Calling all Darden-UVA Applicants(2015 Intake) Class of 2017

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: From Combat in Iraq to Investment Banking

Poets & Quants wrote a great article about Derek Rey (MBA ’15) and his experience at Darden as a military veteran. The original article, by Ethan Baron, can be found here, and is also copied below.   It’s not every MBA student who can list “combat” and “counterterrorism” along with “leveraged finance” and “investment banking” under the skills and knowledge sections of his LinkedIn profile. Derek Rey, it should be said, is more experienced at warfare than he is at investment banking. For now. During seven years in the Marine Corps, with deployments in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and southeast Asia, Rey built up a substantial skill set in high-stakes environments. He left the Marines in 2013, took aim at a career in financial services, and enrolled in the MBA program at the University of Virginia Darden School. Like many U.S. military veterans, Rey has discovered that abilities forged in fields of fire have tremendous value in the business world. “You never quite know what the situation is you’re getting into,” he says. “Let’s say you’re doing a security patrol and you have an idea of where the enemy is located. You’ve received your intelligence reports. You know generally were they are but you don’t have any idea of what their exact position is, you don’t know how they’re arrayed. Are they ready for you or not? Or maybe there’s nothing there at all and it’s some kind of humanitarian crisis that you weren’t really prepared for. INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION IS PAR FOR THE COURSE “Once you get out on the ground you have to adjust on the fly and do the best that you can with the information that you have, and just get the mission done. That’s kind of a great skill to have.” Across the U.S., military veterans make up nearly 13% of the graduate student population in business schools, according to the Military Times, a news outlet run by Gannett. Darden vigorously recruits veterans – they make up seven to nine per cent of each incoming class – in part because having students from diverse backgrounds facilitates learning under the case method, says assistant professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne. “That external perspective we really seek and build on,” says Grushka-Cockayne, who served as a lieutenant in an ordinance division of the Israel Defense Forces about 20 years ago. Additionally, veterans in the classroom model behaviors that are valued in business, Grushka-Cockayne says. “They are leaders, and so they are comfortable stepping out, they know what it is . . . to be decisive, and handle ambiguity. Those are good traits to demonstrate to some of the other students who aren’t as comfortable taking those roles.” While veterans come into Darden with a range of abilities, they tend to share the ability to make hard choices, a key skill in business, Grushka-Cockayne says. However, she adds, students coming out of the insular world of the military “might struggle at the beginning in terms of the language and using the right terms and understanding the objectives when you’re making a decision.” Although the ambiguity of combat operations strengthened Rey’s capacity to act effectively in uncertain situations, he did his best to minimize the unknowns before starting at Darden. For the former Marine captain, there were a lot of those unknowns, and he discovered that other veterans going to business school shared his mix of military expertise and business ignorance. HARD CHARGING, BUT FEW HARD SKILLS “What we really lacked going into the business world was those hard business skills – accounting, finance, operations, marketing,” Rey says. Rey knew that at Darden, most of his peers would have much stronger familiarity with those fundamental skills, and even if he excelled at soft skills such as strategy, leadership, and communication, he’d enter school at a disadvantage. “In order to operate in the business world and in business school you need to be able to speak the language,” he says. Though he was living in a remote area of Virginia before starting at Darden, he took online classes in financial accounting and business calculus from the UCLA extension program, “to just sort of sharpen my pencils before going into class.” CATALYZED BY RESPONSE TO 9/11 Rey had been born and raised in Vallejo, California, a half-hour’s drive east of San Francisco. “I’d always kind of been drawn to the military,” he says. But until the fall of his senior year, he’d made no moves toward service. Then the planes hit the Twin Towers. “That was kind of one of the catalysts in my life. It’s hard to explain, it was very moving. I remember that being the turning point.” It wasn’t so much the attacks themselves that motivated Rey to choose military service – it was the nation’s response to the attack. “The images we were seeing on TV, everyone was kind of pitching in to help. I wanted to do kind of anything to be able to help, and if that meant helping prevent something like this from happening again, as a member of the armed forces, that would be a good cause.” He enrolled at the University of Southern California, and joined the ROTC. Next stop was the Marine Corps. In his seven years as a Marine, he developed skills in areas including leading teams, communicating, and managing resources. As a captain in Iraq, he led a platoon of 40 soldiers. “These are your guys and it’s your job using the men that you have and the resources at your disposal to get the job done,” he says. “You’re managing from the ground right from the start. You learn the managing skills by managing. You learn communication by communicating with the men you’re with.” As his service was ending, he was thinking about his strategy for reintegrating with non-military life – how to leverage the abilities he’d developed as a Marine. “Where does this kind of translate to in the civilian world?” he wondered. HOW A MARINE VETERAN ENDED UP AT DARDEN Rey started reaching out to officers and former officers who were in business school. He researched business education, schools, and business in general. “I took kind of a full dive into it,” he says, and came to a conclusion about B-school: “OK, this is absolutely what I want to do.” Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business attracted a lot of veterans, as did Darden. Rey and his wife were expecting a baby. He liked both schools’ tight communities, and Darden’s small-town feel, he says. Darden’s focus on the case method tipped him toward the Virginia school. “What I found really awesome about the case method was it was a daily engagement activity,” Rey says. “You’re breaking down the case in so many different ways that you wouldn’t have done if it was just one professor lecturing.” Rey found that the case method also offered something else: an education into various industries he was not knowledgeable about previously. “Every case is from a different industry,” he says. And he’s discovered that his experience with ambiguity gives him an edge in B-school work. “You never really have all the details that you would like, but you have to go with it,” he says. MAKING MONEY, NOT WAR In his personal life, Rey had managed his own investments and retirement funds, and found the work interesting. More conversations with veterans led Rey to focus on a career in investment banking, a field that appealed to him not only because he enjoyed working with numbers, but because it also involved skills he’d refined during his military career: communicating, analyzing and interpreting data, managing processes, paying attention to detail, and carrying projects through from start to finish. At Darden, finance courses firmed up his knowledge base, along with core accounting classes. The Financial Institutions and Markets course was particularly helpful for providing specialized knowledge about how financial institutions operate, he says. And he especially benefited from strategy classes, he says. “It’s good to know finance, it’s good to know marketing, it’s good to know accounting. Strategy drives pretty much everything.” He received an internship last summer as an investment banking associate with Barclays, in the Technology, Media & Telecoms group. This school year, his second in the program, he was a portfolio manager in Darden Capital Management, a student group that manages money for the Darden School Foundation board. In business school, he’s built relationships as close as those he developed as a Marine. “There was a lot of camaraderie in the military,” he says. “There’s just as strong or not stronger camaraderie with the people you’ve gone to business school with.” After his graduation from Darden this month, Rey will return to Barclays in a full-time investment banking position in the firm’s Atlanta office. Grushka-Cockayne describes Rey as “very clever” and believes his attitude toward learning has been a prime factor behind his success as a student and budding investment banker. Never afraid to ask for help, he takes a positive attitude into problem solving, she says. “Maybe it’s his (military) experience that puts it into perspective,” she says. “Maybe it’s having a new family.”

