Admissions Director Q&A: NYU Stern’s Isser Gallogly

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With round two application deadlines fast approaching, we are beginning to wrap up our Admissions Director Q&A Series here at Clear Admit. Today we are pleased to add a recent conversation with Isser
Gallogly, executive director of MBA admissions at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Gallogly understands the MBA and its potential for changing people’s lives first hand. “I am on my third career,” he said. He worked in banking after college and then returned to business school to obtain an MBA as part of a career shift toward marketing. After almost a decade working for Unilever and Loreál, he decided to shift again toward education and academia. “I know how much an MBA has changed my life both personally and professionally, and helping others on that journey seemed to me to be a very gratifying job opportunity,” he said.

Indeed, Gallogly and his staff do seem committed to helping prospective applicants. “We want to be people’s partner in the application process,” he said. To this end, NYU Stern has a range of resources for the prospective applicant in the Applying to Stern section of its website, including admissions directors’ tips and advice, podcasts, interviews with the media and more. You won’t want to miss those or the transcript of our conversation with Gallogly, which follows.

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Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at NYU Stern this coming year?

Isser Gallogly: Well, I have a lot to choose from. I think one of the most interesting things that we’ve been doing lately is a series of Market Pulse events. There is so much going on in the world right now, and we’ve been having panels with our star professors and noted faculty talking about the impact of the financial crisis on the global economy and solutions for the future. .

Really, it’s just part of what you get at NYU Stern. We are a dynamic, plugged-in institution. We really try to stay on the absolute cutting edge of what is happening in the world. What that means is that our students have incredible access to all kinds of people – from the dean of the school, Thomas Cooley, to Professor Nouriel Roubini, who was predicting the current recession a couple of years ago at the IMF, to Professor Ed Altman, a leading expert on corporate distress and default.

We are dynamic, forward looking, innovative, and we change. This was a different year, and in different years you do different things. That said, I could definitely see the Market Pulse events becoming an ongoing series. They have been so successful – some have been standing room only – and it’s very likely they will be continued over the course of next year. Obviously we are all hopeful that the economy will change for the better, but especially given current conditions, I think this new addition has been an exciting and valuable one for both Stern and the business community at large.

[Several portions of the Market Pulse series are available on video on the NYU Stern website. Click here to learn more.]

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CA: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?

IG: There are two big misconceptions when you are an elite business school in New York City. The first is that Stern is a finance-only institution. The second is that the community may not be collaborative. Both of these ideas are not correct.

Of course, we are close to Wall Street and we do have a wonderful finance program, and people certainly come here to pursue careers in the financial sector. But we also have a phenomenal marketing program. In fact, we are ranked number five in research produced among top business schools.

Within marketing we have a great entertainment and marketing focus, and we also have expertise in the area of luxury and retail. On the marketing front, not only will you get to work with CPGs – Colgate, Kraft, Unilever, etc. – but we also have a lot of marketing opportunities with luxury/retail, financial services and pharmaceuticals. At Stern marketing is much broader in its range of industries.

And yet people don’t know as much about a lot of these things at Stern. We also have a wonderful program in entrepreneurship and social enterprise. Really, the list goes on and on. I think if people looked a little deeper, they would see we are very strong across the board.

The second thing that people think when they think of New York – for right or wrong – is that it can be a very aggressive culture. I think the surprise that people get when they experience Stern is that the culture is very collaborative, very diverse and very team based.

We have one of the highest percentages of women, we have people from all over the globe and we have people who bring experience from a range of industries, from investment banking to entertainment to marketing. But as different as they all are, what these people all have in common is that they respect one another and work together. And I think this collaboration is something that people are surprised about when they come to Stern.

So, to reiterate, we are much more than finance, and the culture here is incredibly collaborative. The students here are really down to earth.

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CA: Walk us through the life of an application in your office from an operational standpoint. What happens between the time an applicant clicks ‘submit’ and the time the committee offers a final decision (e.g. how many “reads” does it get, how long is each “read,” who reads it, does the committee convene to discuss it as a group, etc.).

IG: We obviously have three deadlines, but we employ a rolling decisions process, which makes us unlike some other schools that have a round system. We do provide notification deadlines as to when we will get back to you, but typically that’s the latest possible date and we try to get out our decisions as soon as we have them. We recognize that this is an anxious process, and we don’t make people wait unnecessarily.

Our process is holistic and individualist. Everyone gets reviewed by the Admissions Committee and every application is reviewed more than once, so it’s not just a single individual’s decision. And in some cases, the committee will debate considerably. In every case we just try to ensure that everyone gets a full and complete review and is seen from more than one vantage point.

