Admissionado Chat Transcript - Tips for R3 and European School Applications.pdf CambridgeJBS,429910601687502848,600

Last visit was: 10 May 2026, 02:37

It is currently 10 May 2026, 02:37

Toolkit

Business School and MBA

MBA Archive

GMAT Club Daily Prep

Thank you for using the timer - this advanced tool can estimate your performance and suggest more practice questions. We have subscribed you to Daily Prep Questions via email.

Customized
for You

we will pick new questions that match your level based on your Timer History

Track
Your Progress

every week, we’ll send you an estimated GMAT score based on your performance

Practice
Pays

we will pick new questions that match your level based on your Timer History

Not interested in getting valuable practice questions and articles delivered to your email? No problem, unsubscribe here.

Go to My Error Log Learn more

Request Expert Reply

Confirm Cancel

Back to Forum

Create Topic

Judge (Cambridge) Class of 2015

1 2 3

Curumo

Joined: 24 Nov 2009

Last visit: 20 Jul 2020

Posts: 67

Own Kudos:

Given Kudos: 11

Location: Azerbaijan

Concentration: General Management, Entrepreneurship

Schools: Oxford'17 (A) Cambridge'16 (A) MIT-MSMS'17 (A) INSEAD Jan '17 (M$)

GMAT 1: 680 Q44 V39 Verified score

GMAT 2: 740 Q50 V41 Verified score

GRE 1: Q158 V153 Verified score

GPA: 3.74

WE:Project Management (Computer Software)

Schools: Oxford'17 (A) Cambridge'16 (A) MIT-MSMS'17 (A) INSEAD Jan '17 (M$)

GMAT 2: 740 Q50 V41 Verified score

GRE 1: Q158 V153 Verified score

Posts: 67

Kudos: 10

30 Apr 2014, 12:14

Kudos

Bookmarks

So pity that Cambridge does not have the deferred admission (at least not in Business school), most likely I will not be able to attend this year due to family reasons (( and will have to re-apply in the Fall...

amitasagar23

Joined: 05 Nov 2013

Last visit: 11 Feb 2018

Posts: 12

Own Kudos:

Given Kudos: 4

Schools: HEC '15 Cambridge

Posts: 12

Kudos: 81

04 May 2014, 06:44

Kudos

Bookmarks

ahhejase

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..

I had submitted my application for 30th April deadline on 9th April. Am awaiting response from the team. Judge's website says that it will take 5 weeks post the end of deadline to come back. However, for the 30th June deadline applicants, they will take it on a case to case basis. I think once they are done with the april lot, they will take up the 30th June applicants. So you will hear from them by end of may or first week of June but definitely sooner than 30th June. Again this is just my guess.

CambridgeMBA

Official Business School Representative

Joined: 04 Jul 2010

Last visit: 06 Jun 2024

Posts: 196

Own Kudos:

Posts: 196

Kudos: 47

07 May 2014, 09:00

Kudos

Bookmarks

Those who submitted their applications before the last deadline should get their decisions by the beginning of next week.

Those who submitted their applications after the deadline will be looked at after those decisions have been sent out.

Conrad Chua
Head MBA Admissions

SirSteve0

Joined: 14 Jan 2014

Last visit: 03 Jan 2015

Posts: 7

Schools: IMD '16 (WD) INSEAD Jan '15 (A) Cambridge (A$)

GMAT 1: 700 Q41 V44 Verified score

Schools: IMD '16 (WD) INSEAD Jan '15 (A) Cambridge (A$)

GMAT 1: 700 Q41 V44 Verified score

Posts: 7

Kudos: 0

08 May 2014, 03:21

Kudos

Bookmarks

CambridgeMBA

Great. Hope to hear good news. What are the odds of being considered, given your rather small class size (at least comparing to the big US schools)?

