2011 MIT Sloan Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) thread

edzo,
I have not seen any program that resembles the LGO at MIT except for the SDM program which also awards 2 degrees, but it seems a bit incomplete as it is done in 13 months in campus or up to 20 something months if you choose to do part time and online courses. Aditionally, I dont think it provides the economic relief that LGO provides and it is also more focused towards design of products, systems, etc. Going back to the disclosure, the SDM has the same disclosure agreement and it has I think, more international students than LGO. Similarly a lot of engineering fields, and other regular engineering programs have the same disclosure.

I think LGO has less internationals because at its inception, it was focused to make the manufacturing environment in the US more competitive so as to combat outsourcing as an obvious response to cutting costs down. With the rebranding of the name to LGO from LFM, and with the partner companies expansion in the globe, the LGO may start increasing its international acceptance rate. Also, I think that the admissions commitee must include representatives of the partner companies who know the current partner company's need in terms of ongoing projects, expansions, operational problems etc, and that if the majority of internships or projects are in the US, they wont see the need to bring too many international students. I remember reading a posting by Jane Deutsh saying that as the partner companies grew to include more international companies (not based in the US) the need for having more internationals would obviously increase.

Also, as a side note, the LGO disclosure says that they may favor candidates who are eligible to work in countries where the partner companies have a considerable amount of operations, and so you may have a better chance if you are from a country in which a lot of the partner companies have a significant number of plants or operations.

Regardless of the disclosure, the most significant factor here is luck as I am sure that there are plenty of excellent applicants in the pool and so it becomes really difficult to truly discard one applicant over another. One little, petty detail in your application may be the difference from getting in or being rolled over to Sloan... yikes . But lets keep our hopes up, like I said, it seems that nothing important has happened for internationals as it would be weird that not even one of the nearly 15 that I have counted in this thread would not have gotten an invite. Its a highly unlikely event.

Good luck