Ross Admissions Director Blog

Visits, Round 1 Update, and Fun Times at Ross

What's in a Visit?

A couple weeks ago, we hosted UpClose, one of our on-campus diversity events. Here's survey feedback from some attendees: "The classroom sessions were awesome! [They] really gave me a sense of what the academics are like." "It was meeting the community, staff and students that made the program jump off the paper." "The website does not do justice to what a great weekend it is." "Ross moved to my first choice school over this weekend." 

How do we do that? All of us here - from Admissions staff to students to faculty - are passionate about this place and passionate about bringing great people into our community. Did we roll out the red carpet and do something "special"? Not exactly. We shared with visitors who we are, what we're about. From my sharing admissions straight talk (e.g., how we review apps, what to worry about, what not to worry about) to current student panels to the MBA1 "unplugged" session (without staff or faculty in the room). 

All that to say, there's a lot of great information and perspective to be gained through a visit - whether it's for a Preview Day (the next one is on Friday, November 16), our Women in Leadership Conference + Preview Day (November 29-December 1), or one of our Visit in Person ("VIP") days. 

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Round 1 Update

Thanks to those of you who submitted apps in Round 1. We'll be going out with our first wave of interview invitations on Tuesday, October 23, with that interview period running from October 25 - November 20. The second wave of invitations will go out on November 12, with the interview period being from November 15 - December 2. For maximum scheduling options, go to the online scheduler as soon as you get your invitation. 

All interview types are weighted equally. Interviews conducted on-campus with one of our 2nd year MBA students are not weighted more heavily than interviews with alumni in your area. While we offer Skype interviews, I highly encourage you to do an in-person interview if at all possible. The quality/flow of the interview conversation will be better. If you must do a Skype interview, you needn't worry that it will reflect poorly on you. Skype interviews carry the same weight as on-campus or local alumni interviews. 

Remember that when you are invited to interview has no correlation with your likelihood of admission. 

Round 1 decisions will be released before Christmas break - on December 20, to be exact. 

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Director's Log

The last few weeks have been filled with a variety of interesting conversations and planning sessions with students, faculty and alums. Among the students I've met with to strategize around recruiting and messaging are the Brazilian Students Association, Design + Business Club. I also met with the co-presidents of Michigan Business Women to explore an alumnae mentorship program and the co-chairs of the Women in Leadership Conference to discuss potential panels and speakers. I had lunch with Professor Noel Tichy, a regent and some of our military students to explore programming for veterans; participated in a workshop with Professor Pris Rogers to discuss cross-cultural learning environments, and a number of faculty and staff on the Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Last week's reunion gave me the opportunity to meet with the presidents of the Ross alumni clubs in Peru and Chile (both execs at LAN airlines) and to hear from Boeing CEO Jim McNerney. Among the most fun things I got to do in the last few weeks is join our MBA students at Taste of Ross - a food and cultural event to celebrate the many ethnicities of the students at Ross. I conveniently parked myself next to the Brazilian table where I enjoyed Brazilian beef (a special cut that our Brazilian students taught the butchers at the local Whole Foods to do) and Brazilian beverages. Next week, I'll be in NY for a Forte Foundation board meeting and a reception with prospective students and alums. If you're in NY, I look forward to seeing you there!

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Random Tips

If you attend an event, always a good idea to bring business cards. Easier than looking for paper and pen. Gives the receiver (e.g., an admissions officer, an alum, a fellow prospective student) an additional identifier, which is helpful when you're meeting lots of people. 

If you visit Ross and love cookies, get a cookie from Insomnia Cookies on South University. The peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies are awesome. They're one reason I run!

 

 

 

Don't Underestimate the Importance of Your Resume

Our 2012-13 on-campus interviewers have been selected. Tomorrow, I'll train 75 MBA2s on how to conduct Ross interviews and what to look for.  Let me pass on some tips to applicants based on my interviewer training notes. 

1. Spend the time and energy to draft a good resume. Your essays aren't the only opportunity to tell us about yourself on paper. The resume is, in some ways, more important and possibly more challenging than the essays because you have only one page to tell your undergrad plus post-undergrad story. It should be clear and concise, yet detailed enough to give us an idea of your skills, experiences and interests. I find that many applicants don't take enough care with their resumes, submitting a version that may be relevant when applying for another job in their current industry, with technical details ad nauseum. Don't go there. You'll miss an opportunity to help the Admissions Committee advocate for you.
2. Don't fret over the number of years you've worked. We look for quality of your work experience in terms of the skills and knowledge you've gained, the contributions you've made.
3. Don't fret if you work in a "non-business" field or majored in liberal arts. We're looking to create a diverse class. We don't want all of our students to come from one or two industries or one or two majors. 

For me, the resume is just as important as your essays. How you describe your experiences matters. What you choose to highlight matters. Think of it as a trailer for the movie about you. It doesn't need to be flashy and exciting. It needs to show that there's substance there. And keep it real. Good luck. Can't wait to learn more about you. 

