2011 Michigan Ross MBA Admissions Q&A with Soojin & Jonathan

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Linda Abraham: Hello. My name is Linda Abraham. I am the founder of Accepted.com and the moderator of today’s chat. First I want to welcome all applicants to the Q&A today, and I want to congratulate you for taking the time to learn more about Michigan Ross School of Business. It is critical to your decision making process and your admission chances that you know as much as you can about the schools you are applying to. Being here today allows you to ask experts about this top business school. I also want to give a special welcome to Soojin Kwon Koh, Director of Admissions, and to Jonathan Fuller, Senior Associate Director of Admissions at Ross. I am going to take advantage of my position as moderator and ask Soojin and Jonathan what's new at Ross.

Soojin Kwon Koh: Thanks everyone for joining us. I am very excited to talk with all of you, and thank you for doing your research on the Ross School of Business. Some of you may have heard about our latest venture fund that we've launched, the third of our student lead venture funds, called the Social Venture Fund. It is a student managed fund, and the students are learning how to invest in and manage sustainable for-profit enterprises that really address a societal need. So we are very excited about that. The school is also going to be launching some activities around what's going to be called 'Inclusive Growth'. On the heels of the passing of our esteemed Professor Prahalad, we are developing an initiative around his vision for creating inclusive capitalism. So there will be activities to focus on his research and his commitment to try to get businesses to do more with less, for more people. So those are two new things that are going on.

Jonathan Fuller: I think Soojin touched on some of the bigger things that are going on here. We're always very engaged with our current student population, and some of the things that we, at admissions are feeling a lot of benefit from, and I think perspective students will also feel a lot of benefit from, is what we call Ross Student Ambassadors. And this year we had a record number of current students who had volunteered to participate as Student Ambassadors; to essentially be a touch point for prospective students. The Student Ambassadors tell those individuals about their experiences here at the school and how they went through the deliberation process and those kinds of things. So we talk at Ross about how engaged our student community is with both helping the school and improving upon the experience that everyone has here. And that is something that we, at admissions are also feeling directly. I'd like to think that it means we did a good job with bringing in a good quality class last year, based on the engagement that they have in wanting to be a resource for prospective students, and also pay it forward in terms of the experience they had as prospective students as well. So it's something that I personally am excited about. Again, it's exciting just to see a good crop of people that are really engaged with maintaining the excellence that we have here, and bringing in the next great class.

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Linda Abraham: That's great. You've already had your round one decisions deadline. Is it up, down, or pretty much the same as the previous year? I think on your blog you said that you were up, right?

Soojin Kwon Koh: Yes, we were up. We were very excited to see the up kick. Last year we were up slightly, and this year we were up a little more than slightly. So we're very excited to welcome in a hopefully, really strong class.

Linda Abraham: That's wonderful. Let's get to the questions posed by the applicants. Weigh asks, "Are the alumni interviewers up to date on current Ross events, etc.? And do they follow a guideline or question list to conduct the interview?"

Jonathan Fuller: As the questioner noted about alumni interviewers, the vast majority of our prospective student interviews are conducted either by current students if the person interviews here on campus or by alumni interviewers wherever the candidate is located. All of our interviewers, regardless of whether they are current students or alumni, go through a training process in terms of how we want them to conduct the interview and the kinds of questions that we'd like them to ask. We do give them some guidelines, but we don't script it; I wouldn't say that we prescribe to them which question they need to ask first, which question they need to ask next, and so on and so forth. The interviewers do have the flexibility of being creative, but they are all expected to provide us with a similar level of information and input into the application process. Soojin does do a good job throughout the year of communicating with our alumni interviewers and giving them a status update on the progress that we've been having with our applicants, our application reviews, and things that are going on around the school as well. If you are interviewing with alum who graduated within the last couple of years, he/she will obviously have more relevant and recent information because they've spent time here more recently. The further out you go, that might be a little bit less the case. But again, we do try to keep them aware of what's going on here, and the exciting things that are happening here on our campus.

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Linda Abraham: Soojin, are MBA candidates allowed to take courses in other schools, such as Engineering and Law School, and are there any limitations if they can?

Soojin Kwon Koh: Absolutely. We actually highly encourage that. There are a lot of cross-disciplinary opportunities, not just taking classes but also partnering with students from Engineering, the Med School, and other grad programs on campus to come up with business ideas and work on projects together. But yes, students can take up to 10 credited hours of electives outside of the School of Business.

