借用一下兄弟的地盘，搭个电梯 ------------------------------------------------------------- 深夜转帖：这是我在BW上看到的Tuck Admissions head Dawna Clarke的文章（06年10月的，不知道是不是toooooold，不过是我可以在公开新闻媒体上找到的最近的一次公开访谈了），在此转载，sorry有点长(大家也许可以针对自己感兴趣的问题看相应的段落）。。。盼望大家讨论what's the indication for Chinese applicants，尤其盼望tuckier可以针对AD的分析分享一下你们的想法 Tips for Taking on Tuck
Dawna Clarke
Dartmouth
Dawna Clarke just completed her first full year as director of MBA Admissions at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, but she's no stranger to the MBA admissions arena. Clarke came to Tuck after 15 years in the admit office at the University of Virginia's Darden
School—the last five as director of admissions. Prior to that, she served as associate director of admissions at University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler.
Clarke says well-developed communication and interpersonal skills are both important to recruiters and vital to success at Tuck. That's why Tuck places such a heavy emphasis on the interview component of the admissions process, she says—those so-called "soft skills" are harder to gauge from the written application.
Another plus in Clarke's book: International experience, which she says is becoming increasingly important in the recruiting process. Clarke spoke recently to BusinessWeek.com reporter Kerry Miller. An edited excerpt of their conversation follows.
In a nutshell, who's the ideal Tuck student?
We really pride ourselves on the fact that the admissions process is not formulaic. Because we're the general management program, there's not necessarily a background that we're looking for. We want people from lots of different functional areas, geographic areas, and industries. This year, 34% of our students are international, and there are about 25 different countries represented between the first and second year. We have students from lots of different industries—from health care, education, the Peace Corps, nonprofits—it's not just people from finance and consulting.
Overall, though, we're looking for positive people who are team players and have potential to be leaders. The students we admit have strong interpersonal skills, they're bright, they have strong analytical skills, they're strong communicators, and they have a capacity to succeed in a rigorous academic program. Over the years, Tuck has gotten great feedback from recruiters about the type of people they accept as well as the type of results that they produce, and I think the school is really proud of that.
Dean Danos has been pretty firm about not wanting candidates with fewer than two years of work experience unless they're applying for the combined MD/MBA (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/7/07, "B-Schools: You Don't Have to Wait"). Is that a policy that's likely to change anytime soon?
I haven't gotten any directive on that at all. Our average age did go down this year, from 29 to 28, and it's possible that it will come down again, but we still really like to see at least two years of work experience. So I don't anticipate that that policy will change anytime soon.
Have there been any other changes this year in the demographic makeup of the class?
Well, slight changes. This year, we have the highest percentage of international students that we've ever had in Tuck's history. Women increased to 33%, which was the highest percentage of women we've had in Tuck's history as well. And we're really shooting for a better balance among our international students. We're aiming for a pretty equal balance between Latin American students, European students, and Asian students, and we still have some Canadians in there as well, given our proximity to Canada.
Why is recruiting international students so important to Tuck?
We believe here that in order to be an international school, we need to recruit strong international students from all over the world who can help educate students on global issues and then will go back to their countries ultimately and represent Tuck in their home countries. But one area of emphasis that we're going to increase slightly is that we would like to see more domestic students who also have international experience.
That's not an admissions requirement, but if we're going to be a global school, the administration feels strongly you have to have a global curriculum, you have to have faculty members who have international expertise, and that it's really healthy for the future of the school to have a robust international-student population, especially as things have become more international in general.
When you say you want to see more students with international experience, what does that include—working, studying abroad?
Exactly. If they've had an opportunity to travel abroad, work abroad, to study abroad, to study a foreign language or two foreign languages, to go on an exchange program, to go on a global consultancy prior to coming to Tuck, that's all relevant.
One area that we're really emphasizing is we really want students to expand their horizons and gain more international experience while they're here, because we're hearing strongly from recruiters that it's becoming a very important criterion for them. They want to see that people have cultural sensitivity and have had some cross-cultural experiences. I think it's [misleading to say] that the only people who can offer international experience are international students.
Can you take me through the life cycle of an application once it arrives at the admissions office?
