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Over the course of the last few weeks we've had the privilege of speaking with admissions directors from Michigan Ross and Yale SOM about admissions policies, student life, job recruiting, and other vital information relating to getting in at these two top business schools.
We highly recommend that you view the full transcripts of these Q&As or listen to the audio files to get a complete picture of the admissions scene—you don't want to be lacking info that's already been shared with others!
Here's an excerpt from the Michigan Ross Q&A (view or listen to the complete Q&A here):
Linda Abraham: When you are evaluating an application, what do you look at first and how do you go through the file?
Soojin Kwon Koh: I start with the resume and this gives me a snapshot of what this person brings to the table in terms of experience, education, interests; all those things that are perfectly standard on a resume. And I just want to make a point to encourage everybody to try and get your resume to one page, and to not include jargon or technical speech.
Linda Abraham: Thank you. Any other tips on the resume?
Soojin Kwon Koh: Sure. I would focus on the impact of each role and not what your responsibility was. I don't want to know what your job description is; I want to know how you made a difference at the organization that you were employed with and what your impact was. And it should be understandable by your mother or by your brother; if you give someone your resume, it should mean something and be comprehensible. So if you are in some fields in which there is a lot of technical jargon, don't include that. Try to make that fairly understandable to the lay person. And giving it to someone else to read as a test is a good way to gauge whether you've hit the mark. Also it's perfectly fine to include extra-curriculars, hobbies, etc. I would not include summer internships from undergrad; we're really primarily interested in your post-undergrad experience in terms of professional experience.
Linda Abraham: No high school grades, right?
Soojin Kwon Koh: No high school grades please. And even for college, we don't want a whole laundry list of all of the activities and all of the courses you took; we are really looking for a snapshot. So given that you only have one page to get me familiar with who you are, make sure that you are not focusing on your undergrad days only; it should be driven by your work experience as well. After I look at the resume, then I will look at the recommendation letters, just to get another sense of how someone else sees you. It helps me get a gauge of whether I see a potential fit in terms of achievements, interests, work style, team work skills, and all those kinds of things that we ask your recommender. And a good way to understand what we are looking for is to look at the recommendation questions themselves. And on the ratings grid that we ask your recommenders to fill out, those are the things that we are looking for them to evaluate and those are the things we are watching to see in our students. A word of caution on the ratings grade: there is often a tendency for recommenders to put 'top 1%' for every category just to ensure that their candidate gets the highest chance of being admitted. We are very familiar with that approach, and it really doesn't differentiate anybody given that everybody else is rating their candidates at the top 1%. So we're looking less what the tier of the ranking is and more on how they rate you on the different dimensions, and how they differ one from another. Then after the recommendation letters, I read the essays to say okay, now why does this person want to get an MBA? What do they say about themselves and can I imagine this person fitting? After I bring all of that together, then I read the comments to see whether someone from the Ross community agrees with the picture that's been established based on the written materials by way of the application, the recommendation letters, and the essays. And if there is a fit there and the academic quality is there, then they are a strong potential for an admit. If there is an inconsistent picture between the interview and what's on paper, we will take an even deeper review of those candidates and have a discussion amongst the Admissions Committee. But in most cases, the interview lines up fairly well with the application materials, so it's rare that we are so troubled by the inconsistency. Generally people are pretty good at representing themselves on paper as well as in person, once they get to that stage.
Here's an excerpt from the Yale SOM Q&A (view or listen to the complete Yale SOM Q&A):
Linda Abraham: Ritcha asks, "Are there any specific criteria that Yale SOM looks at while reviewing an application from a career changer?" And Bruce, while you are thinking about how to answer that question, I want to ask the applicants how many of you are applying to the MBA program with the intention of changing careers? Okay. We have 48%, which would be right in line.
Bruce DelMonico: Obviously given the number of people who want to change careers through an MBA program, that is obviously a very important and relevant question. I would answer it on two different levels. The first is substantively in terms of the substance of what you want to do. We tend to be pretty agnostic; we are not valuing one type of career over another. So say you are in finance now and you want to go into marketing, or you're in the public sector now and you want to get into finance, or you're in the non-profit and you want to do healthcare, we are not making a judgment about which of those changes are better or worse. So we are indifferent and agnostic on that level. What we are looking for is to get a sense of how deeply held that switch is; how well thought out is, how much that switch is supported by evidence of commitment to that switch.
Linda Abraham: In other words, if somebody says that they want to save the whales but they've never been to the beach, that's a problem.
Bruce DelMonico: Exactly. And because we have a reputation for being strong in the non-profit sector, we have a number of candidates every year who will throw in there that they want to go into non-profit. They're not doing that right now, and they've got no evidence or indication anywhere that they've volunteered or have done anything to show an interest in this area. So it's that exactly; save the whales, but I've never been to the beach. I like that example. One thing that goes along with that is that we are not judging the switch you want to make or what you want to go into, but we also want to get a sense that it is somewhat realistic, that you have a sense of what it takes to make that switch. I'll give another example. Private equity has been very popular and every year we do have a number of students who go directly into private equity, but it's very difficult to do if you are not coming from finance or you don't have some background. And every year we get candidates who are doing something completely unrelated. They may have done good work, and it may be very interesting work, and it may be very valuable work, but they say that directly after the MBA program they want to go into private equity. Well, you need to have a better sense of what the trajectory of someone is to get into private equity, and what the steps you need are to make that switch. It's not something you can just jump right into; there is a lot of work that goes into it. And so you need to have a sense of the steps that it takes; that you may need to get some more general experience in diversified financials, and then maybe do some investment banking, and then work your way into PE. That would show that you are a much more serious candidate, and you are being much more thoughtful about the process rather than just saying I'm going to go from retail to private equity and there is nothing in-between those two.
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