SirSteve0

Joined: 14 Jan 2014

Last visit: 03 Jan 2015

Posts: 7

Schools: IMD '16 (WD) INSEAD Jan '15 (A) Cambridge (A$)

GMAT 1: 700 Q41 V44 Verified score

Schools: IMD '16 (WD) INSEAD Jan '15 (A) Cambridge (A$)

GMAT 1: 700 Q41 V44 Verified score

Posts: 7

Kudos: 0

09 May 2014, 06:46

Kudos

Bookmarks

Invited for an interview. Looking forward to it. Glad my first MBA application worked well so far, hope not to have to do another as I would happily accept a place at Cambridge.

amitasagar23

Joined: 05 Nov 2013

Last visit: 11 Feb 2018

Posts: 12

Own Kudos:

Given Kudos: 4

Schools: HEC '15 Cambridge

Posts: 12

Kudos: 81

09 May 2014, 07:45

Kudos

Bookmarks

SirSteve0

Invited for an interview. Looking forward to it. Glad my first MBA application worked well so far, hope not to have to do another as I would happily accept a place at Cambridge.

congrats. Pls share your profile..all the best

Anuradha2013

Joined: 21 Apr 2013

Last visit: 25 Jun 2014

Posts: 3

Schools: Cambridge'16

Posts: 3

Kudos: 0

09 May 2014, 08:16

Kudos

Bookmarks

SirSteve0

Invited for an interview. Looking forward to it. Glad my first MBA application worked well so far, hope not to have to do another as I would happily accept a place at Cambridge.

Congrats! Steve. When is the interview, this month or June? Will it be a face-to-face or through Skype?

SirSteve0

Joined: 14 Jan 2014

Last visit: 03 Jan 2015

Posts: 7

Schools: IMD '16 (WD) INSEAD Jan '15 (A) Cambridge (A$)

GMAT 1: 700 Q41 V44 Verified score

Schools: IMD '16 (WD) INSEAD Jan '15 (A) Cambridge (A$)

GMAT 1: 700 Q41 V44 Verified score

Posts: 7

Kudos: 0

09 May 2014, 08:39

Kudos

Bookmarks

Anuradha2013

Congrats! Steve. When is the interview, this month or June? Will it be a face-to-face or through Skype?

June 9 (that date can also be found somewhere on their website) face-to-face, but they also seem to offer a telephone interview option on June 6.

newsCambridge

Joined: 22 Nov 2013

Last visit: -

Posts: 229

Own Kudos:

Posts: 229

Kudos: 6

03 Jun 2014, 04:00

Kudos

Bookmarks

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: Women are not the problem.

Last week, the Women in Business Special Interest Group (SIG) organised a talk by Smaranda Gosa-Mensing, Professional Development Manager and Head of Learning UK at McKinsey. She talked about McKinsey’s Centered Leadership model and how it can apply to individuals and organisations. You can hear a podcastthat two of our MBAs did with Smaranda, who was also kind enough to host a workshop for some of our students after her talk.

Listening to the podcast and her talk, I was struck by one statistic that she mentioned. Most corporate boards perform better if they have three or more women on their boards. One woman is not enough to change behaviour because, like it or not, a sizeable majority, including other women, would dismiss this as tokenism. Three is a threshold number because it usually represents 30% of a board, and at that point other women begin to think that there is a career path for them to senior management levels.

This got me thinking about women in MBA programs. Women make up just under 30% of the Cambridge MBA, a statistic that is similar in other European schools. Most US schools are above 40%. Over the years, we have tried various initiatives to increase the number of women applicants and students but we seem to be stuck at our current level.

When I first joined CJBS, there was a prevailing theory about why we had a lower percentage of women students compared to US schools. Our program was for students with more years of work experience and most women would be at the stage of their careers where they might be thinking of having children and hence taking on an MBA was not a priority. But Smaranda produced another statistic which cast doubts over this theory. According to her, 65% of women were having children after the age of 35. Now it didn’t occur to me at the time to clarify this statistic with her but I assume she meant 65% of women professionals or maybe women in McKinsey. Even if we assume that it is 65% of women who work in McKinsey or similar type of organisations, that still means that at 29 or 30, which is the average age of our Cambridge MBAs, many women in our target group are not thinking about having children yet.

