that will prevent you from getting in. We feel like at that point, we’ve given you many opportunities to let us know who you are, and if something’s still not feeling right or is inconsistent, or we don’t feel like you gave us enough information—we feel like your essays were incredibly vague and could have been written by somebody else; not written for you, but just don’t tell us enough about you, that I could have had the same story—then you haven’t done your job, and you won’t get in, no matter what your scores are. If I really like you but I’m concerned about your ability to do the work, you’re also not going to get in. And that’s also not based on one score or one grade; that’s going to be [based on] what everyone says about your work ethic or your drive. And then if I don’t feel like you’re a leader, you’re not going to get in. If you haven’t been showing us that you’ve been involved in enough activities and that you’re willing to take initiative and work with others, I’m going to be concerned about that. So it’s not so much that you could provide us with anything else at that point. I really want to see it in the application and in the other pieces. But sometimes we’ll call or e-mail someone and ask a question, or we’ll find out if someone’s going to be at an event and talk to them there. But this is an opportunity, these applications, and it’s pretty thorough. Please give it all that you can in the space we provide.

mbaMission: How much coaching do you feel is appropriate for a recommender? Do you think it should be a completely hands-off process, or do you think it is okay for applicants to discuss their goals for business school with their recommenders?

SN: Please sit down and talk to them. It will be a good process for you, too. It will be introspective for you. When I write a recommendation for someone—which I’ve done a fair amount, especially in my previous job—I ask the person to send me their resume. I ask for bullet points; never write actual paragraphs, because that leads to too much of your own language potentially going into the recommendation, but bullet points that cover your key accomplishments or the reasons you want to go to that school. I also ask for the mission statement of the school or something from the school’s Web site so that I know what that school is about, so I can think about how that person would be a fit for that school. A little bit of a package to give to the person so that they’re ready to write the recommendation. And then sit down with them and talk about the goals and the purpose and the why. Hopefully there is someone that you do that with anyway, a mentor or a manager that already knows your career plan. But if not, certainly spend that time.

mbaMission: How can a candidate best reveal his or her fit with Darden?

SN: This is an excellent question, because I think each school I talk to and each staff member at each school that I talk to has a different feeling about this question of fit. I do think we want applicants who have really thought about the schools they’re applying to, but I think until you’re actually there, if you haven’t visited, it’s hard to know. I don’t always expect people to reveal as much about fit as I think some schools might. I think that if you tell me who you are, what you’re about and what you want to accomplish, I’ll be able to see if you’re a fit or not. It’s more important to me that we get personal details, because one of the mistakes people make is regurgitating the Web site back to us. You telling me that you want to take so-and-so’s class or the case method is important because of what we put on our Web site is just a waste of your word count. It shows me that you can read our Web site, but it doesn’t show me anything about who you are. Really spend that time with personal examples, incidents, specific stories that you think tell me something about yourself that would make you a fit for the case method. For example, something about presenting at a board meeting and the questions you were asked and how you had to manage that on your feet and what kind of preparation you had to do beforehand—that would completely tell me that you could accomplish the case method, right? But it doesn’t tell me exactly what I already know about the case method that I’ve told you on the Web site. Really personal examples from the workplace or from an activity, that’s how you can convey that the best. The best essays are always about a moment in time and not a laundry list or a chronology of everything you’ve ever done.

mbaMission: Do you judge applications differently in Round 1 versus Round 2? Is it better to get in during Round 1?

SN: It’s always better to do the first round. The main reason for that is because every seat and every scholarship dollar is available, so it’s open. In Round 2 it’s pretty similar in terms of the admit rate, but I would say that there are fewer scholarship dollars available per person because people from the first round accepted them. It’s impossible for us to make it even, so I would say always try to apply in the first round if at all possible. I welcome people to apply in the third round, especially if they’ve had job changes or life changes, but please explain why you’re applying in that round. If you’re reading an interview like this, you’re pretty prepared, so you should explain why. And it’s perfectly acceptable to say, “I wanted to take the GMAT again” or “I wanted to make sure my recommenders had time.” That’s okay. Your chances aren’t going to be as good as if you’d applied in Round 1, but having a reason like that is fine.

mbaMission: What kind of discrepancy in volume do you see from Round 1 to Round 2 to Round 3?

SN: It used to be a lot different. Round 1 has really grown in the last few years and is almost the same size as Round 2, slightly smaller, and then Round 3 is maybe a quarter the size of those, maybe a third. It’s pretty small.

mbaMission: What did you see in terms of application volume last year? Do you have a prediction as to whether the volume will increase or decrease this year?

SN: We were flat this year, which I felt was really fine, given that we lost our international student loan program earlier than many schools did. I felt like we really had very strong domestic growth, and it pretty much equaled the decline from India. If you look at GMAC’s data, GMAC’s test-taking in India is down, and so I expect that to be the trend going forward. But I think that there are some markets really growing, so I don’t expect the applications to go up this year, but I expect that we might be steady again. If you look at a 20-year trend, business school applications will go up preceding a downturn in the economy, and then they’ll level out, and then they’ll start to go down as the economy recovers. So, if the economy really takes off, as I hope it does, we could see a decline in applications. But I think it could be flat.

mbaMission: Has the student loan situation been resolved?

SN: The rising second years and the incoming students all have loans sufficient to cover all their expenses, and they’ve had that for a couple months now, and that’s all going fine. I think everyone’s expecting more banks to enter the arena in the next year, which will increase the competition, which will change all the rates, so we might want to change our programs to take advantage of lower rates. So I can’t really predict what it will be.

mbaMission: So all incoming students this year have loans?

SN: Yes.

mbaMission: Is there anything else you want people to know about Darden or about applying to the school?

SN: There are always things I want people to know. I would say, never be afraid to interview because you think it’s going to be competitive. Don’t try to differentiate yourself from others; try to be your best self. These are sort of cliché, but people get caught up in “There are so many consultants applying” or “There are so many bankers applying.” I still want the best and most interesting bankers or the best and most interesting consultants, so don’t let that dissuade you. I would say, do try to watch some of the videos and things, because you can get a much better sense for the program [that way] if you’re not able to come to Charlottesville. We will be releasing our list of our travel cities; we’re going to be going to over 60 cities this fall, so hopefully you can come visit us as we’re traveling. And the dean will be at many of those events. Our events are unique in that there’s usually equal numbers of alums to prospective students, so you really get to talk to a lot of alumni. And that’s really valuable, because I think very highly of our alumni, and I really believe that you can get a really good sense for the program if you talk to people who have been through it. We do not do PowerPoint at our events. You can get that from the Web site. So take a look at those things and those videos on the Web site beforehand, and come and talk to people.

mbaMission: Thank you so much for you time. I think you’ll help a lot of people.

SN: I hope so. I think this process should be a lot more transparent than it is.

• Tuck’s desire to remain a smaller program, despite economic pressure to grow its class size
• The unique nature of Hanover, New Hampshire and the importance of interviewing
• Tuck’s adherance to an open interview policy and how to interview successfully at the school and more…

mbaMission: I’ll start with my usual first question, which is what should Tuck be known for that it’s not known for? What do you think is the hidden gem of the school that people overlook?

Dawna Clarke: I’ll answer this from the perspective of someone who has already done their research and knows what a special place it is in terms of the community and the focus on the two-year MBA program. One is the uniqueness that Tuck focuses exclusively on the two-year, full-time MBA program, and I see that as a huge differentiator for us in terms of the fact that if a student comes to school here, there’s roughly 240 to 250 students in each entering class. The sole focus of the entire community is on the two-year, full-time program, so you’re not sharing resources at all, with faculty who are also teaching in a part-time program or a weekend program or a global program. The fact that Tuck has that unique focus on the two-year, full-time program is extremely distinctive.

I would say in an even more hidden way, when people research Tuck, I think that they know it’s a good, solid MBA program. It’s a great general management program, but it is a rigorous program. I mean, academically it is quite rigorous. It’s a really serious place in terms of academics, and our dean has really worked hard over the years on faculty having dual excellence in both research and teaching, and there are a lot of opportunities in the second year to take what we’re calling these “deep-dive electives” to very specific areas. And also I would say that [something] people don’t affiliate with Tuck is that it’s a great school for finance. We are a general management program, but if you looked at the number of people who come here as students who are interested in finance versus the ratio of recruiters, it’s very strong. So I think we place students in careers in finance equally strong as the finance schools. And that is something that is not as well known as I would like it to be.

mbaMission: We know that these days, some schools’ endowments are shrinking, and because of that, the schools are increasing their class sizes or adding programs. Is Tuck facing any of these kinds of pressures? Is the school considering adding a part-time program or an executive program?

DC: It is something that we are definitely seeing in the industry, that many schools are expanding or offering spin-off programs and things. I will say that I’m sure that the Tuck administration feels the pressure, but there are no plans currently to expand the Tuck School or to offer part-time programs. When I came here in 2005, they were wrapping up a study looking at the feasibility of the advantages and disadvantages of offering a part-time program, but in a different location.

We’re in New Hampshire; 80% of New Hampshire is wooded. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place, but it’s not logistically the best location for a part-time program. I think it’s a fabulous location if you want to relocate here and stay for a few years, but the school did undergo a process of evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of offering some kind of part-time or executive program and decided against it. So, I think the school has done a great job in terms of asking us to look at our budgets really, really carefully and scale back in a way that would enable them to not lay off people and not have to expand the class by 30% or something like that. Our class size should be about the same as last year, which was 252.

mbaMission: So no plans to expand the class size?

DC: No.

mbaMission: You mentioned that Tuck might be considered a little more remote or relatively remote. Do you place any particular emphasis on the class visit for that reason? Does it indicate to you that people are more serious about Tuck when they make the trip?

DC: I think the fact that we are remote plays into our admissions policies a little bit in that we’re fairly unique in that we remain committed to the open interview policy so that any student who wants to interview has the opportunity to interview on a space-available basis. You know, if 50 people wanted to come on Friday, September 13, or something, then we might not have space to accommodate them, but we do have an open interview policy, and part of why we are committed to that is because of our location. It’s not as easy to get here as it is to get to other major metropolitan areas. So if a student is interested in making the effort to come, then we by no means want to discourage that.

