For the out-of-state applicants who are unable to come to campus, are those phone interviews or alumni interviews?
We can do a number of different things. The admissions officers travel all around the world, meeting with prospective students, so it is often the case that we will fly out to interview people. That's one method. Certainly, we use alumni to interview people and, as a last resort, we go with the phone interviews. It's always better to have the face-to-face interaction, but if necessary, the phone interview will suffice.
Is there any advantage or disadvantage to applicants as far as coming to meet you in person versus the alumni interviews?
There's no advantage or disadvantage when we're talking about how it will impact the admissions decision, but I think there is an advantage to visiting campus for the applicant. It's very important for applicants, if they can, to visit all the schools they're interested in. They should meet with current students, talk to staff, talk to faculty, maybe sit in on classes, get a feel for the place, because this is a big decision.
It's very easy to look at websites and read what we say about our school, but I think that sort of "in the moment" experience of visiting a classroom can't be replicated by what you read on the website. It's an advantage to them because they'll be more informed about whether or not it's a good fit for them.
Do you have any programs targeted to specific population groups, such as women or minorities?
Yes. In, fact last weekend we held our annual Diversity Weekend, and that is essentially a weekend that targets various underrepresented minority groups – namely African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American applicants.
We belong to something called the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, which is a group of universities and companies that are specifically interested in working more of these underrepresented minority groups – not only into American business schools, but into American business. So we have a very vested interest in trying to do the best job we can to bring these particular underrepresented populations into our school.
We actually do spend a lot of time with these folks.
We also belong to the Forté Foundation. We are actually the most recent member, I believe, of that organization.
Similarly, this looks to bring more women into U.S. business schools and into corporate America. So not only do we market to these particular groups, but we also have scholarship money allocated.
There is one other group that we heavily market to, and that is military or ex-military people. We have funding set aside for those applicants as well and we do a lot of on-the-road recruiting to different conferences for them.
What do you advise a wait-listed applicant to do?
A wait-listed applicant should contact the school to try to determine whether or not there is anything that he or she can do to bolster their application. Oftentimes a simple conversation with an admissions officer can lead someone to do certain things that will make their application much stronger.
There are a lot of reasons why a person might be wait-listed, and sometimes an applicant has control over those things and sometimes he or she doesn't. I would say contact the admissions office. It will, at a minimum, demonstrate that the person has shown initiative and that the person has shown continued interest in not only getting the MBA degree, but also in that particular school.
And I think there has to be some assessment on the applicant's part, to look over what they submitted to make sure that they feel they submitted the strongest possible application. Finally, different schools have different policies, so they may ask for additional information. They might ask for an interview or even a second or third interview; it just depends on the school.
How was the recruiting season last year?
In terms of the internship search, 100 per cent of the students who were looking for internships got them. It is looking like this is a perfect time to be getting an MBA. We look at a lot of data and it appears that the economy, at least for MBA students, is on the upswing. I expect that we're going to see more employers visiting our campus,
and more employers in general looking for MBA students. I think the prospects for their employment, both for internships and post-MBA, look quite promising.
What types of companies recruit at Olin?
It's all over the map. We have a lot of students going into the three areas that you would expect MBA students to go into, which are finance, marketing, and consulting.
So we get major corporations, but we also get the smaller entities as well. Because of our size, what you end up finding at Olin is that it's not the case that one company is going to extend 10 offers. What happens is, through this very personalized job search, we get a lot of companies offering one or two positions.
Is there anything else that you want to highlight about the Olin MBA?
I think one thing that people don't know a lot about is St. Louis, so we really are trying to attract people who are coming from a lot of different destinations. It's really important for students to try to do as much in-depth research as they can, instead of just relying on what they might see in print or on the Web.
I would also say that there's no perfect MBA applicant in the sense that
we're not looking for an individual with X, Y, or Z-specific characteristics. We take people from across a range of industries and functional areas,
and a range of educational backgrounds. And a lot of people who go to business school don't necessarily have business as an undergraduate background.
They might not even be, strictly speaking, business people.
What we're looking for are people who have been good in whatever they've chosen to do, whether that's academically or professionally, because that tends to be the leading indicator for us about how they will do down the road when they're into their careers.
Page
1
2
3
4