I wonder whether a better theory is that most men find it difficult to give up their career for a year to accompany their wife on her full-time MBA. That the thought of taking a year off corporate life, and for some spending most of the day with their young kids while their wife is in class, is a terrifying idea. And yet, many women make that choice when their husbands take a full-time MBA. So maybe it husbands in general who are the problem and not women.

Of course, this is just a theory and there are exceptions even in the Cambridge MBA. And I won’t even pretend to have any solutions but I am keen to hear from people whether they agree with this hypothesis or whether they have any other suggestions.

This Blog post was imported into the forum automatically. We hope you found it helpful. Please use the Kudos button if you did, or please PM/DM me if you found it disruptive and I will take care of it. -BB

cssrikanthca

Joined: 23 Jul 2013

Last visit: 23 Jun 2015

Posts: 39

Concentration: Strategy, General Management

Schools: ESADE '16 (S) Oxford Cambridge (S) Rotman '16 (S) Anderson '16 (S)

GMAT 1: 620 Q42 V33 Verified score

Schools: ESADE '16 (S) Oxford Cambridge (S) Rotman '16 (S) Anderson '16 (S)

GMAT 1: 620 Q42 V33 Verified score

Posts: 39

Kudos: 0

10 Jun 2014, 08:40

Kudos

Bookmarks

SirSteve0

Anuradha2013

Congrats! Steve. When is the interview, this month or June? Will it be a face-to-face or through Skype?

June 9 (that date can also be found somewhere on their website) face-to-face, but they also seem to offer a telephone interview option on June 6.

Congrats Steve.

I have applied on 12th May 2014 ( Part of the case by case basis applications extended till June 30,2014). Did anybody get an invite from that round or the last round of April 30th.

newsCambridge

Joined: 22 Nov 2013

Last visit: -

Posts: 229

Own Kudos:

[1]

Posts: 229

Kudos: 6

[1]

12 Jun 2014, 20:00

Kudos

Bookmarks

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: When rankings get mixed with commercial concerns

I’ve recently sent in the inputs needed for the Business Week MBA survey and although the results won’t be published for several months, there has already been some controversy.

I won’t go into all the details but there were several questions in the student survey that some felt were inappropriate and offensive. There were questions about how much alcohol was consumed in a typical week and whether the school was a good environment for casual dating. At the very least, most people would question the validity of such questions in an MBA survey. Following objections by some business schools, Business Week has removed those questions. For more information about the controversy. you can read this article on the Poets and Quants website.

I wasn’t one of the school officials who complained to BW and I haven’t asked them for their position on why these questions were included in the first place but I can guess that the questions would have been used as a basis for other articles that Business Week could run. It isn’t the most ideal of situations but we have to remember that the people who conduct these rankings are commercial interests who are able to gain more advertising revenue if they can attract more readers. And nothing attracts MBA candidates like rankings or stories about rankings. My colleague at CJBS, Simon Taylor who is also the Director of the Masters in Finance programme, shared similar thoughts in his blog post.

I share the unease that Poets and Quants has with the fact that survey questions are removed in the middle of a survey and also the more serious charge that the methodology for the employer survey is still evolving and will depend largely on the sample size for the employer contacts.

However, I think it is only fair to the new Business Week team that people should know that these issues did not just crop up with this year’s ranking. I remember that there were issues in the last ranking held two years ago where there was an error in the calculations that was only corrected after the survey results were published. There were also questions then about the amount of time classmates spent sleeping in class (CJBS made the top 5 in that list, which I would like to think is due to how hard we work our students, but I could be wrong on this point). Most troubling of all is that while 45% of the BW survey relies on employer inputs, there were just 300 employer responses to the last survey. This is a very small sample size when one considers that more than 100 schools participate in the BW survey. I also recall that there were changes to the employer survey methodology in that year, brought about possibly because of the small sample, to depress the weightage of some employers who hired from regional universities.