One change that I've made to the process is that I read every single application after they've been read twice. I feel very strongly that I should be heavily involved in reading and compiling the class, so I do evaluate. So, an applicant applies. The application, when it's complete, is sent out for a first read, and every application is read independently. We highly recommend an interview, but you don't have to have submitted your application yet to have the interview.
One thing I love about our process is the amount of time that goes into each individual application. Every application is read independently by two members of the admissions committee. We don't use students in the process of evaluating written applications. I'll make a final decision, when I can, and that decision may be to admit someone, to wait-list them, to deny them admission. Or it may go to the admissions committee, and at the end of each round, we will talk about those applications. At that point, there are a couple of decisions that can be made. For example, if we have a candidate who hasn't done a lot of quantitative work but otherwise really shines, we have what are called offers of contingencies.
We may ask them to take a class or two, or we may ask them to come to one of our pre-enrollment programs to beef up their quantitative skills [see BusinessWeek.com, 10/19/06, "Tuck's Intensive Numbers Crunch"].
What are some common mistakes that candidates make in their applications?
I think the most common mistake is that sometimes when people write their essays they will take direct quotes from our Web site or viewbook, or they will start an essay off with something like, "According to Thomas Jefferson, leadership is…." That might tell us a lot about what the particular person that you're quoting thinks about leadership, but we really want to know about what the applicant has to say.
Quoting from viewbooks or the Web site or quoting from other people isn't particularly compelling, because we're really trying to get to know the applicants themselves. We want to see that they have done their research, but not to the point that they need to quote the brochure.
Another common mistake is making very broad, sweeping statements like, for example, "I'm a strong team player." It's much more compelling when they use an anecdote or a vignette or an example. And tell your recommenders to do that as well. Some applicants make broad, sweeping statements but don't necessarily substantiate them.
So some of the best recommenders are not the ones that say this person is bright and a born leader and gets along with everyone, but ones that really write some stories, giving examples how this person really shined in the workplace and stood out. It's also really common to see people cut and paste their essays. Almost every day we'll see something like, "the Hanover location, the curriculum, the faculty, that's why Harvard's my top choice." And they're applying to Tuck.
I would also say it's important to accentuate your strengths, not your weaknesses. Sometimes in an interview or in an essay, people will use that time to talk about a weakness. So they may, in an essay or interview, draw attention to the fact that they don't do well on standardized tests and will talk about why they don't do well on standardized tests. I would say in the interview in particular, when you only have half an hour or 45 minutes, you really want to accentuate your strengths and not use the majority of that time to draw attention to your weaknesses.
One of the essay questions this year is, "Discuss the most difficult constructive criticism or feedback you have received." How do you accentuate the positive in an essay like that?
In that essay, we're trying to get a sense of people's maturity level and sense of self-improvement. I think all of us hopefully have received constructive criticism in the past and hopefully have some examples of how we've taken that to improve ourselves, whether it's personally or professionally.
Going to a top business school is going to be a challenging experience, and while it's generally a positive experience in terms of building self-confidence, there are times when you're going to get constructive criticism that might be hard to hear. So, I think it can be a positive in terms of, "I got the feedback and initially it might have been difficult to accept, but I realized that it was true. And here are the actionable steps that I took to improve in this arena."
Can you explain what the interview process is like?
People have several options in terms of interviews. The majority of our interviews are conducted here at Tuck, in person. We think that's really important for both our benefit as well as the applicant's benefit, because they can come and see Hanover and see Dartmouth and visit Tuck. And when they come for an interview, we hook them up with a student host. They go to lunch. They have an information session. They go on a tour, and they have their interviews. So we try to make it very well worth their while.
Interviews are conducted by both members of the admissions committee as well as second-year students. So we have second-year students who go through a selection process, and are chosen and trained pretty extensively. We meet with them occasionally. We're meeting with them on Wednesday night to give them some feedback on how they're doing and give them updates on trends we're seeing, and so on and so forth.
Anybody who wants an interview can come to Tuck, on a first-come, first-served basis. If you don't come, we will interview the strongest candidates in each round by invitation. If an applicant isn't able to come to Tuck—and there are many circumstances when people are not—what we'll do is review the application first for a pre-screen to see if an interview is necessary, and we will arrange an interview with an alum, if necessary.
In some cases, we'll do phone interviews. Sometimes we travel internationally or in the country. If one of us is going to be in a certain location, we'll usually open up some interview spots when we're on the road, for people who have been invited.
