Judge (Cambridge) Class of 2015

Hello GMATCLUB Members,

We are bringing a webinar with Q&A as well as chats with current students focused on the Waitlisted Applicants.
The first event of this series is Webinar conducted by Admissionado's Founder and HBS Alum Jon Frank. Jon will share his suggestions followed by a Q&A session. This is your opportunity to ask your specific questions. The webinar will take place on 31st January 2014, Friday, 9 AM PST.

We shall also be conducting chat sessions with some Current students from various schools who were successfully admitted from a waitlist so you can learn what to expect from the process, what worked for them, and what it takes. These chats shall take place in our Chat Room. We will release the times & Dates (all will be the first week of February)

Registration Link: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/531329318
Download event to your Outlook
If you are on a waitlist - you do NOT want to miss these!

The webinar and chats are free. There will be a 30-minute Q&A session at the end of the Webinar on Friday Jan 31st at 9 AM PST - join to have your questions answered.

Thank You!

I am very happy that I'll be in Cambridge on 23rd of February for dinner and interview the next day.
Good luck everyone.

Great.

When did you received the invite? And where are you from?

Regards

@conard

Should we expect d decisions to come out by tomorrow? ?

Posted from my mobile device

@anuradgiitr

We have sent out some decisions late last week and still going through the rest. Hope to send out most of the remaining by end of this week, ie end Friday UK time.

Conrad

Thanks Conard

waiting eagerly. ...fingers crossed

Posted from my mobile device

Wow! I didn't realize interview decisions would come so soon. My fingers are crossed!

Hello Guys,

Now we have integrated twitter feed of Cambridge-Judge in to Main post of this thread in order to have latest school updates on our forum.

Thank You and Good luck to everyone applying!

!	Join us for a chat with several current students who have been admitted from WL last year. When: Tue Feb 4th at 9 AM PST Where: GMAT Club Chat

The recording of the Getting off a Waitlist Webinar is now available on Youtube:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61Lo8LAfOIQ[/youtube]

See you there!

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: What I didn’t have to do this year

The Financial Times published its annual MBA rankings two weeks ago and the Cambridge MBA held steady at 16th position. While I did my usual analysis of the results for our internal audiences, one thing that struck me was how low-key the reaction to the rankings was compared to previous years. Yes, it helped that we were in the Top 20 whereas in recent years we were in the mid-twenties. But I would also like to think that the relative lack of reaction was also due to our constituents (our students, alums, staff) knowing that while rankings are important and gives us valuable benchmarking information in certain metrics, there are a lot of areas that we feel strongly about that are not captured by rankings. For example, the quality of the academic experience, the learning environment, the networks that our students and alums can tap into. I hope we can use the breathing space created by a top 20 ranking to improve these areas, which I feel will produce more lasting value to the CJBS community.

Hi everyone, I am snooping around here for a little help.

I am a 22 year old, with 15 months of work ex in one of the biggest asset management firms. Meanwhile, I am a founder of a NGO (not really a NGO,more like a movement. Limited resources) that tackles commercial sex trade issues in India. Eventually I want to quit my job and focus on my movement. I have a decent undergrad and 770 on my gmat.

what are my chances with Cambridge? should I wait for a while before applying?

Thanks for the help.

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: Dominant paradigms in MBA programmes