The bottom-line of all this is a point that I have been making for some time. Rankings are important but imperfect. They should be just one data-point that a candidate uses in determining which school to apply to. It is more important to apply some of the analytical skills that MBAs are supposed to have and examine the data with a critical eye, understand what the data is telling you, understand what the data is not telling you, and make your own decisions.

newsCambridge

Joined: 22 Nov 2013

Last visit: -

Posts: 229

Own Kudos:

Posts: 229

Kudos: 6

17 Jun 2014, 10:00

Kudos

Bookmarks

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: Look before you leap — the FT’s headline not mine

I recently had the pleasure of participating in an interview with the FT Business Education editor Della Bradshaw about MBAs applying to programmes outside their home country. I don’t do this often and I find it terribly uncomfortable watching myself on video. I keep asking myself why didn’t someone tell me that my glasses look like they were about to slip off my nose?

On a more serious note, I had prepared several talking points but I couldn’t find the opportunity to raise these issues during the interview. The most important point that I had wanted to make was those students who were applying to an overseas MBA should start building a network in their home country even before they leave for their MBA. This means talking to your contacts, telling them that you will be leaving for an MBA, explaining your motivations for an MBA and giving them some idea of what you want to do after your MBA. Whether or not you return to your home country post-MBA, it is important to keep your home network apprised of developments on your end. They will then be able to help you look for opportunities, give you advice, or introduce you to the right people.

So remember, don’t wait till you start your MBA to build your network.

newsCambridge

Joined: 22 Nov 2013

Last visit: -

Posts: 229

Own Kudos:

Posts: 229

Kudos: 6

22 Jul 2014, 08:00

Kudos

Bookmarks

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: TOEFL, admissions, visas.

We have reversed a decision made three months ago regarding acceptance of TOEFL as a means of demonstrating English proficiency. We are essentially accepting TOEFL again.

This U-turn is the result of the confusion that sudden changes to the visa regime can create. Here is the sequence of events. Earlier this year, a TV programme exposed the procedural abuses that happened in a TOEIC (another language test) testing centre in the UK. The UK Government rightly investigated the incident and asked ETS, the test-provider, to suspend all TOEIC and TOEFL tests in the UK pending the results of the investigation. When the investigation was completed in April, ETS decided not to renew its licence with the UK Border Force and that meant that TOEFL tests were no longer available in the UK, even though the investigation had not revealed any breakdown in security processes for TOEFL tests. In the wake of that decision, it wasn’t entirely clear what the impact was on non-EU student visas as many Universities used TOEFL as a means of language assessment.

While we run a separate admissions process from the University, we try to make sure that our standards are aligned to a great degree. So the business school adopted the University’s guidance that TOEFL would continue to be accepted for the majority of the students who were applying for the September 2014 class. There was a small group who had taken TOEFL and were required to undergo a separate language assessment but the impact was small. For admissions after September 2014, the University decided that TOEFL would not be accepted and we followed suit.

With the benefit of some time to assess the issue of language assessment, the University has decided to accept TOEFL again so long as candidates are interviewed as part of the admissions process. This is not an issue for the business school as all our students are interviewed by members of faculty. Essentially, we are back in the situation pre-February 2014.

This is good news because many of our students are non-EU students who did not study in one of the small group of countries that have an exemption from the UK Visas and Immigration. At the same time, I am reassured that the TOEFL test process is still robust as it was not implicated in the UK government investigation. While the confusing U-turn would not have helped our efforts in terms of marketing the Cambridge MBA, I am hopeful that the relative early timing of this change in the admissions cycle means that we have time to get the message out to our candidate pool.

