Calling Judge(Cambridge) Applicnts(2015 Intake)Class of 2016

Hello Cambridge Applicants,

I hope all of you are going to attend chat session tomorrow with Cambridge Admissions Team on GMATClub. We are looking for a volunteer who can help us in moderating the chat session. If anybody is interested, Please PM me

Best Regards,
Narenn

Thank you guys participating in today's chat session with Cambridge Admissions; It's always helpful to get a look in from the AdCom

We shall make the session transcript available for those who could not attend the session. Keep checking this place.

Dear Cambridge Applicants,

Thank you very much for participating in recent chat session with Cambridge(Judge) Admissions Team. We had a wonderful discussion with Mr.James Barker of Cambridge team.

For our friends who could not attend the event, here is the transcript of session.

Chat Transcript

"Essays provide an opportunity to 'colour' your application with your personality and experiences. So write well and show a good sense of self-reflection and thought about this MBA application process" - James Barker (MBA Coordinator - Judge(Cambridge) Business School)

Just a few more ways of reaching out to the Admissions Team at Judge:

If anyone has any follow-up questions specifically for James Barker, MBA Admissions Co-ordinator for Judge Business School, who graciously spent some time with us for the chat, you can reach out to him via Twitter @JamesAdmissions

If you have questions that wouldn't fit 140 characters, reach out to Conrad Chua, Admissions Director at Judge, via our own forums here:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/ask-cambridge-judge-admissions-117002.html

Find Out Fridays is hosted by the Admissions Team at Judge, if you have a series of questions or would just like to have a longer chat with them:
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/mba/apply/meet-us/find-out-fridays/

Recently, Conrad Chua, the Admissions Director for Judge Business School, was interviewed at Clear Admit, another MBA Admissions blog and consulting website. He's got some really interesting comments on changes to the application process, especially re: referees/recs and the interview process. Take a look here:
https://blog.clearadmit.com/2014/08/admi ... ss-school/

Hi all - since we're coming up close to the first deadline for Cambridge Judge, I was thinking we could sharpen our focus here by discussing why we're all applying to Judge. Since I'm posing the question, I suppose I should start:

The ready availability of hands-on, experiential learning opportunities at Judge are a big factor. There are few other places that make experiential learning such a large part of only a year's curriculum. Also, the opportunity to do a summer internship (though self-sourced) is very helpful within a one-year program as it gives me more opportunities to find a full-time foothold in the UK.

What are everyone else's reasons for applying to Judge?

R1 is coming soon! Good luck to everyone currently fine tuning their essays and references for the first round of Cambridge Judge!
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/media/2014/round-1-application-deadline/

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: The China wave

Two CJBS faculty members recently wrote a paper on how Chinese companies were innovating faster than their Western competitors by focusing on the speed of R&D instead of quality. Their paper has gained considerable attention and was featured in a recent Economist article. I attended a recent alumni dinner in Hong Kong where Eden Yin, one of the authors of the paper, and the Director of CJBS, Christoph Loch, spoke to CJBS alumni about these findings. In short, Chinese companies are industrialising the R&D process by modularising it, and then using larger numbers of less qualified technicians or researchers to work on each part. In comparison, Western companies would use a small number of very highly qualified Phds to tackle the same issue. In this way, Chinese companies are able to quickly scale up or down their R&D efforts. Chinese companies are also more willing to push through their beta products to market, gather customer feedback and make rapid changes. For example xiaomi, the largest Chinese smartphone company, can make updates to their OS every few weeks, compared to Apple who only updates iOS annually. Chinese companies are also willing to take more risks in their product launches by using fewer tests, e.g. xiaomi only uses 200 tests compared to Nokia’s 2000 tests of each product. The alumni discussion was fascinating but I will only focus on two aspects. The first was a question on whether Chinese companies could get away with this approach because they are able to experiment in a large, easily segmented and forgiving Chinese market that had lower expectations of a Chinese product. Eden felt this was definitely the case where Apple could not afford anything less than a near-perfect product launch because it focused on the high-end premium market. Xiaomi could easily launch a product in one city to poor feedback and make rapid changes before a more large-scale launch. The second aspect was about organisation. Eden and Christoph made the point that while Western companies were flatter organisations, they were still very hierarchical and split by functional areas which hindered rapid innovation. In contrast, Chinese companies resembled a network with the CEO at the centre. There was a stronger social glue within many Chinese companies that allowed them to innovate across functions once a problem had been identified. These two aspects got me thinking about the Cambridge MBA. The MBA is a premium product and our position is more similar to Apple than Xiaomi in that we have to be more careful in rolling out product launches. This is a point that I feel explains why full-time MBAs seem slower to innovate compared to MOOCs. On the other hand, with the benefit of a suite of programmes in the school, we are able to learn from the experiences of our colleagues and roll out innovations that have been tried out in other programmes. On the other hand, we are in the midst of a programme review that will roll out changes to the Cambridge MBA over the next few years. The Cambridge MBA has always emphasised collaborative leadership as a pillar of our students’ learning. At the risk of succumbing to confirmation bias, Eden’s findings does suggest that we are on the right track in emphasising collaboration in the Cambridge MBA.