Linda Abraham: Rick asks, "I applied already for round one's deadline. Will attending the Ross Preview next week influence the admissions decision at all?" And could the same question about influencing the admissions decision be made about visits to Ross on other occasions, or by participation in Ross receptions or things like that?

Soojin Kwon Koh: That's a great question; we get asked that frequently. The fact is that if you come to campus, while it doesn't affect the admissions outcome, it does affect your ability to be a strong candidate in the process, whether it's before you apply or after you apply, before your interview. When you are admitted, it will help you make the best decision possible whether to come to Ross or not, because the visit will give you a sense of whether there is a good fit in terms of the curriculum, the student body, the activities, the location, and all of those things. But there are no extra points for coming to campus; I think it just helps the applicants.

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Linda Abraham: I'd like to ask the applicants a question. How many of you have applied round one? It's 36%. How many of you are applying round two? Okay. It's 38%. And I'm going to assume that everybody else is applying round three or is undecided. That's kind of interesting to know in terms of exactly who is here. The next question is from Patrick, and he asks, "I have received an interview invitation and had a quick question about the interview during the Saturday event. Will we know who our interviewer is i.e. student, alumni, adcom, after registration and before interviewing?"

Soojin Kwon Koh: The interviewers will be predominantly current students who have been trained recently by me. There may be a couple of interviews done by staff if we are shorthanded, but they will predominantly be students.

Linda Abraham: So interviewers are blind, right? Resumes only?

Soojin Kwon Koh: The only thing the interviewers will have is your resume in advance. We don't alert them to look for anything in particular prior to the interview. So you will not know who the interviewer is until they come and say your name, and pick you up for the interview.

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Linda Abraham: Okay, great. Tom asks, "How does the Admissions Office work on the evaluation process specifically?" How does the evaluation process go?

Jonathan Fuller: We have a number of different rounds of review for every application that comes in. I would essentially divide them in to three main waves. The first review is to determine whether or not we want to invite the person to interview. There are certain individuals that when we look at them we know right away that yes, we want to interview this person. And then there are others who we'll say, let's look a little more deeply into the application before we decide if we want to extend an interview option to that person. The second piece is then combining the interview results with the overall application. So it's the in-depth review of your academics to measure performance, your essays, recommendations, resume, and so on and so forth. And then preliminary admissions decisions are made when that information is combined with the interview results. Then all of that is reviewed by members of our team, and then eventually makes its way to Soojin for her final review. She then forwards on our recommendations to the Dean for his final review too. So count up all those steps for every application. Of course, not all of them are going to be reviewed to the similar level of depth; I don't think I'm out of turn saying that the Dean doesn't read every single essay that comes in or doesn't necessarily look at every transcript. But from the standpoint of the number of reviews that every one gets, I would say that it's probably on the order of five for somebody who goes through the entire process all the way. So that is a high level of reviews of how we examine applications.

Linda Abraham: When you are evaluating an application, what do you look at first and how do you go through the file?

Soojin Kwon Koh: I start with the resume and this gives me a snapshot of what this person brings to the table in terms of experience, education, interests; all those things that are perfectly standard on a resume. And I just want to make a point to encourage everybody to try and get your resume to one page, and to not include jargon or technical speech.

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Linda Abraham: Thank you. Any other tips on the resume?

Soojin Kwon Koh: Sure. I would focus on the impact of each role and not what your responsibility was. I don't want to know what your job description is; I want to know how you made a difference at the organization that you were employed with and what your impact was. And it should be understandable by your mother or by your brother; if you give someone your resume, it should mean something and be comprehensible. So if you are in some fields in which there is a lot of technical jargon, don't include that. Try to make that fairly understandable to the lay person. And giving it to someone else to read as a test is a good way to gauge whether you've hit the mark. Also it's perfectly fine to include extra-curriculars, hobbies, etc. I would not include summer internships from undergrad; we're really primarily interested in your post-undergrad experience in terms of professional experience.

Linda Abraham: No high school grades, right?