On a last note, I was reflecting whether we should have just ignored the furore about ETS and continued to accept TOEFL. Many of our students sit for TOEFL and it was not a painless decision to take. For that matter, some UK schools took this stand and never even made any changes to their website regarding TOEFL throughout this entire saga. But I think we did the right thing. We have to be upfront with our candidate pool about changes to the visa regime. We cannot put students in a position where they could be at an advanced stage of moving to the UK only to find that their visas were in jeopardy.

newsCambridge

Joined: 22 Nov 2013

Last visit: -

Posts: 229

Own Kudos:

Posts: 229

Kudos: 6

01 Aug 2014, 07:00

Kudos

Bookmarks

FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: What we have done with what I have learnt at GMAC 2014 Conference

In June this year, I attended the GMAC (GMAC is the body that develops and conducts the GMAT) Annual Industry Conference in Baltimore. This was the first conference I attended in the last two years, having passed up the opportunity in the past because I felt the topics had become a bit stale.

I attended this year because I was interested to hear what the new CEO of GMAC, Sangeet Chowfla, had to say. Sangeet had taken over a year ago and it was refreshing to hear his perspectives, as an erstwhile outsider to business education, on the challenges that GMAC and business schools face. He covered a lot of ground during his address to member schools and I will only write about one theme that he highlighted which resonated with some of my thinking.

Sangeet pointed out that while GMAT test taking volumes were still high, the numbers were small if one defined the business education market more broadly. In regions such as Africa, where there is a fast-growing young demographic plus rising incomes and the emergence of a middle-class, GMAT test taking volume is very low. He used the theme of accessibility to tie this with other observations that he had made. Coming from a software background, he was struck when he first joined GMAC at the lack of uniform standards in business school admissions. Every school had a different application form. Sangeet pointed out that in the software industry, companies competed with each other fiercely for business but also wanted a common set of standards so that consumers would face lower switching costs.

I admit that I had never thought of this before but it made so much sense if I had only adopted a more customer-focused perspective in reviewing our application processes. Most of our candidates apply to more than one school and it becomes a huge challenge to complete more than one application. Ideally, we could have the same essay questions across the main schools that our applicant pool applies to but that is probably a bridge too far in the foreseeable future.

However, one thing we have done is change the references section of our application. Until this year, all applicants had to submit a supervisor reference and a peer reference. We included a peer reference to see how candidates perform in teams as collaboration is a key value that we look for in our students. Unfortunately, almost all peer references are invariably glowing with most candidates being rated as excellent in a whole range of categories. So from now on, we will not require the peer reference because it wasn’t giving us enough information to differentiate candidates. In addition, while we would still require the supervisor reference, we now allow supervisors to submit references that they have written for the particular candidate but for a different school. This way, a candidate who is applying to us and other schools that require a supervisor reference does not need to ask his or her supervisor to write a special reference just for us. The candidate can just re-use a reference that was written for another school. Our thinking is that most schools ask for almost the same information. We still provide a template for those supervisors who prefer to tailor their reference to the Cambridge MBA context.

One thing I should point out is that we are not dumbing down the application process. The standards will remain high. But what we are doing is paring down the application to the essential parts that give us insights into a candidate; and improving the applicant journey by taking some tentative steps to harmonise some processes with other schools. My team and I will continue to scrutinise applications with the same level of rigour and so will our faculty interviewers.

Founder

Joined: 04 Dec 2002

Last visit: 09 May 2026

Posts: 43,258

Own Kudos:

83,820

Given Kudos: 24,695

Location: United States

GMAT 1: 750 Q49 V42 Verified score

GPA: 3

Products:

Expert

Expert reply

GMAT 1: 750 Q49 V42 Verified score

Posts: 43,258

Kudos: 83,820

10 Jul 2023, 09:54

Kudos

Bookmarks

Archived Cambridge Judge Discussion

Hi there,

You've stumbled upon an old discussion from our Cambridge Judge Forum that's now outdated and has been archived. No more replies are possible here.

Interested in current discussions? Feel free to dive into our dedicated Cambridge Judge Forum for all fresh things related to the Cambridge Judge MBA program.

Thank you for understanding, and happy exploring!