And also you just asked if there were any myths I would want to dispel about Tuck, and one of things that was such a pleasant surprise to me—and I think is a pleasant surprise to many of those who come here—is that you think of Tuck as being very remote, which it is, but I have been so pleasantly surprised, and I think students are surprised, by how much there is to do in the area. And I think in general, the Upper Valley is pretty outdoorsy, and here we have our own ski way, we have our own canoe and kayak club, you can rent snowshoes, you can take snowshoe lessons, skiing lessons. Embracing the outdoors is very accessible, even if you’re not an outdoorsy person, because there is so much going on on campus to help embrace that lifestyle.

It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty sophisticated. I think we have the advantage of being part of the greater Dartmouth community, and Dartmouth being an Ivy League school draws a lot in terms of the guest speakers who are coming, the actors and the actresses, and we have the Hopkins Center for the Arts, which brings in a lot of jazz musicians, performing artists and visual artists. One of my favorite things to do in the fall—the Hopkins Center of the Arts sponsors a festival called the Telluride Festival, and there is actually a festival in Colorado every year called the Telluride, and the person who used to run that film festival runs the Film Society now at Dartmouth. And he goes to Telluride and picks what he thinks are the six best films at the Telluride Film Festival, and they are shown here at Dartmouth before they are shown to the general public.

So for example, we got to see Capote here well before it was released to the general public and Into the Wild.  It’s a huge film festival here in New Hampshire. So I think that the fact that we’re remote, it’s really just a beautiful area in terms of embracing the outdoors, but it’s also surprisingly sophisticated in terms of people who come to us. I’m more socially active, or active in things like that here than in places that were significantly bigger. A lot people live within walking distance of the campus; everything is reasonable. So that is definitely a myth that I would want to dispel. I think it’s just kind of a neat place to spend two years.

mbaMission: And a fairly large percentage of students live on campus, correct?

DC: Yes. It’s a residential campus, and within the past year we finished one of buildings, called the Living and Learning Center.  I had a tour of it when it opened and I thought, “I want to live here.” [Laughs] It’s just gorgeous, and it has a yoga studio and kitchens, and all of the buildings are connected, so you can get from building to building underground through tunnels, which is very practical in the wintertime. But I think that’s one of the reasons there’s so much bonding at Tuck—it is a residential campus. It’s residential for single students, and a huge percentage of the single students live on campus, and then there is married student housing where a lot of the married students live, and then many of the second years rent houses in the area.

But what I was most struck by when I first came here was the school spirit. As you know, [school spirit] is very high at UVA and Dartmouth. I think Dartmouth and UVA have such an incredibly high level of school spirit, and I think one of the reasons it is particularly intense here is because it is residential, so the students are studying together and living together and playing together, you know, working together, and I think that contributes a lot to the bonding that goes on at an even higher level.

mbaMission: You said that a certain kind of individual can fit in that kind of environment. Is there anything you do to screen for that characteristic?

DC: I think that it’s really important for individuals who go to business school and who are going to be potential business leaders to be adaptable in general. I mean, the world, as you know, is so much more global, that we added into the admissions’ criteria a new criterion last year called Global Mindset. So we’re asking people, have you studied a foreign language or worked abroad or traveled abroad? Or to what extent have you worked with other cultures? Because I think one of the things we’re finding is that recruiters are looking more and more for that sense of adaptability and the ability to get out of your comfort zone and to try something new and embrace the global world and to have some global skills. So I think we look at it in general, but not necessarily how they would adapt, because I think it’s a very easy place to adapt to because it’s so community oriented, and I think even people who are city slickers really come to appreciate the fresh air.

And like I said, Dartmouth does a really great job of making the outdoors accessible to someone who isn’t even outdoorsy. The Outing Club is the biggest outing club in the country. We’re one of only two colleges to own our own ski resort.  We have a Canoe and Kayak Club. The things that go on here are reasonably inexpensive, so if you are just a novice, it’s very accessible to you.

But to get to your point, I think for a variety of reasons we look very carefully at sociability, interpersonal skills, communication skills—not just book smarts, but the ability to articulate your point and get along with people. I mean, Tuck students are known to be very strong in terms of team skills. One of the things that people told me a lot when I came here, and I have found this to be the case, is that Tuck students and alumni are really well known for humility. It’s just a really nice aspect of the culture here.  I mean, Dartmouth and Tuck, that’s really part of their brand image. There is a certain amount of humility that is conveyed when you interact with colleagues, subordinates and things. We do look at it in the admissions process, but it’s more because we feel like interpersonal skills and communication skills are so important to have in business and at Tuck.

mbaMission: Can you talk a little bit about why Tuck uses the open interview approach?  And what makes for a successful interview, from your perspective?

DC: We’re extremely proud to say that we are very committed to the open interview policy for a variety of reasons, and one is that we’re proud to showcase our school, and anyone who is interested enough to have done a lot of research on MBA programs who wants to explore Tuck further, we want to be available to them. To come and explore the school, which of course they could do even if we didn’t have an open interview policy, but I think if you’re making that kind of effort to come here and sit in on a class and go on a tour, the least we can do is make ourselves available to interview someone. I think it’s a reflection of what we value in the admissions process, and we don’t value only that someone has been successful academically and on the GMAT and in their career, but we also value a candidate’s interpersonal and communication skills, and I think that those are very, very hard to convey on the basis of an application.

So the interview, I think, allows some candidate who is a solid candidate but maybe not a standout to really push their candidacy over the edge and shine because they presented themselves so well or they were so strong interpersonally or their motivation level [was strong]. Whatever they convey in the interview may help to push them over the edge in terms of how strong they are in our eyes, and I do think that the open interview policy is a direct, and I’m repeating myself, but it’s a direct indication of what we value in the process. And I feel personally that if someone has taken the time to complete our application, which is time consuming, and can be expensive in terms of various application fees and taking the GMAT, I think that people have the right to be heard. And they can be heard by what they tell us on paper through their application, but I think people have an innate desire to be heard in the interview, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to tell us more about yourself and to market yourself to the Admissions Committee.

And I think the third reason is because of our location. We’re not in a major metropolitan area. We realize that it is a little more challenging to get here and a little more time consuming, so we just don’t think that it would be fair for a student to come here to just sit in on a class and come back again when they are invited back for an interview. So part of it is logistics and trying to be respectful of our location and the relative cost and time in getting here.

mbaMission: And what is the interview like? What do you think is a successful interview?

DC: I would say one of the facets that contribute to a successful interview is the research an applicant has done. Once we have gotten to the point of interview, we would really hope that people are pretty familiar with the program and have a good idea generally of why they would want they would want to come to Tuck. I think some of the reason that some interviews are successful is that the candidates are able to do a good job articulating why they think there is a good fit between Tuck and their background. So Tuck is kind of a bridge between what they have accomplished and achieved up to this point and how Tuck can be a bridge to what they want to do in the future. So I think research, thoughtfulness, really giving some analysis to why you want to do this and being able to articulate just the basics of why you’re interested in Tuck and why you are interested in an MBA.

And it may change. I mean, we realize that people change their minds all the time, but research is definitely important, and I think anyone who looks at our Web site and sees the purpose of the interview for us is not to get a sense of how you did in your academic courses or GMAT but to supplement what is in the written application. So I would say there’s not a cookie-cutter Tuck student, but I would say one of the threads that binds people together is the hope that all students who are admitted have strong leadership potential, interpersonal skills and communication skills. And so I would say going into the interview, realize that’s a great time to showcase your personality. Not everyone has to be full personality. People can have strong interpersonal skills in different ways. You know just recognizing that it is an opportunity to showcase some of the skills in person that you showcase on paper.

A successful interview, I find one of the common threads, is when people don’t just make broad sweeping statements, but they have some really good, tangible examples of things that they’ve done. So if they say they have strong leadership potential, then they tell a story to illustrate that, or if they identify themselves as being a strong team player, then they would tell us a story, an anecdote or a vignette that illustrates that they are a team player. It’s very hard if you interview a lot of people, you’re not going to remember that so-and-so said that they were a strong team player, but I very well might remember a very compelling story that somebody told me. So I would tell people to really identify what are the three things that you’re most proud of that you think are relevant to business school, and how am I going to convey those in the interview, and what kind of specific examples do I have to tell that would be memorable and compelling?

mbaMission: And what is the actual structure of the interview?

DC: Ours are, intentionally, fairly informal. We have interviews that are conducted by our staff as well as alumni and current students, and typically, when someone comes in for an interview, a few minutes are spent just making the person feel at ease. We try to ease people into it. They’re definitely not intended to put someone on a hot seat. We ask questions geared toward why someone would be interested in an MBA. Why Tuck? We definitely ask some questions about why they chose a certain undergraduate school, why they chose a career path, why they chose their path.

We often ask an open-ended question, like, is there anything else that we haven’t asked you about that you would like to articulate. I think that’s an important question that I hope all of our interviewers are implementing, and sometimes people have something that they really want to tell us that our questions don’t elicit. But I think they’re fairly informal. We intentionally want to put someone at ease. That’s the kind of place we are, and we want the interviewee to feel comfortable, so that we can kind of see their true personality. I would say that there are certain themes that we focus on in an inviting, welcoming fashion.

mbaMission: You mentioned that a lot of applicants, once they’ve been accepted, may later change their goals and that business school is a time to explore. If so, why ask candidates for a goal statement?

DC: Well, people are embarking on a big investment on their behalf, and we want to make sure that we can deliver what it is that they say at that time that they are intending to pursue. I think that at just a basic level it shows someone has good decision-making skills. They see the value of an MBA in a general way. They might see the value of a general management degree, and they might see the value in a Tuck degree, but they have been thoughtful that they have embraced the process. I think the more thought and more commitment someone has shown to the process, the more they are engaged in the experience as a student, whether you are in the classroom or preparing for an interview.