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Application Feedback Appointments Now Available

If you will be reapplying to Darden in the fall and would like to receive feedback on your application, you can schedule one 15-minute feedback session with a member of the Admissions Committee during the month of June. At this time, we are not offering feedback appointments to applicants on the waitlist.  This is an opportunity to find out how you can improve your candidacy for your Darden application for the coming year. Please note that reconsideration for the current admission cycle is not an option. To schedule a phone appointment, please go to our Application Feedback page and select a time slot in June. Within 48 hours of signing up for an appointment, you will receive an e-mail with the name and phone number for the Admissions Committee member you are to call at the designated time. We look forward to talking with those of you that sign up!

By Paul Lanzillotti, Amerasia Consulting Group
Today's blog post is going to be the first in a series that covers business school rankings. More specifically, it's Amerasia's attempt at ranking top MBA programs by industry and based on publicly available data. Our motivation for doing this is quite simple - business school rankings differ quite drastically from publication to publication. US News seems to be the most consistent and widely followed. After Businessweek ranked Fuqua at number one, they decided to change their methodology.  Whether the two are correlated is up for debate. John Byrne over at "Poets and Quants" covered the change quite extensively here.

Regardless, we've never felt completely comfortable with the rankings because (to our knowledge) the raw data that drives the rankings has never been fully disclosed. Yes, we do know that the methodology (ranking model) has been discussed on relevant websites, but it's a cursory explanation of the process in our opinion. Also our opinion - that the process is still very much a black box.  So we decided to start over and see what we could come up with.  Most importantly we started with the very numbers that the school's career centers are reporting via their respective employment reporting.

Our opinion is that recruiting (i.e. who's hiring) drives most programs "investment" decisions - in students, faculty, courses, experiential initiatives, alumni outreach, etc.  So to know to what a specific MBA program is really all about, you need to see the end result. In other words, what industries are hiring MBA graduates and from what schools?

Now before we get into the numbers, a few words of caution. What we have done is our first attempt at a numerically based ranking and its not perfect. It's based on our interpretation of the numbers put forth by top business schools. Let us explain. Most MBA career centers report employment numbers according to the categories that we use in our rankings. Some schools break "industry" categories into further sub-categories. Other programs - i.e. Michigan Ross - roll up their industry categories under more general headers like "manufacturing". So you could be a "marketing" professional but be within the manufacturing industry. To be forthright, it's a little confusing. (This is why we have decided to exclude Michigan Ross from some categories until we gather a little more insight into their self-reported numbers.)

None-the-less, we have tried to make sense of it all and to do this we did combine some categories in order to get an apples-to-apples comparison across schools. Clear as mud?  That being said, we welcome any constructive feedback you may have. Either post your comments below or email us at MBA@amerasiaconsulting.com.