Soojin Kwon Koh: No high school grades please. And even for college, we don't want a whole laundry list of all of the activities and all of the courses you took; we are really looking for a snapshot. So given that you only have one page to get me familiar with who you are, make sure that you are not focusing on your undergrad days only; it should be driven by your work experience as well. After I look at the resume, then I will look at the recommendation letters, just to get another sense of how someone else sees you. It helps me get a gauge of whether I see a potential fit in terms of achievements, interests, work style, team work skills, and all those kinds of things that we ask your recommender. And a good way to understand what we are looking for is to look at the recommendation questions themselves. And on the ratings grid that we ask your recommenders to fill out, those are the things that we are looking for them to evaluate and those are the things we are watching to see in our students. A word of caution on the ratings grade: there is often a tendency for recommenders to put 'top 1%' for every category just to ensure that their candidate gets the highest chance of being admitted. We are very familiar with that approach, and it really doesn't differentiate anybody given that everybody else is rating their candidates at the top 1%. So we're looking less what the tier of the ranking is and more on how they rate you on the different dimensions, and how they differ one from another. Then after the recommendation letters, I read the essays to say okay, now why does this person want to get an MBA? What do they say about themselves and can I imagine this person fitting? After I bring all of that together, then I read the comments to see whether someone from the Ross community agrees with the picture that's been established based on the written materials by way of the application, the recommendation letters, and the essays. And if there is a fit there and the academic quality is there, then they are a strong potential for an admit. If there is an inconsistent picture between the interview and what's on paper, we will take an even deeper review of those candidates and have a discussion amongst the Admissions Committee. But in most cases, the interview lines up fairly well with the application materials, so it's rare that we are so troubled by the inconsistency. Generally people are pretty good at representing themselves on paper as well as in person, once they get to that stage.

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Linda Abraham: Do you ever see inconsistencies between the person portrayed in the letters of recommendation and the person in the essays? I don't mean the 1%, 1%, 1%; I mean just a sense of the person.

Soojin Kwon Koh: Occasionally, but it's really a small percentage. It's an outlier more than anything else.

Jonathan Fuller: I just wanted to make note to the audience that you'll notice that Soojin did not say that the first thing we look at is the GMAT score, or that the first thing we look at is your GPA. To a certain extent, I think there are two reasons for that. The first thing that I'll say is that generally we have an expectation on your standing that our applicants are going to be able to perform at a high level academically. And so even to move forward into the other evaluation process, we want to make sure that you are going to be academically capable and be successful in our MBA program which is a pretty rigorous academic experience. But there are many other things within the application that we put significant emphasis on besides just what your GMAT is and what percentiles you are in, and whether you have a 4.0, and all those sorts of things. While that is important, all those other aspects of the application are really what will differentiate you from the application pool.

Linda Abraham: Great. Jonathan, can you just tell us please how you review the application, or do you follow pretty much the same process as Soojin outlined?

Jonathan Fuller: We do all follow it pretty consistently in that manner, mostly because regardless of who is doing the reading, we want to make sure that everyone is having an equitable experience as the application process goes through. And it's worked pretty well for us in the past, so that's really how we end up viewing it from a consistency standpoint. What we don't want to have is a situation where if we were to put two applications next to each other and look at all the evaluation comments, etc. we'd be able to say that I know Soojin definitely did this one, and Jon definitely did that one. It's nice to have that degree of consistency and uniformity across the board.

Linda Abraham: The next question is from Ella. She asks, "Hi Soojin and Jonathan. I've been given to understand that Ann Arbor is a student town. What format and styles do companies use to recruit at Ross? In the sense, do they visit campus or do students have to visit the nearest big city on consulting treks, finance treks, and so on? Thanks for taking the time to talk to us."

Soojin Kwon Koh: Sure. We are actually very well located in terms of being close to the Detroit Metro Airport, and so we have a ton of recruiters coming here. Any of the recruiters that you see going to the top ten schools, you will see coming here as well. So we're not out of the way; we are about 45 minutes from the international airport so we get a lot of recruiters on campus. We've got more recruiters than we have students. So there are plenty of on-campus opportunities to be had. That said, there are students who are interested in focused opportunities whether it's for emerging markets, real estate, hi-tech, etc. So there are student lead career treks done during our Professional Development Week, where they organize trips to meet with companies, with alums, and with recruiters in those specific industries, so that they can begin networking and developing relationships to land full-time jobs after graduating. So we've got a variety of those focused on very niche areas: entertainment, retail, and I mentioned a few of the other ones. So those are student lead as well.

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Linda Abraham: Ashish writes, "Thanks for organizing this session. I visited Ross during the Preview Day last month, and would recommend anyone applying to do so. The session conducted by Jon, to give insights on how adcom evaluates applications was really great." That was just a FYI. The next question is from Fang, and she writes, "Has Ross recruited students who want to pursue a second MBA degree before? Do you have any suggestions for such students?" Will you take somebody who already has an MBA?

Soojin Kwon Koh: Though occasionally we have, it depends really on the person's rationale for getting a second MBA. We look at where they got their MBA from, and what they want to do now. We are probably going to take a closer look at "Why MBA?" on this person because generally we hope you made the right decision the first time. But there have been cases where applicants have made a compelling case for getting it here.