I had a interviewer tell me one time that if he were interviewing Tuck students, the biggest thing that he would focus on would be how much research they’ve done, because that can differentiate one student from another. And he feels like there would be a correlation between how someone has prepared for their business school interview and the extent to which they are really going to knock the socks off a recruiter at the end of the process. That it shows that you’re proactive. It shows maturity. It shows insight. I think that how committed somebody is about doing their research is a reflection of how serious somebody is about how they are going to handle other elements of the MBA experience, of how prepared you are going to be when you go to class and how prepared you are going to be when you have an interview or are involved as a leader of a club.

I think that also it is perfectly appropriate to say that one of the beauties of an MBA program is that you’re exposed to so much and so many industries and functional areas that you obviously haven’t been exposed to, and it’s quite common for people to change their minds, and that’s fine, but what are your thoughts at this time? I also think that it’s really impressive to me when applicants go beyond reading the viewbook on the Internet. And there are times when applicants say, “Oh, a friend of a friend went to Tuck, and he introduced me to three people, and I called them up,” and uniformly one of the things that they say that really resonates with me is that that was a transformational experience or whatever.

Someone who goes that extra mile, who didn’t just read the Web site, but talked to current students, talked to faculty, talked to alumni—you know, they are going to make a better choice. You want people who really want to be here; I think that’s true of most schools. We’re proud of the institution, we’re proud of our students, but the students that embrace it most are the ones that really want to be here. And setting those goals and knowing why you want to be here and how the school is going to help you helps make a case that this is really going to be somebody that is serious about this experience and embrace it fully.

mbaMission: Is this the toughest market you’ve seen since coming to Tuck? And how are Tuck students doing in this economy?

DC: I definitely think that having done this for several years—and there have been several recessions I’ve gone through as an admissions director—I would definitely say that it’s one of the toughest job markets, but I think that we’re fortunate in our scale. Because the ratio of recruiters that come vis-à-vis the graduating students, the second years, I think works to our advantage. I don’t want to speak for other schools, but I wonder if smaller schools are slightly more sheltered because of their scale. Even if people are scaling back, I think that our scale works to our advantage.

And we’re lucky this year for a change that we made. We have two people heading up career services at Tuck. One is a Tuck graduate and one went to Wharton, and they have been incredibly proactive in terms of reaching out to faculty, sending out résumés for students without jobs for summer internships, and really embracing our board of overseers, the advisory board. They’ve been unbelievably proactive, from literally floating résumés out through the Tuck community, looking for these things, and really connecting people on a personal basis. So we have weathered this fairly well considering that this is a really challenging time for all business schools.

mbaMission: Are you giving more scrutiny to applicants in terms of their employability after graduation? Are more applicant files going to career services this year?

DC: I would say that it’s not a major component of the admissions process, but we do have joint meetings with the career development office to give us guidance on if, for instance, the students says that they want to go into private equity, is it more likely that they will be successful if they have these skills or these backgrounds? So, I don’t know if we’re giving more scrutiny to employability, but we’re working more closely with career services to make sure that we’re well educated on what it takes for someone to make a transition into a specific industry. And there are occasions when we might ask their opinion on how reasonable is it for a student to make a certain transition. We have major admissions criteria that I could go over if you want to, but I would say that there is slightly more emphasis on career goals, employability—is the transition a realistic one?

mbaMission: If you could go through your criteria, that would be great.

DC: Sure. There is a variety of criteria. This is a holistic process, which I’m sure you’ve heard before, and I’m sure a lot of schools are really proud that they have holistic processes as we do here at Tuck. We definitely are going to look at academic credentials, primarily at the student’s undergraduate performance, and not just the GPA, but their performance over time. The GMAT. The TOFEL. We will look at the highest GMAT scores. We’re looking for people who are both team players and have demonstrated leadership skills or leadership potential, so we will look at the extent to which they were involved at the undergraduate level, as well as the extent they have been involved in organizations since graduation. So leadership is huge. Team skills are huge.

We talked about the interview earlier. Interpersonal skills, communication skills are huge. The extent to which you have done research on Tuck. Career progression and accomplishments are something that we look at in the admissions process. Where someone started their career, where they are at the time that they are applying, how have they progressed? What kind of additional responsibilities have they taken on? It’s a very valuable source of information for us. The letter of reference—we require two, and we prefer that they are work related. I think those are incredibly valuable because it’s an objective set of information from an employer’s perspective of the candidate.

A new criterion that we added about two years ago, I said earlier, is the Global Mindset. So none of these are mandatory, but we love to see that people have embraced foreign cultures, studied abroad, traveled abroad, worked abroad. Employers are looking more and more at that. So if I were to give tips to prospective students on what they can do to be successful in the admissions process but also to be successful on the tail end of the process, one thing that we hear from recruiters all the time is that they want students with a global mindset. That’s one of the reasons we added that.

mbaMission: What can you tell us about application volumes recently? How selective is Tuck at this point?

DC: Our applications were flat this year, which is not unusual in a tough economic climate. And I don’t want to speak for other schools, but it seems like that is fairly common. It’s still a very competitive process.  We got close to 2,900 applications. The targeted class size is about 240.

mbaMission: Can you talk about the discrepancy in volume between the first and second rounds?

DC: Sure. We’re a school that has an early action deadline, and that is geared toward people who have identified Tuck as their top choice and know that they would attend Tuck if they were admitted.  And I highly recommend that round if you fall into that category. It’s nice because you get your admissions decision in mid-December.

We have four deadlines. We have early action, we have one in November, one in January and one in April. Early action is October 14, November is November 11, January is January 6, and April is April 2. The most popular deadline is the January deadline. The second most popular deadline is the November deadline. Well, November and early action are pretty even. And then the smallest deadline is typically the April deadline.

A lot of people ask, is there a clear advantage to applying in one deadline over another? They wonder if there is a strategy involved. We look at statistics over the years—how many applications we got, how many we admitted and how many we yielded—and we try to even it out so we’re not being too generous in one round at the expense of another round. I would say that we do give slight preference to candidates who apply in early action. I think the selectivity is slightly more liberal in early action and slightly less competitive than the other rounds. Those candidates tend to be good candidates and have done a good job of doing their research and identifying their top school, and I think that indicates that they’re very organized, and the early bird gets the worm. It’s a general reflection of how organized they are, and so their applications tend to be strong, but it is slightly less competitive to get in during early action.

mbaMission: Tell us a little more about early action. Can you explain precisely how it works and what the advantages are?

DC: I think there are a multitude of advantages. One of them is that it’s time consuming to go through the admissions process, to go on all these interviews and study for the GMAT and write all these essays, so if you know that Tuck is your top choice, then you can apply in early action in mid-October and you will be notified in mid-December, and it saves you a lot of time and effort and money. There is that very basic advantage. There’s also more time for you to line up your finances. You have a little more time to go through the process of financial aid. You have a little more time to locate your housing. If you know in December that you’re going to school in late August, then you’re going to have a huge amount of time to prepare for it financially and emotionally and logistically. So those are some of the advantages.

The deposit is $1,000 higher than it is for the regular enrollment deposit. It’s $3,500, whereas the deposit for November, January and April is $2,500. We’re so grateful to have great applicants that have identified Tuck as their first choice. By admitting people earlier than the other three rounds, it helps guide us that these are the people who have committed to Tuck in early decision, and those are spaces that are no longer available in November, January and April. So we want to ensure that the people who do enroll, that they really are serious about identifying Tuck as their top choice. If we were less serious about it, what could happen is that people give the deposit back, and we were less generous than we should have been in a later round. It’s an insurance [policy] for us to make sure that people think seriously about applying early action because it is a nonrefundable deposit.

mbaMission: So what are some of the don’t’s—the absolute don’t’s—the mistakes you see people make when they are applying to Tuck?

DC: There are so many of them that my mind is filling up right now. One is, I mean a lot of people are probably sophisticated enough to know, don’t come [to your interview] looking relatively disheveled. It’s a professional interview, and you want to present yourself professionally, but that is kind of obvious. We have an open interview policy because we’re reaching out to our applicant pool, saying we care about the students. I would say, don’t not take advantage of that. It’s a huge opportunity to stand out. And don’t wait until the last minute. So plan ahead, but don’t not take advantage of the fact that we have an open interview policy, because that is very unique now among our peer group, and it’s such a missed opportunity because some applicants really shine in terms of their interpersonal skills and charisma.

And don’t miss an opportunity to go the extra mile. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to ask around at work, “Hey, do you know anybody who went to Tuck? I would like to talk to a Tuck grad.” and to say in your application that you had conversations with this Tuck grad or these Tuck grads shows initiative. So don’t miss an opportunity. It’s a competitive process to go above and beyond the call of duty a little bit in terms of networking.

mbaMission: Great. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us.

• Stern’s unique essay three and suggests ways to consider the essay
• Stern’s robust response to the financial crisis via the book the faculty wrote almost immediately
• Stern’s willingness to accept younger applicants and its emphasis on career goals

mbaMission: Stern is pretty well known for finance. Would you say that is a fair assessment? In your opinion, what should the school be known for that it’s not known for?

Isser Gallogly: I think probably the first thing that surprises people about NYU Stern, especially when they come in contact with our students and visit us, is our incredibly collaborative and down-to-earth community. I think that for whatever reason, when you’re in New York City, people expect that the community might be less closely connected or less friendly.  Nothing could be further from the truth about NYU Stern. The thing that probably differentiates us the most is our community and how collaborative [the students] are and how well we work together. I think that’s the first sort of surprise people may not be expecting when they encounter NYU Stern.

I think the second thing would be the broad range of educational and functional expertise. Certainly we are in a finance capital of the world by being in New York, but New York is much more than a finance capital. It’s actually a capital of all industries across the board. In fact, 25% of the Fortune 500 has their headquarters in the New York area. So really, we reach all industry and functions. We have an excellent program in marketing, consulting, social entrepreneurship, as well as in fields that are more specialized—entertainment, technology, luxury & retail and pharmaceutical to name a few. We’re really strong across the board.