Hi all – as everyone knows, we’re coming up close to the R1 deadline, which is this Friday! Heady times, and I hope things are going well for those working towards this deadline (or who’ve already finished). Judge staff were available at a recent QS MBA Fair this past weekend, and I had a chance to learn more about the new career advisor interview Conrad mentioned.

The new interview with a career advisor was originally talked about as being 1-on-1 (see previous post on Conrad’s interview with Clear Admit). Because of the volume of applicants on Interview Days, they’re changing that to be 3 applicants-to-1 adviser.

The school is also discussing tweaks and updates to the MBA program – an announcement on the changes should be coming soon.

Good luck everyone!

Literally hours left - good luck to anyone who's left it this late

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: Combining Careers and Admissions and Marketing

This summer, the Cambridge MBA team underwent a reorganisation that saw the Marketing, Admissions and Careers functions come under my supervision. Within the Careers team, we have beefed up the employer relations and business development side so that we can increase our outreach to employers with two objectives, one to better understand employer talent needs and feed that information back to students, and secondly to help in employer branding so that students get a more accurate picture of each employer, their strategies and their values. We are not the first school to formally bring the admissions and careers functions under one roof. I keep hearing that schools that have gone down this path want their careers team to have a say on admission decisions. Many schools that don’t have this formal structure have processes in place where someone in careers might have a place on the admissions committee or in some schools, even conduct the admissions interviews. This was not the reason behind our reorganisation nor the end objective. Our admissions process will continue to hinge on a candidate’s intellectual abilities, work accomplishments, collaborative ethos and potential to contribute on a larger scale. And our career stats so far, of at least 90% in two of the last three years, show that we don’t need to make much changes on the admissions side to improve the careers outcomes. Instead, we are bringing the careers aspect forward to candidates. At our interview days, interview candidates are split into small groups where they have a session with one of our careers consultants. Our careers consultants provide feedback to the candidates on their career goals but their feedback plays no part in the admissions decision itself. In some cases, where a candidate is strong but has career goals that are a stretch, we will still extend an offer to that candidate but follow up with a phone conversation explaining why we think the career goals will be a challenge and let the candidate decide how he or she wants to proceed. One idea that I have mentioned several times on this blog is the power of networks. Not the schmoozing over drinks type of networking but the capability to identify, connect with, build and grow a community of like-minded individuals. That’s where marketing comes into the mix. As more and more students get interested in organisations that typically might not have considered hiring MBAs, it becomes more important for students to showcase their interests and connect with people in these organisations. The marketing work that my team does, whether in terms of student blogs, podcasts, videos, websites like the New Game will become more important from a careers point of view. For the first time, the marketing team hosted a reception for the MBAs during Orientation and our Careers team has been active in encouraging students to use twitter firstly as a means of getting information from us, but subsequently to connect with others. Exciting times. We will see what happens.

Hello all! We recently interviewed Conrad Chua, the head of MBA recruitment and admissions at Judge. In the interview, he discusses changes to the Judge application that take effect this year. He also shares that Judge will place a stronger emphasis on career interests earlier in their MBA program and in MBA recruitment. You can learn about all these changes at Judge here: https://blog.clearadmit.com/2014/08/admissions-director-qa-conrad-chua-cambridges-judge-business-school/#more-50740.

Has anyone heard any feedback from their submission. I know the website says five weeks but it appears 3 people in the GMAT Club has been invited to interview.

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: CEOs, organisational culture and MBAs

Recently, the Director of the Business School Christoph Loch wrote on his blogabout Culture Clash and CEO leadership. styles. It is an interesting article in light of what some of our alums told our students this week. The Careers team had organised an alumni panel for those interested in consulting careers. And while the alums represented the entire spectrum of consulting firms, one common thread was that consulting is a lifestyle and students have to understand the different cultures in each company. And it has to go beyond asking an alum what is the culture of the company but asking yourself whether you have a compatible set of values and then deciding whether you should apply to this company. This mirrors our approach when we speak to employers. Beyond the transactional issues that we discuss such as application processes, we spend time understanding what is the DNA of the company. This helps my team to advise our MBAs when they ask us whether they area good fit for various companies. The other aspect which Christoph also touched on in his blog is whether CEOs influence organisational culture or whether the organisation appoints a CEO who has compatible cultural DNA. This got me thinking about the types of students we admit. Because the school has a strong collaborative ethos, with an emphasis on cross-functional learning, that it is not surprising that we have a student body that mirrors those qualities. It would be interesting to see whether this means that our alums tend to work in companies who prize these qualities, and not in organisations that Christoph describes as mercenary.

I received an official email with an invitation to interview at Cambridge, on the 31st September evening GMT/1st October early morning Asia time.
I am an R1 applicant.

According to the email, the interviews will be in Early November (2nd Nov - dinner, followed by a full day on the 3rd of Nov).

I hope this helps to answer your question - I also wish you luck & hope that you receive yours soon!

Hi ge0rgeous,

My status still shows "Submitted". Does that mean I am not accepted ?
What was your status ?
I have dropped a note to JBS, but no response yet - may be for the weekends.

Regards!

31st September! Nice invention!!