One aspect I think is unique about our process has to do with who’s reviewing the applications. In some schools, students, part-time help or alumni are involved. But at NYU Stern all applications are reviewed by trained admissions professionals who are part of our full-time team. Occasionally we will bring in some help, but even then these are people who have been a part of our team.

The second point is that our interview process is very different than most schools. First of all, the interview is not optional, it is required. Second, the interview is by invitation only. We only do it if we are serious about the application. Between 25 and 30 percent of applicants are invited in for an interview. This means that we are not going to waste anyone’s time.

Almost all of those interviews happen in New York City with one of our admissions professionals. I always tell people that if you are applying to Stern, set aside the time and money to travel to New York and interview. We take it very seriously.

Our interviews are conducted almost exclusively by trained, professional admissions staff – individuals who are trained assessors of talent. We rarely have students or alumni conduct our admissions interviews – we think our students and alumni are terrific, but most of them are not professional interviewers. So our staff really invests the time to meet each candidate individually in the process. I do interviews myself.

Furthermore, the interview is not blind. The interview is 30 minutes long, and we are not going to waste people’s time by asking them to tell us why they want to go to business school. We’ve already asked that in the application. We want candidates to take it to the next level in the interview. At the same time, these interviews are conversational, they are not interrogation.

Last year our selectivity was 14 percent, making us more selective than most other business schools in the world. So, we want to make sure that we are screening not only on paper but in person as well. I think anyone who has done a job interview has seen some wonderful resumes and then been surprised during the interview that the person was somewhat different than he or she appeared on paper.

It is our responsibility in admissions to make sure that the quality of the Stern network is as high as possible, which is why we have trained professionals conducting all of our interviews with candidates. It’s the only way we feel we can ensure the consistent high quality of students at Stern.

Really, though, it’s in the benefit of the applicant. The applicants typically like the opportunity to have 30 minutes speaking directly to a member of the Admissions Committee. This is their chance to make their case in person.

Not only do we want to make sure that applicants are the right fit for us, we want to make sure we are the right fit for them. When they come to visit Stern as part of the interview they can have lunch with a student, visit a class, and have a tour of the school. All this helps them make an informed decision as to where to attend.

So our approach to the interview is unique and a bit different – but we think that this special part of our process really does get us the best possible talent.

Getting back to the application process as a whole, people have three notification possibilities. There is the invitation for an interview, the waitlist or the one no one wants, which of course is to be denied.

After a candidate goes through the interview, we typically get back to them within three weeks. Last year we admitted between 50 and 60 percent of those who were interviewed.

In terms of how we notify candidates of our decisions, we do almost all of it with an online status check. This allows applicants to see where they are in our process 24/7. When people’s status does change, we also send them an email.

When people are admitted we do try to have the person who conducted the interview give them a congratulatory call. Those are special calls to make. Every once in a while, these calls catch people by surprise, but for the most part we find that candidates stay pretty much on top of their online status – they watch that pretty closely.

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CA: How does your team approach the essay portion of the application specifically? What are you looking for as you read the essays? Are there common mistakes that applicants should try to avoid? One key thing they should keep in mind as they sit down to write them?

IG: There are obviously a lot of dos and don’ts. But one of the most important dos is to answer the question asked. In one of our essay questions, we ask about applicants’ short-term and long-term goals. But we find that a lot of people do not explicitly state both a short- and long-term goal. The question asks for this explicitly, so to answer it is an important thing.

Another piece of advice I would share is that applicants should take their time to choose their schools carefully and apply to only the schools they would be thrilled to be admitted to. Then, they should take the time to customize their essays specifically to those schools and to the questions they ask.

Do not just try to use the same essays to answer different questions. Take the time to really answer the question asked. That’s so much easier to do when you have fewer essays to write because you’ve done your homework in advance and know where you want to go.

Also, do your spell check. Now, a typo is not an automatic disqualification, because we know people are human and make mistakes. But let’s just say this: It certainly doesn’t look good. When your essay is only 500 words long, to have one of those words be that glaringly off, it’s just not ideal.

When we are reading the essays, we are really looking to make sure that people have thought things through, have clear direction and have passion. A lot of people are writing what they think you want to hear. But what we really want to hear is what they are dying to say.

People spend too much time thinking about how to get into business school and not enough time thinking, “Is business school really right for me and how will it help my career both in the short run and in the long run?” Think about that first and then the essay is going to be really easy because you will have done your homework.

Sometimes people just think, “I’m really not happy doing what I’m doing now and I might be happier in this area so I’ll just go to business school.” But the ones who are most successful in business school and in life are the ones who have taken good stock of who they are, what they want and how business school will help them achieve their goals and dreams.