For example, in the innovation and social enterprise field, we recently added a specialization in that area. In Entertainment, media, and technology we’ve added a dual degree, an MFA with NYU’s Tisch School [of the Arts], which is an exciting project for us and one that’s been very popular. For luxury and retail there is no better place than New York if you’re interested in this area of the marketing world. We’re just a lot more diverse here at Stern than people really think.

mbaMission: Are there any areas in particular that Stern has been working to strengthen over the past couple of years? And how are those kinds of decisions—as to what needs to be an area of focus for the school—typically made?

IG: I think one of the great things about NYU Stern is that, despite having been around for 100 years, it’s a very forward-looking and innovative institution. I think one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we’re constantly changing, evolving, growing, seeking to enhance things. Continuous improvement is part of our DNA and we’re always looking at different things to do and different ways to do it and how to make ourselves better. We’re never going to rest on our laurels; we’re never going to become complacent. And I think that’s one of the things that is exciting about being at NYU Stern.

In terms of where the decisions come from and how we prioritize, the school definitely has a strategic planning process. It’s a proactive process, not so much a reactive type of thing, here at NYU Stern. We’re savvy about how we use our resources and how to grow and evolve.

An area that has definitely gotten heightened interest over the last several years is the marketing department, which has always been very strong, and I think that some of the moves that have been made recently, in terms of bringing on well-known researchers, as well as clinicians, have been phenomenal.   Certainly the luxury and  retail space has been one that has continued to grow, and the social innovation area has also picked up based on interest. We have a lot more students in the Millennial Generation who not only want to do well but want to do good.  Stern is a place that fosters that type of thinking. So I those are some areas that we have continued to enhance academically.

In terms of the school overall, one of the things that we always try to work on here in New York is our physical space. We’re not out in the countryside, so we don’t have limitless acres. We have to be smart about how we utilize our space. And we initiated a very large scale space initiative.  It’s called the Concourse Project, and it’s to revamp whole sections of the school. There’s a lot of construction going on this summer, but we’re hoping to complete most of it by this fall, and this will create more and better space for students.

We’ve also done a lot of projects to revamp student lounges and reconfigure them based on student input of how they want to use the space and what would be most appropriate. So we’ve done a lot in that world.

Obviously, things like infrastructure are also being improved. Our IT systems, for example, have been one area that we are continuously enhancing to keep up with the pace of technology. The school hired a new CIO—chief information officer—a few years ago. And he’s been doing a phenomenal job of partnering with students, administration and faculty to make sure the school is continuing to move forward.

mbaMission: So you mentioned the Millennial Generation. How does NYU feel about younger applicants, perhaps direct admits from undergrad or people who might have only one year of professional experience?

IG: People without experience have always been eligible to apply to NYU Stern. We’re looking to make sure that people are able to reach their academic, professional, and personal goals. So, when we admit people without work experience we want to make sure that fits with what they want to achieve.

For example, let’s say an applicant is applying for our JD-MBA dual degree with NYU School of Law, and wishes to pursue a career in law.  Well, law is a field where people often do not have prior business experience. The legal firms that hire law students are comfortable with that too.  So in that case, not having work experience prior to the MBA makes sense to us. In other industries and in other types of careers, recruiters are not necessarily going to be as positive toward not having prior work experience. So we really understand that person’s path.

Another example might be someone who works in a family business and wishes to go back [after business school] and work in that family business. In that case, they may or may not need post undergraduate work experience if they have worked with the family business for years and they want to get the education to continue to move forward in it.

mbaMission: That naturally leads into another question I had about goals and what is scrutinized closely in light of the challenging economy. What are your thoughts with regard to someone who is trying to make a career transition that may be a little more difficult to pull off in this economy, or someone who perhaps talks about primary and secondary goals?

IG: At Stern we’ve always scrutinized goals extremely closely. That’s just part of our process and something we’ve always done. We’re in the top seven business schools in terms of the number of applications that we receive. We also have a medium-sized class. Our selectivity last year was 14%, which [makes us] one of the most selective business schools. So for us, we’re really looking for people who know what they want to do, who have taken the time to do self-evaluation, and have a really focused and well conceived plan.

Any MBA student will tell you that first semester goes by exceptionally quickly, and you really need to have a plan when you walk through the door. Sometimes that plan changes, you’re exposed to different things, but you’re going to get a much greater return on your investment of time, money and effort if you have a good from the start.

I always say to people, if all you know is that you don’t like what you’re doing, then you don’t know enough to apply to business school. You’re going to have a really hard time writing one of those essays about goals and career if you haven’t really thought through what you want to do. You’re going to have a really tough time when you come in to do an interview with us in admissions. You’re going to have a really tough time when you get in front of recruiters at the end of the semester.

And the other thing I’d say is that it’s really smart to figure out what you want to do. You might not have it all nailed down exactly, but you’re investing a tremendous amount of money and time in an MBA, so you had better be sure that it will get you where you want to go. Admitting well directed students is part of our philosophy here, and we’ve always partnered with our Office of Career Development in this effort. We look at the skills it takes to be successful in certain fields, what the dynamics of those fields are, what backgrounds are most attractive—we talk with recruiters. We really want to partner with our students and help them get where they want to go academically, professionally and personally. I don’t think we are doing anyone any favors if we’re not holding people accountable for having a plan, a pretty thought-out plan when they apply to Stern.

Now back to your point about Plan B’s and contingency plans. No matter what you’re doing, and no matter what economy [you’re in], you always want to have a contingency plan. It just shows that you are someone who understands realities. You should always have a Plan B. It’s good to have thought it through.

mbaMission: Speaking of which, what would you say to someone who is interested in applying and who has been unemployed for several months, not just a month, and has been laid off?

IG: They have to think about how they want to position that when they are at business school and when they are in front of recruiters. They need to try to do what they can to maximize their development and enhance their skill set while they are between jobs. That may mean taking some course work. Perhaps they can earn a certification or a professional license. Perhaps they do some volunteer work that enhances their business and or leadership skills. Perhaps they take on some independent consulting work. Maybe they assist family businesses. I think it comes back to what are they doing to better their skills, and to keep themselves marketable.

Some people just say, “Oh, I am going to go travel the world.” That’s okay, if that’s what you want to do. Certainly getting global exposure isn’t a bad thing. So long as you have thought about how that is going to look on your résumé and how that is going to look when people are deciding whom to invite for interviews – or not. You should have a plan for how are you going to talk about that in your job interviews, in your admissions essays and admissions interviews.

This is going to affect you professionally, so make the time between jobs be as meaningful for your development as possible.  It is a challenge. The upside is that people understand the reality here; we understand that if someone is not employed, it’s probably not a result of that person’s ability but more a result of the situation and the economy. So we will be somewhat forgiving, but it sure doesn’t mean just coast. You want to be proactive.

mbaMission: Stern has had quite a robust response to the financial crisis. Can you talk a little bit about the goings-on on campus and in the media with respect to academics and to the school’s overall response to the financial crisis?

IG: The short answer is that we wrote a book on it. We have such an amazing faculty here. The faculty that chooses to be at NYU Stern is a faculty that wants to be connected to business and tell students about changes in business. This isn’t a place where the faculty wants to do the same old lecture for their entire career, teach about theory, and never broach or approach what is going on today, or that uses cases that were written 15 years ago that might no longer be relevant. That’s just not our style. And I would say to anyone who is applying to NYU Stern, if that’s what you’re looking for—a place that is doing just theory and old cases—then don’t apply, because that’s not what you’re going to get here.

We had a whole number of our faculty write a book called Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System. And this book had 18 targeted white papers by 33 academics that offer financial policy alternatives, specifically courses of action to help the global financial system. And the whole idea was to be able to present this to the current government and administration but [for it] also [to] be a roadmap for industry, not only in the U.S., but also other places around the world. We got endorsements from Paul Volcker [former chairman of the Federal Reserve] on this and John Paulson [founder and president of Paulson & Co., Inc.]. It’s been fantastic. It’s been extremely well received. You can read about it on our Web site http://whitepapers.stern.nyu.edu/home.html. Mostly, the faculty looked at this as an opportunity to contribute to society and share knowledge and affect positive change. Again, that is just the spirit of Stern.

As this thing started to happen, we also had a “Market pPulse” series event where we brought in people from industry and professors and had these sessions for our alumni ,students and the media about what is going on. What do we need to do about it? How is this going to affect the world and the market and business in general? So it’s been a very exciting time. In fact, we turned the book into a class.

And it’s not just a financial situation; this is affecting all industries. The management groups and strategy groups—how do you manage in an economic situation of instability from a strategy standpoint? How do you rethink your business in order to be profitable? It’s affecting everything from a marketing standpoint. How do you market when people are reluctant to spend? It’s a fast time for business, and our professors are very engaged in it, and it’s really reaching across the board. It’s definitely been the kind of thing that our academics and students and administration have been very excited about and been extremely involved in teaching.

mbaMission: Can you shed a little light for me as to why Stern has a later application deadline than many other business schools? It’s November 15, right?

IG: Yes, November 15 will be our first deadline. It’s still almost a year before they would begin business school, so it’s very early. It serves applicant’s needs and we can get decisions to people in a timely fashion. So it works for us.

mbaMission: Did you see an increase in your application volume last year, and would you care to make a guess as to what will happen this year?

IG: Last year was a very robust year for applications. Actually, the year before last, applications were up 20%, and that was the second highest level we have ever had. We generally have a very high level, so that was an amazingly high level. Last year, application levels were about equal to that, so it was the third highest level that we have ever had. It was an extremely competitive year and Stern is an extremely popular place to be, as always.

In terms of predictions for next year, I think that right now things are extremely uncertain. There are so many factors. What I will say is that historically, in the year of an economic decline, you get a small increase in applications. Usually the year following a decline, applications start to go down a little bit. So that would be history. But then again, I don’t know if this is going to be a moment in time that is similar to history or not.

mbaMission: What can you say about the proportionality of applications from one deadline to the next? What is typically the volume per round at Stern?

IG: The majority of people will apply typically on our January 15 deadline, the second deadline—that’s typically the largest. It really can change from year to year. We typically have spots to admit people from all deadlines, and we typically tell people that they should apply at the first deadline for which they feel that they are extremely competitive. Because there is no point in applying early with a poor application, because you’ll just hear bad news sooner. You should wait until you are most competitive and apply then.

mbaMission: In terms of actually reviewing an application, what is the review process at Stern from the moment you receive a completed application through when decisions are made?

