Judge 2013 (Cambridge) - Calling All Applicants

Thanks for creating this thread! I'll be applying in Round 2. Best of luck to everyone!

Applied for round 1. Hoping for the best

Two of us denied with the same GMAT score and industry, but varying levels of work experience. Cambridge not interested in IT folks this year? I'm disappointed, but in a way makes me feel less worried about my other applications (I'm a younger applicant) to see someone with similar stats but higher WE denied as well. Oh well, live to fight another day. Good luck to everyone else!

Cheers,
Cpt. Brightside

Sorry to hear about the dings. I have found that MBA admissions can be very unpredictable in that your outcome in one school isn't necessarily an indication of your outcomes in others. For what it's worth, I hear HBS loves young people Good luck to you!

For those invited to interview, how many are interviewing on campus? I will unfortunately be interviewing over the phone because of my visa situation.

Round 2 applicant here.

I'll be submitting my application for round 2 as well.

Would anyone know if Cambridge is like the other schools in the US that allow for some "overage" in the number of words for the essays?

Just submitted my app today for R2.. best of luck everyone..

I saw Judge performed rather poorly in the Businessweek ranking. Any thoughts on this?

EDIT: I just read Conrad's blog post regarding this ranking. If I understand correctly, the reason for Judge not appearing in the ranking is not that they did so poorly that they were not even ranked. Instead, very few responses were received so BW decided not to include the school. Interesting.

Yes, it took me a bit to figure that out. Now the question is - when a lot of the employers at Judge are common to other schools, why did so few responses come in? Too small of a class size? Too diverse of a class causing students to be spread really thin across a whole range of companies i.e. student/company ratio is very low and therefore somehow disqualified by BW?

Regardless of the reason, it is unfortunately very likely that strong prospective applicants (who don't fully grasp these intricacies) will completely skip Judge because it does not even figure in these highly-regarded BW rankings.

We generally follow herd mentality. If many people are going towards particular direction then we assume that so many people can not be wrong ... and interestingly, if they goes wrong also then I feel that I am not alone!! and my pains are then relatively manageable.

Most of the people do not have much resource to identify a good school for themselves and they blindly follow the ranking. I said blindly as many of the prospective students are clueless about the schools or what they really want to achieve from the course. Essay is rubbish or creative writing but you need to clearly identify your objective of the course and their relative priorities. Your real objective can be completely different from your essay objective!!

I come from an industry where there are 30+ BEST awards for primary business. Another 30+ for secondary business and another 100 from second tier rankers. Interestingly, the top places are predominantly taken by few companies only, historically from the last 20-30 years!!

We are from the industry and hence we know there are 60+ best awards but general public has absolutely no idea. So when one ranking ranks us as second, there is generally a negative public sentiment .... why are we second? our quality is going down the drain!! ... we completely forget that there are another 59+ awards, we forget that our competitors are almost equal to us and the difference is very thin and many a times very subjective. I remember one case where wife of one of the assessor was confused and formed a bad opinion about our company and that probably lead to a slightly lower ranking.

The issue is in ranking mechanism. Two rankings are never similar. The ranking varies as widely as from self declaration to third party audits/surveys. Oh yes, there are many rankings that just rely on your own declaration and submission. Some people are vocal and some people are conservative and many people are fake ... so technically the self declaration is absolutely rubbish. However, self declaration is the easiest ranking for the ranker and anyway, the consumer of the ranking, i.e. the general public never bother about the mechanism!! General public just look at the position ... top or not?

So to add better credibility, these rankers came up with many hybrid models, where they look at different parameters, collect submission/evidences from different channels, validate the results from various sources and then use their own algorithm to have a weighted average ranking.

So you can see, there are 1001 parameters, channels, algorithm and relative weight. One parameter important to one ranker is not at all important to another ranker. Relative weight given to one parameter is not same for two ranker ... and on top of that, ranker use different methodologies and mechanism. Student satisfaction ranks high in some rankers mind but not so high in another ranker's mind .. How do you define quality of a programme? How do you define ROI for a programme? Definitely it is not A.pple to A.pple comparison!!

If it was mathematics then, whichever way you choose, your result would have been the same ... provided you are correct. But schools are not mathematics and hence different ranking produce different results.

Having said that, ideally, BALANCED good schools should have balanced ranking everywhere, irrespective of rankers but highly skewed or unique school's ranking can fluctuate quite substantially.

The point is, ranking is important if you do not have other options to evaluate a school or most importantly, a programme. If you have other channels, then ranking is just one of the guide and you should not be to worried too much about the rankings.

I agree with you 100%. Even IMD, which has 90 students per year, is ranked. This is all too weird.

I have a score of 590 in the verbal section (80 percentile) and 770 (83 percentile) with 4.5 (73 percentile) in Analytical writing in the GRE exam. My GPA is uni was 3.1, however I have a solid 9 years of experience, 8 of which are in a Fortune 200 company with excellent to good reviews. Do I stand a realistic chance of getting into Judge?

Hi there,

Did any R2 applicant hear back from Cambridge? I submitted a few days earlier than the R2 deadline (13 Nov) and received an e-mail an hour back that my application is "Waitlisted" but without an invite to interview at this point. I've been told that there will be further communication if the Adcom decide to speak to me.

Cheers

Dinged (without interview). Somehow, it hasnt affected me. I'm much more keen on Oxford, my Cambridge application was almost an afterthought..

This thread has been pretty quiet!

R2 Applicant here. I got an interview invite for 1/21 in Cambridge. Any other applicants with an invite? I was also looking for resources on the interview. Any information would be appreciated!

Hi there, R1 accepted (and enrolled) candidate here. Congratulations! From what I understand, getting the interview invitation is a very good sign at Cambridge.

I had a 20 min pre-interview first with the Head of Admissions and then a 40 min phone interview with a faculty member (I wasn't told who it would be in advance). You can assume that your interviewer would have read your whole application very carefully and the questions will be specific to your application. So definitely reacquaint yourself with your essays before the interview. They will likely ask questions related to your weaknesses pointed out by your referees. Many of the questions were behavioral in the vein of "tell me about a time when..." so make sure you have at least a few good stories to use to answer those type of questions. Also be prepared to tell them how you will contribute to the program. Remember, Cambridge builds quite an eclectic student body (and I'm talking in terms of personalities here, not just passports) so they're looking for what's unique in you. Overall, the interviewer was very friendly and seemed genuinely interested to know more about me. I enjoyed it very much. Good luck!

Oh and the reason you might find this thread quiet is because the school sets up a Facebook page very early in the process and facilitates discussion over there. For R1, they invited all candidates invited to interview and there are also Admissions staff and current students on there. Since you've been invited to interview, perhaps you could request to be added on there?

Leftcoastguy: Did you decide Cambridge over Oxford? Wondering how you got to the decision. Thanks.