Are the interviews hard to do without having the applicant's file in front of you?
We do require a résumé. Some schools I know don't, but we do ask a candidate to submit a résumé in advance. We don't look at the application in advance intentionally, and one reason is logistical. We just had our first deadline in October. Well, we had been open for two months interviewing candidates who were hoping to apply for the October deadline. So if we were to require that their application was here, we would have to wait until after October to even begin those interviews, and we have about 30 visitors a day, five days a week.
The other, more important reason we don't look at the application part beforehand is in fairness to the applicant. I think it's better for us to not know what their GMAT score is and not know what their references say, because as much as we've all gone through extensive training, we all are human, and I don't want a person's GMAT score to influence what an interviewer has to say about someone. For example, if I see that somebody has a 760, there's a potential for me to say, "Oh, this is such a great candidate," and really to focus on the strength of that candidate. Likewise, there might be a candidate who really shines interpersonally and maybe their GMAT score is a little bit below average, but you want to give them an opportunity to shine without us knowing what their GMAT score is or what their references have to say. If their references point us in a certain direction, you might hone in on that area a little bit more than doing the interview relatively blind.
Do you have any advice for applicants on how to prepare for the interviews?
I would recommend that people approach their interview with a strategy. When candidates are applying to Tuck, so many of them are so bright and so impressive, and there are probably 50 things that they would love to talk to us about in their interview. But there's limited time, and I would recommend that they spend some time thinking about five of the top skills, experiences, or accomplishments that they most want to emphasize.
I would literally write a list of everything that you're proud of before your interview and then cut it in half, and cut it in half again and cut it in half again, until you say, "You know what? If I have limited time, here are the five points I'm really hoping to get across in this interview." With each of those five bullet points come up with some examples and substantiate them.
Another piece of advice is to do research on the school. A lot of schools will talk about the fact that they're looking for fit, and basically what that means is that they're looking for people who've done their research and are going about this decision using some insight and good judgment about what it is that they're looking for and what that school has to offer. There are so many good schools out there, and what you want to do is convince your interviewer or your admissions committee that that school is a good bridge between your past and your future plans.
The best way to make a compelling case is to really show that you've done your research and that you know what the school has to offer and what you have to offer the school.
When you're talking about fit, for a lot of applicants I'm sure the location is a big piece of that. You've worked at Darden, in Charlottesville, and UNC at Chapel Hill, as well as Tuck. Are there distinct advantages of being in a smaller town such as Hanover, as opposed to being in a big city like New York or Chicago?
Well, obviously both have advantages, and some people are more comfortable in a big city. I see advantages here. This is a really charming, safe, New England town that offers a lot to do. You have the best of both worlds. Dartmouth owns its own kayak and canoe club. Dartmouth owns its own ski way.
It's the only college in the country that owns both of those. So there's a lot of hiking. You have the White Mountains, and you can go on day trips to Vermont and Maine and things like that. And there's a lot that goes on here culturally, as well. I think another advantage of being in a smaller place is you can really focus on your studies and your classmates.
One of the things that struck me as really special about Tuck is the school spirit here—and I do think it has something to do with the location. Tuck has residence halls, and it's one of only a couple top MBA programs that are residential. A lot of the single students live in a dorm their first year, but there's a lot of off-campus housing within walking distance of Tuck.
There's married student housing, too. I think bonding goes on when you're attending a residential school where people don't disperse into a big city on the weekends. They're doing things together, and making a lot of fun and being pretty creative in terms of some of the annual celebrations that take place on weekends.
You mentioned that Tuck offers married housing. Do you have other services for families?
Tuck has a pretty strong reputation for being very family-friendly. There are many jobs available, including several seasonal positions in the admissions office, just to make it easier for students who are coming with spouses. We also have a very, very active partners association here that's funded by the school. They don't have to be married—it could be husband-wife, domestic partner, girlfriend, whatever. The partners association has everything from social activities to day trips to Vermont to play groups for kids. I think the school does a lot to embrace them in the community, and I think the partners give a lot to the school as well. As a matter of fact, one of the partners was joking with me that the best way to come to Tuck is to be a partner because you get all the advantages at Tuck but you don't have to do all the work. | 