Random tips

Since my last post (a month ago...sorry for the delay), I've traveled to meet candidates and alums in Buenos Aires and Santiago (I should've met folks in Sao Paulo too but Delta couldn't get me there on time, or my luggage to Buenos Aires), celebrated my son's 11th birthday in NYC, welcomed 502 new MBA students to campus, shared admissions advice on a Forte Foundation webinar, worked with MBA2s on programming for our Women in Leadership Conference at the end of November, flew to San Francisco for a joint school women's panel with Yale, Duke, UVA, Berkeley, NYU and Cornell, drafted revisions to our interview process, hosted a reception for new and returning Forte Fellows, and kicked off our first on-campus Preview Day of the season. TGIF! 

I'll share some random tips based on interactions I've had with prospective students over the last month:

• If you have questions about the admissions process, application, etc., don't ask students or alums - ask Admissions: RossMBA@umich.edu. Would you ask your dentist for financial advice just because s/he has investments? 

• If you are exploring schools, I wouldn't start your research with an email to the Dean asking him/her to set aside time to talk by phone to discuss the prospect of your studying at his/her school. 

• If you choose to send a follow-up email to a student or admissions officer you've met, it's helpful to mention something about yourself that you discussed with that person so as to jog that person's memory. (I admit it. I'm guilty of not being able to remember all 502 students' names in our incoming class let alone the thousands of prospective students I meet each year.)

• Don't ask current students or alums what they wrote about in their essays, thinking that you'll get essay ideas that "get you in." There's not a topic or story that guarantees admission. And the point of the essays is to tell your story, not someone else's. Your best bet for differentiating yourself is to do just that - tell your story. 

A couple notes related to the process: 

• The Round 1 deadline is October 10. This year, we'll release Round 1 decisions prior to the Christmas holiday - on December 20, 2012. 
• The first wave of interview invites will go out on October 23; second wave of invites on November 12. The wave in which you are invited has no correlation to your likelihood of admission.  

Looking ahead, I'll be training application reviewers and interviewers, hosting UpClose, our diversity preview, heading to NYC in late October for a Forte board meeting followed by a Ross recruiting reception on October 24, and then on to Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai in November to meet with alumni interviewers and ambassadors. The rest of the team will be on the road as well, with Jill currently in Europe, Diana heading to India, and Eun Ja completing her globe-trotting on the West Coast. Check out our event schedule to see if we'll be in your neck of the woods. 

As always, feel free to post comments, ask questions, suggest topics here! 

 

Welcome to the new recruiting year!

We’re a little over a week away from formally welcoming the incoming class to Ross. Over 200 of them are currently on MTreks around the world – from Croatia to Iceland to Tanzania and everything in between – getting to know their new classmates on 7 – 10 day student-led adventure trips.

The Admissions team has embarked on our own adventure trips around the world to meet prospective Ross MBA students. Associate Director Eun Ja Yu is in Asia this week and next, I’ll be heading to South America, Diana Economy will be in India and Jill Huerta will be in Europe and South America. Of course, we’ll be in various cities around the U.S. for Ross, Forte, Consortium and other recruiting events. To find out where we’ll be and updates from the school, register here. We hope to meet you on the road, or better yet, we hope to see you on campus! Check out our “Visit Us” page for information about scheduling a campus visit.

The goal of this blog is to provide transparency into the seemingly mystifying process called admissions, share stories about interesting things happening at the school, and offer advice about how to approach the application. For my first tip of this year’s admissions process, I encourage applicants to really spend time developing a clear, concise resume. This is the first thing in your application we will review. As such, it will create our initial impression of you as an applicant. We see many resumes that are very technical, jargon-y, and lack results or impact. A resume shouldn’t read like a job description – that’s what you were hired to do. A resume should tell us what you actually achieved, how you impacted an organization, what you contributed, what skills you gained. We’re not scanning for curers of cancer and founders of the next big social media thing. We want to create a mental snapshot of who you are and what your path has been. 

For the purposes of the Ross application, your resume should be about one page.  You should take as much care to check for typos and other errors in your resume as you would in your essays.

If you have questions about the admissions process, I encourage you to ask us directly (RossMBA@umich.edu) or via my blog rather than asking each other on online applicant forums. If you have questions about the Ross experience, ask our Student Ambassadors. Through email exchanges, student blogs, and student-led tours, ambassadors look forward to sharing their perspectives about Ross with you.

I hope you’re as excited as we are to begin this journey together. I look forward to meeting you on the road or on campus! 

 

What Do Admissions Officers Do in the Summer?

I am frequently asked by my friends if I enjoy taking my summer off since Admissions doesn’t really do much when the University is out of session. Hardly!  We do get the opportunity for some R&R, but there’s still quite a bit of work going on here and around the country.

I spent much of June on the road at some excellent events starting with The Consortium’s 46^thAnnual Orientation Program & Career Forum in Minneapolis. Representatives from Ross’ Office of Career Development, Ross alumni, and I welcomed our incoming Consortium students and prepared them to have successful experiences at the conference.  We also celebrated the fact that we have the largest incoming class of Consortium students among the 17 member schools.