Top MBA Programs in Finance (2015)
AKA THE RANKING OF BUSINESS SCHOOL PROGRAMS BY PERCENTAGE OF GRADUATES ENTERING THE FINANCE INDUSTRY IN 2014.
Our first ranking is "Finance" and Chicago Booth comes out on top.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="408"]
Top MBA Programs in Finance by Percentage of Graduates Entering the Industry (2015)[/caption]

 

Source Data:

We compiled this ranking based on information taken directly from the following MBA employment reports.
Haas

https://haas.berkeley.edu/groups/careercenter/reports/14-15ReportSummary.pdf

UCLA Anderson

https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/Documents/areas/adm/cmc/2014%20PARKER%20CMC%20Employment%20Report%2002.10.15%20LR.pdf

Stanford GSB
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Stanford%20GSB%20Employment%20Report%202013-14.pdf

MIT Sloan

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/pdf/Class_of_2014-intern_employment_report.pdf

HBS

https://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/mba/data-and-statistics/recruitingreport/

https://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/mba/data-and-statistics/employment-statistics.html

Wharton

https://www.wharton.upenn.edu/mba/your-career/career-statistics.cfm

Kellogg

https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/career_employer/employment_statistics.aspx

Chicago Booth

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/employmentreport/

Columbia

https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/recruiters/employmentreport

NYU Stern
https://www.stern.nyu.edu/programs-admissions/full-time-mba/career/employment-statistics

Tuck

https://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/careers/employment-statistics

Yale SOM

https://som.yale.edu/yale-som-connect/recruiting/employment-statistics

Michigan Ross

https://michiganross.umich.edu/our-community/recruiters

Duke Fuqua

https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/mba_recruiting/recruiting_duke/employment_statistics/

Cornell Johnson

https://www.johnson.cornell.edu/Career-Management/Employment-Report-for-Two-Year-MBAs

UVA Darden

https://www.darden.virginia.edu/recruiters-companies/hire-an-mba/employment-reports/

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Unofficial Darden Get Together in Tel Aviv: 27 May 2015

Our alumni sometimes host unofficial get-togethers to share their Darden experience with prospective students. Please see below for an invite to one of these events on 27 May in Tel Aviv, hosted by a group of alumni from the Class of 2006: Get Together in Tel Aviv, Wednesday, 27 May Three American Darden alumni, and one Israeli Darden alum, all from the class of 2006, are visiting Israel from New York at the end of May. These alumni would like to invite prospective MBA applicants to join them in central Tel Aviv on Wednesday, 27 May, from 6-830pm. There will be no official program or presentation, and the dress code is casual. Simply stop by for refreshments and chat with Darden alumni who are happy to talk about their Darden experiences and what they’ve been up to since graduating. Two of the alumni are running digital startups, and two are in senior roles in private equity/banking. To RSVP please email: zamkowk06@darden.virginia.edu

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Reminder: Admissions Feedback Appointments Available

As a reminder, for those of you reapplying to Darden in the fall, the Admissions Committee has appointments available for you to receive feedback on your application. At this time, we are not offering feedback appointments to applicants on the waitlist.  This is an opportunity to find out how you can improve your candidacy for your Darden application for the coming year. Please note that reconsideration for the current admission cycle is not an option. To schedule a phone appointment, please go to our Application Feedback page and select a time slot in June. Within 48 hours of signing up for an appointment, you will receive an e-mail with the name and phone number for the Admissions Committee member you are to call at the designated time. We look forward to talking with those of you that sign up!

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Darden and the iLab: a Community of Entrepreneurs

The Batten Institute at the Darden School of Business actively promotes entrepreneurship and innovation among students and community members with academic and experiential programs. In this new video, learn about how the Institute is building a community of entrepreneurs with its incubator program at the UVA i.Lab, annual student competitions, and other initiatives. For more information, visit ilabatuva.org.

Did anyone receive any updates? Their deposit date was 3rd June. I'm not sure if the adcom meeting for waitlisted candidates has taken place after that.

The meeting is probably taking place this week and all waitlisted candidates will be receiving the FINAL update. Best of luck.

Emailed the adcom today. They called back. I am in!!!

Congratulations! Must be a great relief.

What time did they call?

Congratulations. Did they call? Have you received a official mail yet?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Thanks!!

They called around midnight last night - India time - after I emailed them asking if they had an update for me. The official email will come today she said.

All the best!

Received the call 15 minutes back from Adcom. I am in!!

congrats guys! I was told they only let in a few people yesterday

unfortunately I'm still waiting

I am waiting too

I just want to get done with it at this point and decide!!!

My online portal has been updated and I have also received the official mail. Check your application page. It should be updated by now.

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FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Darden MBA 2015-2016 Essay Question Announced

The essay question for the 2015-16 Darden MBA application season has been posted on the Darden website. Describe the most important professional feedback you have received and how you responded to it. (500 words maximum) While the 2015-16 Darden MBA application is not yet available, we encourage you to get a head start on writing your essay. In addition, there are plenty of opportunities to learn more about the Darden School this summer through events, including Fridays in July, which begin on July 10. Check back throughout the summer for application deadlines, admissions advice, and fall travel dates!