I attended the info session in Santa Monica last night. Only about 15 prospective students. In addition to an adcom officer, the associate dean made a surprise appearance (I think he coincidentally happened to be traveling to LA). There were also three alumni who attended.
A couple of takeaways:
1) During the presentation, they beat the "leader of consequence" bit to death.
Based on this, I have no doubt that success on essay #4 is going to be CRITICAL to one's success on the application.
2) The staff and alumni were super duper friendly. I've been to probably 5-6 of these events over the last 2 years, and this was by far the friendliest group of people. The adcom was very warm and inviting and not intimidating at all. It was almost as if they were so thankful that we attended and wanted to give as much info on the program/process as possible.
As a (personal) side note, I spent a good deal of time chatting with the associate dean and the adcom member after the session. I seriously got a free 20 minute interview. My work experience is pretty interesting (especially considering what is going on with the financial/credit markets right now) and I felt like I really had a great opportunity to articulate my candidacy through my experiences. I hadn't planned to go into this whole spiel, but things just kind of went that direction. Not sure if these folks are coming to a town near you, but if there was a small turnout for the reception in LA, then you are likely to get some decent personal attention in another city as well.
Another thing that I wanted to add (as I remembered this when I was at lunch with terp06 yesterday!). As mentioned, I work for a company severly impacted by the financial/credit crisis. I asked the assoc. dean if there would be any sort of black cloud over my resume or a bad impression that I was merely applying for MBA school because of my situation (in fact, I am not applying because of my situation, but didn't want it to necessarily look as if that is the case). His response was "not at all." In fact, he said they are actively trying to recruit people from Bear Stearns (Alan Schwartz was a Dukie), Lehman Brother, and Wachovia (Bob Steele in a Dukie).