Calling All Fall 2010 Washington U. (Olin) Applicants!

In my admissions package they gave me a quarter tuition scholarship! Woo hoo!

question for ksjhawk and Pre777 ..........

Congrats for your admission, Can you please tell what make you decide for Olin for your MBA. I saw you have 710 GMAT score, you can go with some other higher rank universities

Now what is your plan, are u going with Olin or not, can you please share your profiles

Pre777,
Where in the application package you are seeing scholarship details

Hi Guys -

I have submitted my appl. on 4th jan (Thanks to Reeve for this).

Could anyone pls share how much time it took for R1 applicants to get an interview invite.

- thanks

Congrats to those who got in! I have my interview tomorrow afternoon on campus with Olin. Any tips or pointers on the interview?

It was a fairly straightforward interview for me, I did mine on the phone. I was asked to walk the interviewer through my resume then tell about a time I failed, then I had time to ask questions. All in all it took about 30 minutes.

Good luck.

I'm curious - was the interviewer a student or an adcom member? Did they know your whole application or did they only know your resume?

Wow, lots of replies in the Olin forum, glad to see it. I'll try to address a few questions at once here.

Why Olin: Employment stats at Olin are solid (relative to other schools ranked near the bottom of the top 25), especially considering the large proportion of MBAs that stay in the Midwest, where the cost of living can be drastically lower. The program has a small class size and emphasizes personal attention from professors, which are virtually all PhDs actively involved in research. I've been in the Midwest my whole life, so unlike 99% of GMATclubbers, I'm comfortable with the idea of going to school and working here. I felt like Olin fell within my target range of schools based on my profile. Wash U's undergrad is now ranked 12th in the nation, their med school is top 3, great law school, many other strong programs - not great reasons to choose an MBA program, I know, but the university has a great reputation.

Here's my profile:
16 months work experience in corporate finance in the manufacturing industry, prior to being laid off
12 months part-time work experience working with financial products during my undergrad
710 GMAT
3.5 undergrad GPA in finance, closer to 3.8 in business classes
Good extracurriculars, leadership positions in business clubs
US-born Caucasian male, I don't speak any foreign languages (try spinning that in diversity essays!)
FWIW, I believe I have strong interview and essay-writing skills

I had a very casual phone interview. An adcom member asked me to walk through my resume, and from there it felt more like a conversation about my experiences than a question-by-question interview. It lasted less than 30 minutes.

A week after I was admitted I received a substantial scholarship offer, almost half of tuition. Very exciting news. I'll be making a campus visit soon, and I'm excited to get a feel for the program and St. Louis. I've also been admitted to Kelley at IU (my top choice in the application process), with a great graduate assistantship package, and it's going to be hard to turn down. I was extremely impressed with Kelley when I made a visit for my interview, but Olin sounds like an excellent school too, so there's a chance the visit will change my mind.

I couldn't be happier choosing between these two top programs, with $, but I have questioned whether I should have applied to programs that are a bit more competitive. However, it seems unlikely that I'd be admitted to a top 10 after being laid off with minimal work experience. Considering the scholie $ and cheaper tuition at these programs, it's hard to justify applying to higher-ranked schools outside of the top 10 where I would likely spend an extra $50k for comparable education and post-MBA opportunities. But I'm sure many in these forums would beg to differ

Congrats, and thank you for all this information. I think it looks like a pretty cool under the radar school. As you suggested, the employment $ figures are low, but that is likely because most people are working in the MW after graduation. What I didn't see, but would be interesting to know, was what percentage of graduates had received jobs in this difficult economy.

Tied for 1st in the nation with Yale. No, Olin grads don't compete for many IB jobs like those coming out of Penn, Harvard and the like, but still - this is very impressive.