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

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Meet Darden Admissions in July

We are excited to join our colleagues at several multi-school events starting this month.  Please join us to learn more about Darden and other top business schools when we come to your city! The multi-school events in July are: Tuesday, 14 July Multi-School Women’s Event (Washington, DC): Register Now Multi-School Women’s Event (Chicago, IL): Register Now Wednesday, 15 July Multi-School Women’s Event (New York, NY): Register Now Multi-School Event (Minneapolis, MN): Register Now Thursday, 16 July Multi-School Women’s Event (Boston, MA): Register Now Tuesday, 21 July Multi-School Women’s Event (San Francisco, CA): Register Now Wednesday, 22 July Multi-School Event (Los Angeles, CA): Register Now Thursday, 23 July Multi-School Event (San Diego, CA): Register Now Stop by these events and introduce yourself to a member of the Darden Admissions Committee as well as Darden alumni. We look forward to getting to know you and sharing more about the Darden experience along with tips for the application process. For more information on our other events and receptions, please visit the Darden website.

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: July Events: The Value of an MBA for Women

Throughout the summer, Darden will be participating in several multi-school events that are geared toward women. These events will begin with a diverse panel discussion featuring alumnae from different business schools, including Darden. Following the panel, you will be able to mingle with alumnae to hear more about their MBA experiences and ask school-specific questions. There will also be Darden admissions representatives at each of the events. These multi-school women’s events kick off this week. Darden will be at events around the country, including multi-school women’s events in Washington, DC, and New York, NY. We will have an alumna representing us on each of the panels, as well as other alumnae available to answer your questions at the Darden tables. Please join us to learn more about the MBA experience! DC: Tuesday, 14 July (Register Now) Panelist: Shelley Reese (MBA ‘08), Senior Assoicate at Booz Allen Hamilton Also in attendance: Natalie Foley (MBA ’12), VP and COO at Peer Insight Caroline Schoenecker (MBA ’11), Chief of Staff at Deloitte NYC: Wednesday, 15 July (Register Now) Panelist: Taylor Meyer (MBA ’13), Vice President at PIMCO Also in attendance: Deanna de Arango (MBA ’13), Director, Global Skincare Marketing, The Estee Lauder Companies Maria DeMuro (MBA ’12), Associate at Barclays Investment Bank For a full list of Darden’s events and receptions this summer, please visit our website. We hope that you will join us to learn more about Darden and other top business schools when we come to your city. We look forward to meeting you!

The MBA Recruiting Process – Insights from Darden ’15 Grad and CEO of RelishMBA

Hello from the RelishMBA team, and congratulations on being admitted to the MBA Class of 2017! My name is Sarah, and I’m a recent Darden School of Business graduate who founded RelishMBA, an online recruiting platform built specifically for the business school recruiting market. As a recent grad who works full-time in the MBA recruitment space, I wanted to share some recruiting advice and tips to help you prepare for arriving on campus at Darden.

The first thing to be aware of is that MBA recruiting is a long and intense process. Recruiting activities begin quickly once you’re on campus and they take up a huge amount of your time and energy for most of your first year. While virtually all top MBA students have great jobs available to them, finding those jobs can be frustrating and stressful, with relevant information often hard to find and a complex networking process that can be tough to effectively manage. I started RelishMBA to address these problems and make the process more efficient for both students and employers.

The summer is a great time to get started with recruiting processes (while you don’t have to worry about school, student clubs, social life, and the dozens of other activities that fill up your time during first year). Luckily, there are a few things you can do to prepare before school starts in August: Relax. Explore. Prepare.

Relax – business school is a big change from the working world; take a bit of time off. You deserve it and you’ll need the break!

Explore – In your time relaxing, begin checking out what industries and companies recruit MBAs. This is something RelishMBA helps with. Sign-up at RelishMBA.com to begin exploring employer’s company pages on MBA Careers specific for your school (“day in the life” alumni testimonials, on-campus presence, key points of contact, etc.).

Prepare – And lastly, get your resume ready. Below are some tips from my experience.
It’s also important to remember that once you’re on campus, you’ll be networking with recruiters and alumni frequently – and RelishMBA will help you here too, through relationship management tools that make it easy to stay on top of your networking game. Have any questions? Reach out anytime at recruit@relishmba.com.

Resume Tips:

1) Writing your resume is your first Marketing assignment

Your resume is essentially a one-page advertisement designed to sell your brand to employers. But as your first year marketing class will tell you, marketing is about a lot more than just a fancy design and a few well-placed buzzwords. Think about your audience (i.e. who will be reading your resume? Finance recruiters? Consultants? Marketers? Others?) and how you are positioning yourself with that audience (i.e. what work experiences would be most relevant or interesting to the recruiters reading your resume?).

For example, if you’re headed up to Wall Street, focus on the more quantitatively rigorous parts of your work experience, and try to make sure that your resume as a whole reflects an interest in and passion for finance and its associated disciplines. Future consultants will want to highlight problem-solving and analytical thinking. Marketers could talk about leading cross-functional teams or point out examples of especially effective communication.

