I would just like to give you some insights from the Oxford MBA open day that I attended last week.
My start to the day was a bit tricky as I missed the early train from London to Oxford and the "on-time" train was running 15 Mins late. But I got there just in the nick of time and was amongst the last batch of people to sign in. For some reason, SBS's superb marketing team had a slip up - they had spelt my last name incorrectly and used it as my first name. So my name infact read (duddybuff) - go figure. A minor gaffe, however all day I had to explain to other students and staff what my name really was when they kept calling me duddy.
Jokes aside - The day was kicked off by the meet and greet before hand, where I met greekoak. It was awesome to put a face to a name!
A presentation from the adcom followed shortly after. Interestingly they said last year they got 20% more applications than the year before and this year in R1, applications were about 15% up. Also interesting they said that they interview about 60% of applicants and "about the same" percentage get an admit from the interviewed applicants. So I guess an admit % of 36% roughly.
Next was a lecture sit-in. Greenoak and I sat in on the Decision Science lecture. I felt that the start of the lecture was going rather slowly. The lecturer was taking a while to come to conclusions while a few students were checking emails and surfing facebook. I figured that this was a core class and he needed to make sure that he doesn't rush through the probability concepts akin to "decision making". He did however do a good job in keeping the class entertained, despite the dry subject matter. The last half of the class was VERY interesting when he introduced robust business concepts to the mathematical material. Where this class lacked in comparison to the lecture I sat in on in February, was the class interaction. There wasn't much of it. I feel that this was the case purely because of the subject matter.
After the class we got to meet a student panel. Many of the questions directed at the students were about the collegiate student life. If you guys have specific questions about this let me know, as I feel many of the answers were the same as those that can be seen on many Oxford MBA blogs.
At lunch we got to mix and mingle with some of these students and I took the opportunity to ask a couple of specific questions to a student from Romania.
After the lunch session, we got a presentation from the MBA director (an ex-Wharton professor). I was impressed by this guy, not because of what he had to say (standard MBA brochure type presentation), but I found him very engaging. I also noticed he was pushing the Oxford Advantage of it's collegiate atmosphere heavily.
The next session was a 30 min presentation by the Career Services director. He was a new hire into the business school and came from a Head of Recruiting position for Barclays Capital. So obviously he knew a thing or two about MBA recruiting into the financial services sector. He basically said that you have to be extremely lucky as a MBA applicant to get a job at IBs at the moment - something obvious but also scary. Next was the famous "percent of the class with job offers 3 months after graduation". After the dizzy mid-90 percentile figures of yesteryear, he said this year will be down but it was too early for this year's figures. The next thing he said was shocking. He compared this year with 2002 when this stat was 73% in the middle of the dot com burst. He said that this year 73% will be optimistic. Goodluck to all graduating in 2008 and 2009. I hope it improves as much as anyone.
Then came a tour of the SBS campus. A modern and comfortable campus it is with plenty of formal and informal spaces.
The day finished as it had begun. The trains were running rather late and I reached home very late and crashed pondering about my R2 app.
-duddy