IG: When an application comes in, the committee makes an initial evaluation, and from there, there are three possible outcomes: you can be invited for an interview, you can be placed on our waitlist or you can be denied admission. If you are invited for an interview, your interviewer is typically a member of the Admissions Committee and a trained, professional assessor of talent. And the interviewer will review your application prior to the interview; it will not be a blind interview. Interviews are by invitation only.

After the interview, that person will write up an interview report. And then the initial evaluation plus the interview report as well as the application will be shared with the committee for a final decision. That decision would either be admission, waitlist or denial. For those who are placed on the waitlist either before or after the interview, we review those typically beginning in the spring and periodically over the summer as spaces become available and/or candidates do things to improve their candidacy. Every application is looked at by multiple people on the committee, and every application gets a thorough review.

mbaMission: What kind of advice would you have for a candidate who is facing the legendary Stern Essay 3, someone who is looking at this blank slate and shaking his or her head?

IG: Look at the application as a whole strategically. We are going to be assessing applications based on the [applicant’s] academic ability, professional aspirations and ability, and who they are as a person. Those are the three major areas, and the application gives you an opportunity to present yourself according to those dimensions. So your transcript from undergrad, your GMAT score, those kinds of things, obviously provide some kind of insight into your academic ability. Your recommendations typically provide insight into your character as well as your professional ability. Your résumé, balanced with your work history form, can provide more context around your professional aspirations. Essay 1 typically talks about professional goals, but you have word limitations. So the nice part is that your work history form can explain in more detail some of the moves you have made throughout your career: why you left certain jobs, why you chose certain positions. Your résumé can cover some of your responsibilities of those roles. So Essay 1 is a little bit more on your goals and tells a story and doesn’t have to tell the whole story because those parts of the application are complementary. So it’s really nice in that way.

Essay 3 is really an opportunity to talk about who you are as a person and really highlight that. So many people say to me, “I think my profile is just like everybody else’s. I’m 27, I have four years of work experience, my GMAT looks to be about your average, my GPA is about your average, I went to a typical undergrad school, my job is pretty much a normal corporate job, and I just feel like I am going to look like everyone else in your applicant pool.” Well, Essay 3 is a chance to not look like everyone else. It’s a chance to tell us what makes you unique—and to do it in almost any way that you want. Write an essay, do it as a puzzle, do it as a photo album, send an artifact that is important to you and tells about who you are. This is a chance for you to stand out, differentiate yourself, to explain the things that you can’t explain in your career essay or that don’t come out from your transcript and résumé. So my hope is that an applicant is excited that they have the opportunity to communicate these things in a much more free-form manner.

A lot of people with Essay 3 do wonder, “Where do I start?” And I give people the same answer, which is always “Start with your passions.” What do you love doing? What do you get excited about? Because typically, what someone is passionate and excited about is usually central to their personality and tells us volumes about that person. So I would start with where your greatest energy comes from. And as much as people may be a little bewildered when they begin the process, we have heard again and again and again that Essay 3 is probably the most fun part of applying to business school. Whoever thought that an application could be fun? But by the end of it, they are pretty excited about it, and the students here are always asking each other during our orientation program or preterm, “What did you do?” and it’s just a fun way for them to get to know each other.

mbaMission: Do you have any favorite Essay 3 submissions you remember that really just knocked your socks off?

IG: There are so many good ones. The ones that really stick with you are the ones where you can feel the person through the essay. Or you really get a sense as to who they are. You get to see their personality and spirit. You know, people are just so unique, and in the world of admissions we love getting to know people. It’s really the ones that just speak to you, and I think those are the ones that are the most genuine and come from a real place within the applicant.

mbaMission: When you read an application, where do you start? Walk us through the process of reading a single application.

IG: Personally, I just read it from front to back. I read the core data forms, so I get a sense of the basic facts of the person. Then I go through the transcripts to look at the academic record historically, their standardized test, their other academics, and then I go through their résumé and the recommendations and the work history, and then I get into the essays—one, two, three and sometimes four, depending on if they include the optional essay four.

I go through it pretty much the way people fill it out or submit it, because it’s one of those things where you’re really just compiling information and not really making judgments. Sort of gathering the pieces, and once you’ve completed the full application, you get a comprehensive feel for the entire applicant. Like I said, the whole application tells you different parts of who a person is, and to do a holistic individual evaluation, you kind of have to read the whole thing and then begin to make assessments.

mbaMission: Are there any red flags—something you might come across in a candidate’s application that would lead you to quickly eliminate that person or might at least heavily prejudice your opinion of them?

IG: Yes, there are some things that make it more challenging for an applicant. When you look at the three areas—the academic, the professional, and the personal—you don’t want to give an admissions officer a reason to say no. You want them to look at everything and say, “Wow, this looks great across the board.” So things that can hurt you are weak performance in undergraduate or on the standardized test. Is it everything? Clearly not; but better it be strong than weak. We publish our averages and our 80% ranges so that people have a sense of how they fall vis-à-vis other people who have been admitted, and I would tell people to do the best they can. Obviously for undergraduate there is only so much you can do, and it’s usually too late, but with the GMAT, we only look at someone’s best scores. So if your score is not reflective of your ability, then retake it. Retake it several times. Put yourself in the best position to demonstrate academic ability.

In the application itself, when you’re talking about résumés and things like that, again, people should really try to highlight what they have achieved and quantify those results. Answer questions that may be out there, and if you have been unemployed, take the time to explain what happened and what you were doing in that time. Don’t just leave us guessing. There is the option of Essay 4 so that you can try to explain the circumstances. Help us understand.

Professional recommendations—we emphasize to people that their supervisor should write a recommendation and that their recommendations be professional, so to the greatest extent possible, that should be what we see. Occasionally we will see recommendations from friends or professors, and we just kind of read that and think to ourselves, “Well, we couldn’t have been more clear in the instructions. I don’t understand why we’re seeing this.” If that’s where you wind up, explain it. We know its not always possible to get your supervisor to make a recommendation, but explain it to us. We have podcasts on our Web site about the entire application process, and we have explicit instructions on our application, so we wonder, “Why is this person not able to follow basic instructions?” Or, “Why are they not explaining why they have not been able to adhere to them?”   Learn each school’s admissions process prior to beginning, it will help you a lot.

Also, excessive typographical errors, poor grammar are things that could hurt. It’s just careless. And we know everyone can’t get every word perfect, and for some people, English isn’t even their first, second or third language. If there are 500 words in an essay, try to get as many of them right as you can.

And you should really have a super clear goal when you’re applying to the Stern business school. I don’t know why anyone would make a $100,000 or so investment in anything without carefully reading the prospectus and doing a lot of investigation. There are those who haven’t researched themselves, their future careers, and also haven’t researched the schools. You can tell people who are just throwing applications out there to everybody versus those who have taken the time to do it right.  All the great schools are going to give you a great education and opportunities, but there are schools where you’re going to excel, where you are going to thrive and become the best you can be, and there are other places where it’s going to be a bad fit. People really need to investigate a lot more than they think they do. There is nothing like going and visiting the school – even if it has to be virtually.  We have students available via email, phone as well as student podcasts, videos, online chat transcripts, etc. Also, at NYU Stern, when we do our admissions interview, we do it on site, which gives people a great change to “kick the tires” too.

mbaMission: Right. One final question: what is the international loan situation at Stern these days?

IG: We have a competitive international loan program. We’ve put in a lot of work to make sure that the funding would be there. We want students to be able to pursue their education, and we definitely want to be a partner in that endeavor. We believe in what an NYU Stern MBA can do for somebody, and we want to be sure that we match that sentiment with appropriate financial support.

mbaMission: Great. Thank you for your time—we really appreciate it.

• Yale will be increasing its class size from about 200 to 220 and will be retunring top four cohorts, from three
• Mr. Delmonico discusses common application errors and how he reads an application
• Mr. DelMonico discusses the new dean and her role at the SOM, past and future

mbaMission: Thank you for taking the time today to talk with me about admissions at Yale and about the school. My first question for admissions directors is always, what should your program be known for that it’s not currently known for?

Bruce DelMonico: Good question. And as I think about that question, I think of a number of different functional areas. We’re a very strong marketing school, for example, but we’re not as well known in that area,  perhaps. We have a really good health care group, and actually, health care at Yale generally is really strong, which is something that a lot of people maybe don’t realize. Although between the med school and us and nursing and public health,  the University is getting better known for health care. And environmental management is well known, but maybe not as fully recognized as it should be.

So all those different functional areas, I think, would be areas that maybe Yale is not as well known for as it should be. But I think in general—and I think this is part of the curriculum reform that took place a couple years ago—the thing that people are starting to recognize us for but maybe not as much as perhaps they should is as a really strong general management school. And I think that’s what we feel we are and what we’re certainly trying to be, which is, regardless of what field or industry or sector someone wants to go into, that they get a really strong general management grounding here at SOM [School of Management].

mbaMission: Are there any stereotypes about the school that you would like to dispel?

BD: Probably due to the school’s founding mission of educating leaders for business and society, and its traditional strength in nonprofit and public management, people think of us as the nonprofit school. And I think at some level, there is some truth to that. We’re very strong in nonprofit and public management, and we have a lot of fantastic students who come here from these sectors and who go into those sectors. So I don’t want to minimize the fact that that is a strength of ours, but I think that people think of it as a limiter — that we’re the nonprofit school but nothing else — and they don’t recognize our strength in finance and the other areas that I’ve been mentioning: health care and environmental management and marketing and operations and a whole range of other areas. So I think that’s one stereotype.

And actually, more recently, I think a secondary stereotype is that [of Yale] as a finance school. And again, I think it’s true that we’re very strong in finance, and in behavioral finance in particular. We’re one of the top schools in that regard. People know [Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics] Bob Shiller and more recently [Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Corporate Governance and Professor of Finance] Andrew Metrick and [Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Management and Finance] Gary Gorton as top finance faculty members. But again, I think that’s one piece of the larger puzzle of what SOM is about. And so I think calling the school the nonprofit school or a finance school is not incorrect in that we are strong in those areas, but that also sort of limits the other things that the school is about.

mbaMission: Was strengthening the finance/economics department with a variety of new academic hires a conscious decision on the part of the school or did the opportunity just arise?