And if you are not sure what you want to do, don’t sweat it – there are lots of you out there, and it’s no big deal for the next few weeks or months. But regardless of your eventual industry or function targets, remember: your resume is not just a chronicle of your past work achievements; it is an advertisement designed to effectively sell you and your brand to recruiters.

2) Be concise but specific

This is one of the more difficult parts of honing your resume: providing specific examples of relevant work accomplishments in a way that a recruiter can easily digest in a few seconds. Try starting each bullet point with a strong action word. Instead of saying something like “Helped to more than double sales during tenure in catchment area,” try something like “Launched blogger outreach program that increased web traffic by 72% and increased sales by 120%”.

These sorts of hard numbers are really helpful, especially since many recruiters will spend only a few seconds looking at your resume and those numbers stand out on the page. So it’s also important to be sure that your bullet points can be read and processed easily. And if you don’t have a lot of specific numbers to add to your resume, it’s still important to be specific about your accomplishments and to pick your words wisely.

3) Add some flair

You should be careful with how much flair you add to your resume, but it’s a good idea to think of ways to set yourself apart from the competition. The “Personal” section at the bottom of your resume, where you list hobbies, activities, and interests, is an easy place to hook a recruiter (or break the ice in an interview). Only mention things that are truly a part of your life, but still consider your audience and which of your hobbies or experiences might be of interest to the recruiters reading your resumes. Once you reach campus, you’ll hear plenty of stories about students who were able to land first or even second-round interviews largely on the basis of what seem like minor resume items.

Other ways to add flair:

-Were you kind of a big deal in college? It’s worthwhile to mention any particularly important or impressive extracurriculars from your undergrad days (particularly leadership roles), and including club affiliations and other school-specific positions can be a good idea once you get onto campus

-Recruiters are looking to hire real people, not business robots. Make sure your resume – the accomplishments you choose to mention, the structure and content of the Personal section – reflects your personality.

4) Don’t be careless

This is the part where we tell you that a few people every year submit resumes with misspelled words or mismatched fonts or other significant but easily avoidable mistakes, and that you could be one of those people if you’re not careful, and you think “I’d never be that much of an idiot,” and then you send your resume to McKinsey or Google with your name spelled wrong at the top. Don’t be that person.
Seriously, just get a friend to read it. Several friends. Have a resume-reading party. But don’t spell your name wrong.

Have any questions? Reach out anytime at recruit@relishmba.com

Sincerely,
RelishMBA Team

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Class of 2015 Top Hiring Companies Announced

The Economist ranks Darden No. 1 for its diversity of recruiters, with Darden graduates being hired by a wide range of companies. And not only are the recruiters diverse, but some of the most prestigious companies in the world are hiring Darden students. This list of top hiring companies for the Class of 2015 collectively hired more than one-third of the entire class. Top Hiring Companies at Darden (Class of 2015) McKinsey & Company Boston Consulting Group Accenture Amazon Microsoft Bain & Company JPMorgan Goldman Sachs PwC Parthenon-EY Deloitte Deutsche Bank Danaher Citi Harris Williams As you continue to do research on the MBA program that is right for you, we encourage you to check out the resources offered by our Career Development Center.

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Darden on the West Coast

This week, Darden will be on the west coast at several multi-school MBA admissions events. We are excited to be in California and hope you can join us for one of the events to meet members of our dynamic network and learn more about the Darden experience. Tuesday, 21 July 2015 – San Francisco, CA – Women’s MBA Multi-School Event Register Now Wednesday, 22 July 2015 – Los Angeles, CA – MBA Multi-School Event Register Now Thursday, 23 July 2015 – San Diego, CA – MBA Multi-School Event Register Now At these events, you will have the opportunity to learn more about the MBA application process, as well as meet representatives from Darden and other top-ranked business schools. The evening will begin with application tips and advice from admissions officers, and will end with a networking session where you can get to know the schools more personally. Please stop by and introduce yourself to us! If you miss us on this trip, we’ll be back on the west coast later this summer, so be sure to learn about more dates on our website. We look forward to seeing you soon!

FROM Darden Admissions Blog: Darden on the Road: Upcoming Events

Darden is back on the road! We have multi-school events across the country in the coming weeks, and we hope you’ll be able to join us when we are in your area. These multi-school events are great opportunities to learn more about the MBA application process, as well as talk to representatives from Darden and other top business schools. For dates and registration links, please see below. This week, we will be attending several multi-school events up and down the east coast. You can come see us in the following locations: Tuesday, 4 August – New York, NY: Register Wednesday, 5 August – Washington, DC: Register Thursday, 6 August – Philadelphia, PA: Register Next week, we’re returning to the west coast for events in California, Washington, and we will also be attending our first-ever event in Vancouver. Stop by and say hello! Tuesday, 11 August – San Francisco, CA: Register Wednesday, 12 August – Seattle, WA: Register Thursday, 13 August – Vancouver, Canada: Register We will be traveling around the country and around the world in the upcoming months, so if you don’t see your city here, check our website for additional event and reception dates. We look forward to seeing you soon!

In these term- or semester-long projects, students work with a member of the Darden faculty to tackle real business problems and propose solutions for their client