Linda Abraham: Jon, what is the deadline by which they'll know if they are going to get an interview call or rejection letter? This question was from Sadita.

Jonathan Fuller: I would say that it's never too late. I tell individuals who may not have gotten an admission the first time around that if you're on the waitlist it means that there is a degree of admissibility that we recognize in you. But until you actually receive a rejection letter, there is still an opportunity for you to get in, in the subsequent round. In terms of the actual dates, our first application deadline was October 11th. On the 25th of October, we released our first wave of interview invitations for round one. Toward the end of next week, we will be sending out our second wave of interview invitations. If someone who applied in round one doesn't receive an invitation, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a guaranteed rejection; that person might very well be waitlisted, or they may not have received an interview invitation because we weren't able to do a full review of their application because of missing application materials. There could be a multitude of reasons or ways to interpret that. So the deadline for us to notify everybody about the admissions decision for round one applicants is January 15th. I am sympathetic; I know it's a long haul and a stressful one for applicants, but you'll be finding out in January in terms of what the final deliberations are.

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Linda Abraham: Does the timing of the interview invitation indicate anything of value?

Jonathan Fuller: The answer to that is absolutely not. We definitely go through applications in a random way; it's not as though we go through them alphabetically or by particular regions of the world before we go through others or anything like that. We get a lot of applications, and it just happens to be when the evaluators have an opportunity, or when your application comes up in their cue.

Linda Abraham: Bahman asks, "Hi Soojin and Jonathan. This is technically two questions, but they are related. Where are the majority of graduates placed in terms of location and industry? And is the Ross network pretty spread out across the country?"

Soojin Kwon Koh: Our graduates last year were pretty well distributed the Midwest, the West Coast, and the East Coast, the East Coast being NY, D.C., and Boston. So we had about 30% going to the Midwest which is primarily Chicago and Minneapolis where a lot of the CPG firms are. And then on the West Coast, a high concentration of our alums go to the Bay Area, some to Seattle, some to LA, but we've got a really strong alumni network in the Bay Area. On the East Coast, we used to have many more people go to Wall Street, but because of the financial crisis, there are fewer; we're still at about 20% in the Northeast and another 5% in the D.C. area. In terms of industries, consulting is the largest industry that our students go into; over 30% go into consulting. About a quarter goes into marketing, a quarter into finance, and then the others go into general management and strategic planning. As far as our top recruiters go, our top high rank firms this last year were Amazon, McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture, Citi, UBS, Boston Consulting Group, Dell, Bain.

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Linda Abraham: That's a pretty impressive list.

Soojin Kwon Koh: Yes. In terms of consulting and hi-tech, we do very well.

Linda Abraham: Ella has another question. "Ross recently relaxed the requirement for all applicants to have a four year degree, thus allowing applicants from say India, with three year degrees, to apply. Does Ross give extra weight to applicants with four year degrees/ master's degrees over applicants with only three year degrees?

Soojin Kwon Koh: You're talking about three year degrees from India; that is the change that has been implemented this year. No, there is no extra weight given to people with four year degrees or three years plus a graduate degree. We are going to look at the whole package. So someone who has a three year degree plus five years of really strong work experience could be potentially better than someone with a four year graduate degree and maybe one year of not as competitive work experience. So there's really no black and white in this. We are going to look at everything across the board in terms of your application.

Linda Abraham: Rotchna asks, "If a candidate is denied admission and is not selected for the feedback session by the Admissions Committee, is it still advisable for him to reapply?

Jonathan Fuller: Absolutely. We definitely encourage people to do so. And I wouldn't interpret being selected for feedback being any indication about our enthusiasm for someone to reapply or not. So if someone feels that there have been compelling experiences that they have had in the past year since they applied the first time around, then yes, by all means we definitely encourage that person to reapply. Every year is different. There definitely are consistent trends that we see in our applicant pool from one year to the next, the biggest one being that it is a competitive pool; that people are coming to the table with a lot of great experiences, a lot of great academic backgrounds, and have very interesting ambitions for the future. So just because you applied and were not admitted last year, by no means should that mean that you are going to have the same result if you apply this year. So I would definitely encourage that person to reapply.

Soojin Kwon Koh: Let me add to that. In terms of the application process, we are really looking for people who reapply to tell us something new about themselves; new accomplishments, new scores, whatever it is. We are not looking for someone to resubmit the same application because if it wasn't as competitive the first time, given that our applicant pool is not getting any weaker, it will be tough to be competitive the second time without something new.