BD: Well, I have to preface this by saying I’m obviously not in the faculty-hiring area, so I don’t know the inner workings of how a lot of those decisions are made. I know about the hires as they’re brought on, but I’m not sitting in on the faculty meetings as those things are being discussed. So that’s one huge caveat. My sense, though, is that there is a little bit of both, in terms of strategically trying to grow certain areas but also seizing opportunities as they exist.

Andrew Metrick and Gary Gorton were great hires, and I think they complement our existing strength well. And my sense—again, this is sort of an uninformed opinion, so I have to couch it as that—is that there’s also some bit of serendipity to it or that they happened to be the right people at the right time, and that brought them here. So certainly I don’t think that the school to going to hire someone just for the sake of hiring them and is going to look at the needs of the school, but I think there is some combination of strategic choices and—I’m trying to think of the correct word—also some degree of resonance between the person we’re trying to bring to the school, and the timing can often be a key issue.

mbaMission: I’ve heard that some schools are possibly increasing the size of their incoming classes. Is Yale planning to do this, and if so, is this an economic decision or perhaps an effort to return to a previous baseline?

BD: That’s a good question; thank you for asking. We actually are, as people may know. When our new integrated core curriculum was introduced three years ago, we dropped the class from four cohorts down to three, and we went from about the 220–240 [student] range down below 200. And we did that to increase the faculty slack so that they could actually implement the new curriculum and have the time to put it in place instead of spending all their time in the classroom. So now that the curriculum is a few years old and is up and running and is working well, we’re actually bringing back the fourth cohort and going back up to around 220 students.

Certainly the school doesn’t mind having the extra income, but I think we found that going from the four cohorts to three and going under 200, there were some critical-mass issues that we bumped up against in terms of recruiters, making sure we had enough students to satisfy all the recruiters who come to campus and making sure the people in all the various fields who would be available to the recruiters who want to hire our students. And also, just internally on campus, there are a lot of clubs and activities and making sure there’s, again, a critical mass of students here to take on all those leadership roles and to do all the things that running a school and being a part of a school entail. So I think for a lot of reasons, it made sense, now that the curriculum is three years old and we feel comfortable that it’s running well, to bring the class back up to the previous size of four cohorts and roughly 220 students.

mbaMission: Is the decline in the economy affecting plans for a new SOM building in the near future?

BD: Well, it’s not clear. It might. Let me explain, because the university has said that projects, because of the economy, need to be fully funded before they can go forward with construction. And we’re not at the construction stage yet, and we have funding to do what we’re doing now, which is the construction documents and the planning stage. So that’s the stage we’re in now, and my understanding is that will last roughly the next nine months. If the building becomes fully funded within those nine months, we’ll just plow ahead literally and figuratively with the new building and just go on the existing course, and there won’t be any delay. If that doesn’t happen, then there will likely be some delays, and the amount of the delay will depend on some other funding and other timing issues.

mbaMission: As of now, what is the target date for opening the new facility?

BD: The target date, I believe, is fall of 2012. I think that the university has an incentive to hopefully get us into our new building, because I think that they have plans for our existing building. The university itself is growing and moving, so I think, hopefully, that will move things along at a good pace, but again, I’m not part of these higher-level conversations, so I don’t know all the intricacies of the discussions and the various pressure points.

mbaMission: How are Yale students doing in the job market?

BD: The job market actually has been surprisingly firm here at SOM. The career development office keeps us updated on how things are looking in terms of offers and acceptances. We’re really not that much off from last year and previous years. We’re off by maybe low digits, maybe 1% in terms of internships and a little bit more—but I think less than 5%—in terms of full-time offers and acceptances. So at least so far, knock on wood, we’ve seemed to have weathered things pretty well and are holding pretty firm in terms of the job market.

mbaMission: Great. I think applicants are very concerned about what’s happened in the recent past. I’m curious about what you would say to a candidate who is considering applying to SOM and doesn’t have a job right now.

BD: There are definitely no easy answers. And [it’s] definitely a tough situation. I think, in previous years, it might have raised a big red flag to see someone who’s not working. It’s not to say it wouldn’t raise somewhat of a flag now, but we understand that a lot of these situations are outside of people’s immediate control, and so we’re being more flexible, and we’re trying to dig in to get a closer look at why someone’s unemployed. And more importantly, what they’re doing now.

So I think for someone who hasn’t been working for a few months and maybe who is probably one of the earlier waves, I think the key from our perspective is what are you doing with that time? And we would like to see people who are trying to be active and trying to be involved and still looking. And even if you’re not working in or doing that exact same thing you were doing before, are you able to find something? Or are you volunteering? So I think the question has become not just “So what are you doing now?” but “What are you doing about what your situation is?” and “Are you trying to stay active?”

mbaMission: Has there been any faculty or academic response on campus to the economic crisis?

BD: Yes. I think we were one of the early, or maybe the first school to jump on this. And it was actually [Senior Associate Dean for Executive Programs and Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management] Jeff Sonnenfeld, who teaches leadership here, who last fall put together a roundtable that brought together a lot of CEOs and leaders—Stephen Schwartzman from Blackstone and some others who got together to talk about the financial crisis—and it was cosponsored by, I believe, the Wall Street Journal.

So we started very early in the fall trying to talk about the financial crisis and think about what it meant and where do we go from here. We actually have on our Web site what we call our financial crisis page [http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/financial_crisis.shtml], where it talks about the ways in which the SOM faculty are addressing and responding to the crisis and some of our thought pieces and articles and Op-Eds and those types of things. But we’re also, even in terms of the curriculum, I think the faculty very much sees this as a teaching moment to understand how the economy got to where it is and what types of things we can do to pull out of the current situation. So I think in the fall semester, even into the spring as well, there was a lot of revising of curricula and actually revising of syllabi to incorporate a lot of the current events, a lot of what was happening now, and bring those into the classroom to make them really teaching moments.

mbaMission: I wonder if you can shed any light on the school’s transition to a new dean and whether Dean Sharon Oster has a new direction or mandate in mind for the school.

BD: Yes, that was definitely an unexpected change for a lot of people here. The good thing is that it has actually been a surprisingly smooth transition. And I think a lot of that is due to the fact that Dean Oster has been at SOM for a long time. And also, she was one of the driving forces behind the curriculum change. And so she was really instrumental in bringing the school to where it was when she took over as dean. So I think it was very easy for her to continue that momentum. And I think initially people were wondering what would happen with Dean [Joel M.] Podolny’s departure, but I think the school has continued moving forward without really missing a beat, and I think a lot of that is to the credit of Dean Oster. She really brought the school together. She knows how we got to where we are, what we’re doing. And she’s been able to carry the school forward.

In talking to her and hearing her speak, She doesn’t have any big changes that she’d like to see, because, as I said, she was instrumental in bringing about the changes that have already happened, but also, I think she’s very much an execution person. I think this is a perfect stage for her to be dean because we’re very much about perfecting the curriculum and perfecting what we’re doing now. This isn’t to say she doesn’t have great ideas and isn’t always thinking about other things we can do, what other programs or initiatives we might want to implement, but I think she’s very good at, also, operationalizing the ideas and executing on them. And I think that’s made her really a great person to be dean at this current time in the school’s history.

mbaMission: A few questions on the application process. Can you take us through the life cycle of an application at Yale? What happens from the reception of an application through the point when decisions are made?

BD: Once someone submits an application, we make sure that it’s complete, because sometimes, some supplementary materials, if they’re not submitted with the application—such as recommendations or sometimes transcripts or other things—come separately, so we wait to make sure the application is complete. Then it’s sent out for two independent reads by different members of the Admissions Committee. By “independent” I mean that neither one of them knows what the other thought of the application. They evaluate them separately.

During that process, either in the first read or the second read, an applicant can be invited for an interview. And if that doesn’t happen during those initial reads, then the applicant will come to committee and can either have a substantive decision or possibly a decision to interview at that time. And then, when someone is invited to interview, the review process is put on hold while they’re interviewed, and then when the interview is complete, the interview report is added to their application and the review process continues. So if they only had one read, then they get the second read and come to committee. If they’ve already been to committee, they come back to committee for a decision with the interview report, and then we, obviously, make a decision then as a group and then notify the applicant.

Our model—different schools do it differently—is a consensus decision-making model, so we sit together as an Admissions Committee, and we all need to agree on an outcome for an applicant. It’s very deliberative. It’s probably somewhat more labor intensive than some other models, but we feel as though it helps make sure that we’re making good decisions and that we’re all calibrated in terms of what we’re looking for and how we’re evaluating candidates.

mbaMission: Can you discuss the interview element of a person’s candidacy—the weight of the interview, how it’s conducted, etc.?

BD: Sure. Interviews last for 30 minutes. People are invited here on campus, in New Haven, to interview. Although, on occasion, if space allows, or if an individual isn’t able to make it here to campus, we do have some off-site interviews that we do. They’re conducted primarily by either trained, second-year students or by Admissions Committee members. And it’s really, I would say, a fairly standard behavioral interview. The purpose is not to trick you or throw curveballs, but really get a sense of the applicant, get a sense of their background, their interests, why they want to get an MBA, what they want to do with their degree. And really get a better sense of their motivations, how they’ve made their transitions, how they got where they are and where they want to go. We will dig into their experiences and try and get a better sense of what they’ve done and how they’ve done it, but we don’t try to make it adversarial or a grilling session. It tends to be a pretty straightforward behavioral interview.

mbaMission: Right. When you read an application, where do you start and how do you evaluate a candidate?

BD: That’s a good question. It’s an interesting question, too, because at times, certainly where you start an application can influence how you view the rest of the application. So if you start with the GMAT score, that might color the rest of application, as opposed to if you start with the undergraduate record or the essays or the recommendations. In general, everyone is somewhat different in terms of how they go through the application. I personally, I tend to start with the undergraduate academic record. I’ll go through, look at the GMAT score and jump into the essays and read through those and then the recommendations. And then we usually, interestingly—you know, everyone will do it differently—look at the interview last, because usually that’s the thing that’s happened most recently.