Last week, I listened to the BBC Radio 4 programme the Bottom Line where the host discusses topical business issues with some guests. I have never tuned into this programme before and the only reason I did on this occasion was because our Head of PR told me that the topic would be business schools. It was a half-hour well spent. The three guests were an Associate Dean from Chicago Booth who looks after their Executive Programme in London, the CEO of a UK-based recycling company who is also a Harvard MBA alum, and finally someone who started a fashion business after working for several years in Marks and Spencer (a large UK retailer) and does not have an MBA. I thought the most interesting part of the discussion happened in the last five minutes after they had just discussed Harvard’s case method. The Chicago Booth Associate Dean talked about how the case method was a tough and gruelling exercise where one had to defend a view against people who knew much more about the industry and how veterans of military conflict had told him that it was one of the most harrowing experiences that they had faced. The Harvard alum gave another side of the case method where he said it taught him humility because no matter how experienced someone was, there was usually someone else in the room who had a valuable viewpoint. But it was something that the woman in the fashion business said which stuck with me. She made the point that just as some business school graduates were not suitable for business, some very successful people of business were not suitable for business school. And that led to an unfortunately too brief discussion on whether there was a dominant paradigm in business schools and MBA programmes that crowded out other forms of leadership or leaders who did not fit that paradigm. For example, would Branson, Jobs or Zuckerberg  have been admitted into an MBA programme and would they have benefited from one? Are they, and other groups such as women, deterred from business school because of a certain paradigm of business that pervades what is taught? I was thinking about this when @AllegreHadida, a member of faculty at CJBS, sent me a link to a blog postthat @MichelleKweder , a Phd student at UMass, wrote in response to Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria’s apology for HBS’ unforgiveable behaviour and attitude towards female students and faculty. Nohria’s apology could itself be seen as a reaction to a New York Times storyon the attitudes at HBS towards women students and faculty. Most of the reactions to Nohria’s speech centered around his pledge to more than double the percentage of women who are protagonists in HBS case studies to 20% from 9%. I have been frankly disappointed at the level of debate amongst business school commentators on the implications of Nohria’s speech. One particularly galling example is this postfrom Poets and Quants, which is a very widely-followed website on business school issues. I am not sure what the writer was getting at with a title like “HBS dean makes unusual public apology”. To me, the writer comes across as dismissive of the deeper issues when he writes that the women in the audience let out an audible sigh at the 20% target thinking it was not ambitious enough, when “they (the women) were unaware that the dean’s objective would amount to a more than doubling of the current cases in which women are portrayed as central leaders in business problems.” I will be charitable and assume that I have misunderstood the writer’s intentions for now. In contrast, I was very grateful for Michelle Kweder’s dissection of the Nohria initiative. Setting aside her numerical analysis of what reaching 20% of cases means, her most compelling argument was that replacing male with women protagonists doesn’t change the underlying dynamics in many business school cases. Michelle points out that most cases were formulaic featuring an MBA hero-leader swooping in to save the day by making tough decisions on which profit line to maximise. Seen in this light, and without additional details from HBS, Nohria’s initiative is no different than changing the names and gender of 20% of its existing cases. I am not ready to go as far as Michelle in describing most cases as exhibiting strains of classical neoliberalism, American exceptionalism and White Savior Industrial Complex, but that is because I haven’t read that many cases recently to make a judgement. And neither has Michelle as she admits that her sample is quite small at 23. But I think she has a point that there is a dominant, unwritten paradigm in business schools. If all this paradigm did was deter potentially good students who have an alternative view on how business should be run, then to me that’s not such a bad thing because these students will go on to do great things without business school. But it is more dangerous if this paradigm is adopted blindly and snuffs out the instincts that some students might have that there must be better solutions that yield profit and value to stakeholders.

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: What’s next after advertising and content

I have been away for the past month in a combination of work-related and holiday travels. I personally find this time out of the office useful to take stock of what we have been doing and what changes in direction we might have to take. It was in one of the many artisanal cafes that have sprung up in Singapore recently that I thought about how our MBA marketing efforts have evolved in the time since I joined CJBS. At the time, our budget was predominantly skewed towards advertising and that was split between print and online advertising. We then re-oriented our marketing to become more social and, to support that new focus, to create more content. The content we produced was a mix of text, audio and video, and focused largely on the student experiences, addressing concerns about an MBA and the admissions process. More recently, we have made a subtle but significant change in the type of content we produce. We started to produce content that we felt would be of interest to our pool of prospective candidates and that drew upon the Cambridge networks and connections that a CJBS student could tap into. In most cases, there wasn’t even an explicit link to the Cambridge MBA. To me, this was quite a courageous step because we were now making educated guesses about the issues that our pool of candidates would be interested in, finding people who had insightful things to say about these issues, and thinking of engaging ways to produce such content. I am not a natural at articulating my thoughts, so it was a pleasant relief to come across this slideshare by John Willshire (@willsh), which I feel captures many of my thoughts. Willshire developed Artefact cards which my colleagues at CJBS would know as the pack of yellow cards that I carry with me to meetings. These cards are large enough to contain one idea but small enough to force one to be very succinct in articulating that one idea, and in a wonderful example of eating one’s own dogfood, John’s presentation relies heavily on his Artefact cards. Slide 3 has his tagline which also coincidentally explains what we were doing in terms of shifting our content. Briefly, it says that it is better to make things people want than it is to make people want things. At this point, I should say that there have been benefits to the Cambridge MBA from producing such content. People who have appeared on our podcasts have deepened their engagement with the Cambridge MBA by becoming speakers on our concentrations or inviting our students to participate in events that they have organised. It is just that the benefits become harder to measure in a linear fashion and to me, that’s a logical consequence of how brands are now more complex. See slides 81-83 of John Willshire’s presentation. This shift towards making things people want has also been extended to the school’s website. Before a recent revamp, the school’s home page only contained brief information about our programmes with links to more extensive landing pages for each programme. I had always felt this was unsatisfactory because this sent a message to the outside world that the school was only interested in running programmes. CJBS, and any other school for that matter, has to be, and is more than just a collection of degree programmes and executive education. So, the new website now features a wealth of content generated from our faculty, students and alumni. I also think it is great that with the school rightfully generating more content, we are now free to think of the next phase of our marketing. It is becoming clear that marketing has to become more intertwined with what we do in the school. On the other hand, many organisations regard marketing as an afterthought in the same way that a person in charge of a factory would turn to the marketing office and say, now sell this. I am also coming to the view that what people want is to learn, and to be part of a community that learns together. It will be our challenge to think of how we can tie these threads together.

I just submitted for the June 30 deadline.. I could not find clear info as to when the interviewing would be held, and when decisions come out, I already got some acceptances, so I was wondering if anyone has some advice on this

Hi all,

I have submitted my application for Sept 2014 - intake. Now crossed my fingers and hoping to hear positive news from the school.

Wish me luck!

Anyone else who submitted the application in 25th April deadline?

Amita