As we’re reading, we’re building a profile. It all combines together, builds on itself. I think we’ve gotten good about—as I said earlier, what you look at first sort of colors how you look at an application—I think we’ve gotten good about being aware of that and really withholding judgment until we’ve see the whole application and we’ve seen all the data points and we’re able to put it all together and really take a holistic view of the application, which is what we’re trying to do. That’s a little bit how I would work my way through an application.

mbaMission: Can you talk a little bit about some of the common errors you see in applications?

BD: There are some common pitfalls people fall into, and some of them are not that tricky to avoid. One thing, speaking at not too abstract a level or too general a level, but in terms of essays, a lot of times, we get people who don’t answer the essay questions, and they go on and on about things that aren’t really relevant to what we want them to talk about. They have this idea of what they want to talk about or what they think we want them to talk about, and they’re going to make it fit whatever question they’re answering. It certainly detracts from an application and certainly makes it more difficult for us as we’re doing our evaluations.

I think maybe a subset of that is, we ask applicants to tell us what they want to do after they get their MBA, and a lot of times we get applicants who want to do something different than what they’re doing now, and that’s perfectly understandable. A lot of people use an MBA to make a career shift. But one thing, one red flag that will often raise, is if we see someone who wants to make a career shift to an area that they don’t really have any experience in or any exposure to. If you’re making a career shift, you’re necessarily not in that area now, so we don’t expect that someone will have work experience in a certain area—but they should at least have some exposure, whether it’s an activity or some volunteer work, to that area so that they can have some sense of what they’re getting into and have a bit of an idea to get from where they are now to where they want to go. So those are two common pitfalls or common areas that applicants often will have difficulties with.

mbaMission: Is there anything in particular that you would advise applicants to do or think about?

BD: Well, one thing—again, this is on more of a general level—one thing I frequently tell people when asked is, we’re good at reading applications and we know that everybody has weaknesses. Very few candidates are strong across the board in every respect, and I think there’s a tendency for applicants to run away from the weaknesses to try to avoid them and hide from them, which is a natural tendency. But actually, what I find so very refreshing, and actually can be a net positive, is for applicants to actually address their weaknesses. Not dwell on them. You don’t want to lead with the weakness necessarily, but try to explain it and contextualize it, and I think applicants who do that in a good way and can do that successfully—actually, they stand out in a number of regards. It shows self-awareness, it shows interest in self-improvement, and it really can put someone in a much better position in terms of their application.

One of the things I tell people is a lot of the time, if we see a weakness, if we see a gap—for example, you don’t have a recommendation from your current supervisor even though we ask for one—and you don’t explain that, we’ll likely draw a negative interpretation based on that. But if you explain it for us and contextualize it and make us understand why that’s the case, we’ll be much more forgiving.

mbaMission: Great. Can you tell me about any trends you’ve seen in application volumes at Yale in the past few years? Also, how do the various application rounds differ in terms of volume and competitiveness?

BD: Sure. In the last five or so years, going back to 2004, the application numbers generally here at SOM have increased by about 50%. So it’s definitely been a steady uptick in volume, a steady progression. This last year was kind of interesting. It started off strong. I think a lot of schools saw a strong first round, and then it tapered off. So as the effects of the economy hit, I think, interestingly, the number of applicants actually subsided a little bit. So I think schools ultimate volume was less than it seemed maybe in the first round, and I think, for us, we definitely saw a leveling off. So we still had a good year, but it wasn’t quite the year that some people might have been expecting or predicting going into the fall.

Within each round, for the last few years, it’s been pretty steady. The second round is our biggest round. The first round tends to be half the size of the second round. The third round tends to be half the size of the first round, give or take. But those are the general numbers. And people ask, generally, is it better to apply in the first round or the second round or third round? We definitely advise people to avoid the third round if possible, because space can become an issue by the time the third round rolls around. But we do view the first two rounds as roughly equivalent. If you’re going to apply in the first round, we feel it sends a signal to us. And it certainly can be helpful to the applicant, because they’ll obviously get a decision sooner and will know their status sooner.

But we do tell people, you should apply when you have the strongest application ready, and if it’s not by the first round, then the second’s fine. And we do try to calibrate ourselves to the pools so that the same quality applicant will stand a chance of being admitted in the first round as in the second round. So there’s not necessarily any strategic advantage or strong strategic advantage in applying in one round versus the other. It’s really when you’re able to submit your best application.

mbaMission: You mentioned that applying in the first round indicates to you that a candidate is serious about the school. Is there any temptation to have an early decision round?

BD: “Early decision” meaning that you have to be bound by the decision if you get in, you have to go?  I know that some schools do have early decision and other schools don’t, and I don’t have a full sense of whether that’s becoming more of a common thing in the last few years. But I feel like more schools have adopted that. We take it as somewhat of a signal that if you apply in the first round, that you’re likely to be a little more interested, but we don’t bind our applicants to commit to the school should they be admitted in the first round.

mbaMission: Can you give us an update on student loans for internationals?

BD: Sure. I know this has been a challenging year for international applicants because a lot has been in flux in terms of the international loan options, and a lot of lenders have been pulling their loan products, and there’s been a bit of scrambling among schools. We’ve actually been in a pretty nice position in the sense that for the last several years, we’ve had a self-funded loan product that the school has put together and have not relied on any outside lenders. And so we kept that in place this year, and that’s the option for international students. We played around with the caps a bit in light of the market, but we wanted to make sure it had favorable terms: no cosigner, you could defer payments while in school, all the typical terms that students would look for. So we’ve been pleased with the response. Our yield among international students remains strong, and I imagine the fact that we had a stable and attractive international loan program in place throughout the year hopefully was somewhat of a help in that regard.

mbaMission: Last question: Is there anything else you want people to know about the SOM that we haven’t already covered?

BD: That’s a type of summing-up question we ask sometimes ask in interviews. That’s tough to answer now that I’m on the other end of it. I think your questions were good and fair and hopefully gave a good sense of the school and where things are. The main takeaway is, I think, that there is a real sense of momentum and excitement at the school with the advent of the new curriculum and carrying that forward.

mbaMission: Thank you. You’ve been very generous with your time.

BD: Thanks so much.

• Ross will be increasing its class size from about 440 to 500 with its new facility
• Ms. Kwon Koh discusses how she reads an MBA application
• Ms. Kwon Koh elaborates on employment issues and her willingness to see candidates consider more than one career goal in their essays

mbaMission: Thank you for joining us. I’d like to start with a standard question we’ve been asking all the admissions directors: what should Ross be known for that it is not currently known for?

Soojin Kwon Koh: We’re a lot more international than prospective students realize. Globalization is integrated throughout the whole MBA experience, from courses to independent study and internships. More than half of our students travel overseas each year. As an example, our MBA Class of 2008 spent more than 6,000 days collectively in over 30 countries outside of the United States as a part of their coursework—that doesn’t include internships. They can go abroad for our Multidisciplinary Action Projects, or MAP, a course called “Global Projects” and  a number of other strategy and operations courses that have gone to places like Cuba, Turkey, Ireland, the Netherlands, China, India, just to name a few. We also have a Center for International Business Education that offers study abroad opportunities with 11 schools in nine countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.

mbaMission: How are those international opportunities sourced?

SKK: Well, a lot of them are through MAP. Our MAP office and other staff travel the world, talking to companies and alums to source projects. Because we’ve been doing it so long—since 1992—we’ve got a really strong roster of companies that have done repeat projects with us, and word of mouth gets us projects as well. Over 600 organizations have partnered with us to sponsor over 1,300 MAP projects around the world.

mbaMission: Is Ross currently focused on strengthening any particular academic areas or offerings?

SKK: We’re a general management school, and we have maintained our general management focus. But even during these tough times, when short-term cost cutting has been the goal on everyone’s mind, we’ve continued to hire new faculty in a variety of areas, including accounting, finance, operations, management and organization, and marketing. So we are staying as broad-based as we have always been, and continue to invest in the research issues that are important across the business spectrum.

mbaMission: You’ve mentioned Ross’s international aspects and opportunities. When evaluating applicants, how do you screen for whether someone has genuine international interest and whether they would be effective in the international environment?

SKK: We look for people who are open-minded and have worked in diverse environments whether it’s in another country or in an industry where they work with people of varying backgrounds and experiences.

mbaMission: Obviously, there’s been a pretty significant downturn in the economy in the last little while, and I’m curious about how you view candidates who discuss a primary and a secondary career goal in their essays.

SKK: We think that having two goals can be and practical. As this economic downturn has shown, sometimes people may have to pursue an alternate career path. We advise our students to do a thorough career self-assessment and identify which careers might be a good match for them based on their interests, values and priorities. We encourage them to reassess as they go along. Students should think more broadly about the skills they want to use and develop, and the kind of environment they want to work in.  Chances are, more than one industry or function will fit that bill.

mbaMission: In the Ross essay question that asks, “If you were not pursuing the career goals you’ve described, what profession would you pursue instead?” do you expect applicants to offer something that’s kind of an ideal or something more pragmatic?  For example, “If I don’t become a banker, I’d like to go into corporate finance” versus “I recognize that fundamentally, I’m successful as an educator of others, so if I weren’t to become a banker, I would become an elementary school teacher instead.”

SKK: I think that’s the essay question applicants have the hardest time with. We’re not looking for a specific type of answer. I think some applicants think, “Oh, they’re looking for a career that’s closely related to my primary career goal. If I’m not going to be an investment banker, then my alternate career should be corporate finance.” That could be the right answer if that’s truly what you would want to do if you weren’t going into banking. Or it could be that there’s this other side of you that wouldn’t have come out if we didn’t ask this question. We’re hoping to get to know you better by understanding what your interests and passions are.The other thing we’re looking for in that question is how that alternate career can make you more effective in solving multi-disciplinary problems. Many applicants seem to forget to address that part of the question.

mbaMission: How does Ross view class visits?

SKK: We highly encourage prospective students to visit and sit in on a class, get a feel for the class dynamics – with the professor, with each other – walk around the campus and get a feel for the culture. Visits can help applicants make informed decisions about which school to apply to and ultimately attend, because they’ll get better sense of fit. Some schools are going to be a better fit based on someone’s personality and goals, and you can’t really make that determination based on view books or Web sites or rankings. You really need to experience it firsthand.That said, we understand that applicants’ budgets and schedules are tight, and it may be tough for prospective students to visit all the schools they’re considering. At a minimum, prospective students should talk to current students and alumni at each school. On our Web site, we have profiles of student ambassadors. Ambassadors are students who have volunteered to answer questions. Prospects can e-mail ambassadors to find out what the school is like from a student’s perspective. Ambassadors aren’t part of the admissions committee so they can’t comment on issues related to the admissions process, but they can answers questions about what it’s like to go to school here.

mbaMission: Do you have any information as to the number of applicants admitted and the number who came to campus to visit?

SKK: We do track the number of visitors, and we do track the number of admits, but there’s no correlation between the two.

mbaMission: Right. As you alluded to earlier, different schools have different personalities. What kind of personality would you say is attracted to the Ross community?

SKK: I would describe our students as collaborative and very team oriented. I think people who value relationships and people are attracted to Ross.  Our students are also very action-oriented.  They take lot of initiative. Our community is very student-driven, from the clubs to our conferences to some of the classes that are here – much of it is driven by student interest and student initiative. The people who tend to have the best time here and, not coincidentally, the people we look to bring into our community are those who really want to get involved in things and not just go to classes.

mbaMission: And how do you think candidates can reveal those kinds of traits in their application?

SKK: Obviously, the essays are a great vehicle to reveal fit. Recommendation letters are also very helpful in giving us a third-party perspective on your level of initiative and impact. The interview certainly plays an important role, too. Even on the application form itself, where you list extracurriculars and other information, each part helps us develop a mental picture of each applicant. So really, every part of the application process provides us with an opportunity to evaluate fit.

mbaMission: Can you talk a little bit about the interview experience at Ross and what an applicant can expect? Are there any differences between an on-campus interview, an alumni interview and a student interview?

SKK: To begin with, our interviews are by invitation only. We make the invitations based on an initial review of the application; it means you’re someone we want to get to know more about.Interviews are conducted by students, alums or staff. On-campus and off-campus interviews are weighted equally. They have different benefits. Interviewing on-campus obviously gives you an opportunity to visit, sit in on a class, meet with students, get a sense for what the school’s vibe is. Interviewing off-campus with an alum gives you the opportunity to talk to someone who can provide a perspective on all aspects of the experience during and post-MBA.

mbaMission: What is the process of evaluating an application at Ross? Can you walk me through the different phases?

SKK: We started reviewing our applications electronically last year, which enabled us to get to the actual application review process more quickly. Obviously, when we receive thousands of applications, we can’t review them all simultaneously. Each reviewer is randomly assigned a list of applications to review. Each application gets multiple reviews. Some applicants might be invited to interview after the first evaluation, while others might be invited after the second evaluation. What we’re looking for in the application review is whether someone has the academic ability to do well in our program and what they’ll bring to the table in terms of professional and personal experiences. We want students who will have something to teach their fellow students. We’re also looking for whether they’ll be a good fit in our community based on their essays, recommendation letters, etc.The interview is used as a gauge of fit as well as communication skills. As I mentioned, interviews are conducted by second-year MBA students, alumni and staff. Interviews are conducted blind, meaning interviewers don’t see a candidate’s application; they only see a copy of an applicant’s resume. Once the application reviews and interviews are completed, the Admissions Committee will make recommendations about each applicant as to whether we should admit, deny, or waitlist. Then I review all the decisions as a whole, by round, to see what the class is shaping up to look like and make decisions on the overall composition of the class. Then I submit our final recommendations to the Associate Dean for review.

mbaMission: When you sit down to read an application, where do you start, and what is the order you follow?

SKK: I look at the resume first. I view that as kind of the introduction to the applicant – to get a sense of the big picture. What does their work experience look like? Their education, interests, and extracurriculars? Hopefully that can be summarized in one or two pages. Then I look at their GMAT score and their transcript to get a sense of where they are on our academic spectrum, and then I turn to the essays. While all four essays are important, the first essay—the why MBA, and why Ross—is the best opportunity for an applicant to explicitly make a compelling case to be part of our class. The other essays are opportunities to reveal your fit in indirect ways.  Finally, I look at the recommendations, which is not to say they’re the least important part of the process.  On the contrary, I view rec letters as a way to gauge consistency in the picture the applicant has painted of him/herself and the applicant’s self-awareness.

mbaMission: I think you touched on this a little, but can you share some of the common mistakes people tend to make in their applications?

SKK: There are two main things that come to mind. On their resumes: applicants often give us a job description or a list of responsibilities rather than highlighting results and impact.The second common mistake I see is that applicants use the essays to tell us about us rather than themselves. They cite a laundry list of classes, clubs and faculty in their essays (sometimes from the wrong school), and use that as evidence of school research without really understanding what they’re about. We already know what we’re about. What we want to know is what the applicant is about and why he or she will benefit from and contribute to our community.

mbaMission: These days, it’s not uncommon for people who are applying to business school to have been laid off. What would you say to someone who’s been laid off, possibly even months ago, in terms of applying to Ross?

SKK: They should still definitely consider applying. We understand that great employees at all levels within an organization can get laid off, especially during times like this, so there’s no need to feel like your chances are automatically less than those of someone who is still working. We’re going to look at an applicant’s entire professional history and not just the last year. And we’re going to look at all the pieces of the application, not just the work history.As with all applicants, we’re going to want to know how the MBA fits into your goals and why now. We’re going to want to know what you’ve been doing since the layoff. That can be addressed in an essay and the interview. A layoff can be an opportunity to showcase your initiative, your maturity and your resilience. Some folks have taken this time to get more involved in volunteer work or investigate a career path that they’re passionate about. The important thing is to address it and show us how you’ve dealt with it.

mbaMission: Great. What can you tell us about the school’s new building and the kind of impact it has had on the Ross community?

SKK: Oh, it’s been great. It’s a fantastic new building. It’s very open and very conducive to community-building. Our new winter garden space lets in a lot of light and has a lot of seating that lets people gather informally. The classrooms are state-of-the-art. We also have a lot of group-study rooms, which is very important to kinds of projects students are engaged in.We’ve also got a great new fitness center on-site for students, faculty and staff that has all of the latest equipment, and a new café that has stations for different kinds of hot and cold food and sources much of the food locally. Also, the building is LEED certified, which is in line with our focus on and commitment to sustainability.

mbaMission: Do you expect to see more applicants this year? Do you have any predictions as to what will happen going forward?

SKK: I think the days of double digit growth are over, and international applicants will look for options closer to home.  But I think there will continue to be strong interest and a need for MBAs.

mbaMission: How many more students do you think you’ll be admitting for this fall?

SKK: The numbers aren’t final yet; classes don’t begin until September 8.  But right now I’d say we’re looking at a class size of about 500.  Our new building has enabled us to accommodate a larger class.

mbaMission: Are you focusing on any particular countries to yield additional applicants?

SKK: We’re looking at different strategies for each region of the world, taking into consideration market potential. We’d, of course, like to see students from all regions of the world in our class.

mbaMission: Can you talk about the international student loan situation right now and what’s going on specifically at Ross with regard to this issue?

SKK: We secured a loan program through the University of Michigan’s Credit Union to cover our current and incoming international students with very good terms. We’re also in the final stages of another international student loan program with a different bank to cover students who will be coming in next fall, in 2010.

mbaMission: What can you tell us about the discrepancy in application volumes between Round 1, Round 2 and Round 3 at Ross? I think more and more candidates are feeling compelled to apply early, and I’m wondering whether you would encourage that or whether you feel the opportunities are relatively equal for applicants across all rounds.

SKK: Percentage-wise, we get about a third of our applications in Round 1, about 55% in Round 2, and the remainder in Round 3. I think a lot of people would rather take the extra time, over the holidays especially, before they hit the “Submit” button. We encourage people to submit their application when they feel that it is the best possible application that they could submit. So, if you can get everything lined up and completed and you feel really good about it by October 10, then I would encourage applicants to apply in Round 1. But if it takes you a bit longer, and you want to take the time to look at your application again and maybe have somebody else look at it, then Round 2 is fine, too. For international applicants, we highly encourage them to apply in Round 1 or Round 2, because there may not be enough time to get visas lined up if they apply in Round 3. The other thing to mention is that all of our scholarship decisions are made around Round 1 and Round 2, so it’s to everybody’s advantage to apply during one of the first two rounds.

mbaMission: While you have an audience of about 35,000, is there anything else you would like people to know about Ross?

SKK: Sure. It seems to be a growing trend for business schools to be doing field activities or hands-on learning experiences, and in that regard, Ross, I think, provides the best opportunity to get real world experience during an MBA program. With MAP in particular, the Multidisciplinary Action Project, students work on diverse teams and tackle strategic and operational issues for companies, nonprofits and startups all around the world. About half of our projects are international, the other half in the United States.  MAP is part of our core curriculum; we dedicate seven weeks, full-time to just MAP.  That’s a meaty learning experience.We think that this way of applying theory makes it easier for students to really own the knowledge they’re learning in the first 3 quarters of the first year. It also prepares them to deal with the uncertainty of working in the real world, where problems and solutions aren’t defined for you. You learn how to ask the right questions, identify the real challenges, and solve problems. From a practical perspective, action-based learning and MAP in particular are helpful for career switchers and for students with fewer years of full-time work experience by virtue of the seven weeks of full-time experience in an industry or a function. That’s comparable to a lot of summer internships, which are often ten weeks. And because of the long history and scope of our MAP program, we’ve really got the experience to get projects that are good from an educational standpoint as well as valuable for the sponsors.

mbaMission: Great. Thank you for taking time to speak with us about Ross.