A week later, I headed to Chicago for GMAC’s Annual Conference (yes, the organization that administers the GMAT exam).  This is the annual industry conference for graduate management admissions professionals, and this year’s event was especially meaningful to me as I chaired the planning group. Roughly 600 representatives from MBA programs
around the world gathered to attend sessions on innovation, social media, diversity, and other topics as well as share best practices with colleagues. Believe it or not, the conference was more fun than you might think - there was even some karaoke with colleagues from other schools.

Lastly, I flew to Los Angeles at the end of June for Forté Foundation’s MBA Women’s Conference. I had the opportunity to reconnect with Ross’ incoming Forte Fellows, and I’m very excited about the energy and leadership that they’ll bring to the class this fall.

Back on the home front, the office is busy planning our recruiting events for the coming year and putting the final touches on next year’s application.  We expect the application
to go live by August 1^st, but our essay and recommendation questions are available on our website if you want to get a head start.

I’m reflecting on how I used this blog over the past year, and I want to make sure that readers find it to be useful and informative.  Feel free to give me feedback and ideas for
topics in the comments section.

Quick Update on R3 and WL

We are close to being done with the review process for Round 3. All Round 3 applicants will be able to access their decisions online on May 15.

The team and I have been painstakingly reviewing and re-reviewing waitlist files. We're looking not only at your merits, but also at how the class is shaping up. The decisions we make now are less a reflection of your fit with Ross, in general, as it is a reflection of how you may fit in the incoming class as it looks at this point in time.

Some waitlisted applicants will get a decision in the coming week; others will remain on our waitlist until additional space becomes available. We appreciate your continued interest and patience.

What it means to be on the Waitlist

Dear Waitlisters -

We haven't forgotten about you. In fact, we will spend more time considering your candidacy than we did for our admitted students. Why? Because we want to make fully informed decisions about your candidacy. The team has been actively re-reviewing your files and your updates to evaluate your potential contribution to and fit with the incoming class. Our decision hinges not only on what you bring to the table, but what the rest of the dinner party looks like. We'll have a better sense of that after May 1, when Round 1 and 2 admits give us their enrollment decision.

There are two main reasons for being placed on the waitlist: (1) you had good academics, work experience and personal experiences, but there were many other candidates who promised to bring the same thing to the table as you did; or, (2) you had good work and personal experience, but there wasn't enough evidence in your academic record to give us confidence that you wouldn't struggle in our program.

Here's how I'd suggest managing your waitlist status: For those of you with strong academics and work experience, other than making sure that you let us know that you are still interested in attending Ross and providing the requisite update, there isn't much you can do to increase your chance of being admitted because it really boils down to how many people with a similar contribution potential decide to enroll.

For those of you with strong experience but less competitive academics - you can still retake the GMAT (we'll accept your highest score) and/or if you had little to no quant courses in undergrad, then you could take a college-level math class to strengthen your candidacy. Make sure you submit your transcript upon completion.

Quite honestly, some of the best students in our program have been those admitted from the waitlist. By "best" I mean - the leaders, the most committed to the school, the biggest contributors, the innovators. Unless they shared with their classmates that they had been on the waitlist, no one would know.

I remember making a call to a waitlister a couple years ago and having to leave a voicemail asking the person to call me back. The next call was to his girlfriend who was also admitted from the waitlist. She was ecstatic for herself and wanted to know if her boyfriend had also been admitted. I couldn't officially share the news with her before sharing it with him, so I let her know that I left him a voicemail to call me. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to return my call before I had to leave the office for recruiting travel. So as not to prolong the anxiety of waiting to connect with me by phone, I asked another Admissions Committee member to give him a call. The newly admitted couple were able to celebrate their happy news together. 

The team and I look forward to making admit calls to waitlisters in the coming month. Though I won't know how many until after May 1, rest assured that there will be many. Thanks for your continued interest and patience.

Gearing Up for GBR

Last week the team and I headed out to the coasts (and Chicago) to meet up with newly admitted students and alums. I was in L.A. and San Francisco for receptions hosted by two of our alums in those cities. For me, it was great to put faces with names - names that the Admissions Committee has seen on applications, discussed in committee, and sent up to the Dean's Office for approval. Names that we hope will be those of future Rossers!

We're looking forward to meeting more than 300 potential Rossers and 60+ partners next weekend during Go Blue Rendezvous (GBR). If you haven't registered yet, there's still time. Here are the reasons you should come:

(1) If you're debating between Ross and another school, you should do your due diligence and experience both. You're about to make, perhaps, the second biggest investment of your life. Don't rely on online research or word of mouth or even a prior visit to make your decision. The decision isn't just about the institution and the programs, it's about your future community/family. Make an informed choice about the community you're about to join, for life.  

(2) If you've already decided that Ross is the place you want to be, come meet future classmates, meet alums and faculty, get a head start on housing, find a roommate, learn about our student clubs, explore Ann Arbor, experience dinner in the Big House.

Enough of the plug for GBR. Just come.

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If you come to GBR next week, you may notice that our Wintergarden is somewhat empty. That's because most of our MBA1s are on MAP travel. I noticed it on my way to getting a steaming bowl of oatmeal from our cafe. The halls and Wintergarden weren't buzzing as they usually are. So I was pleasantly surprised when I ran into one of our MBA1s who just returned from a trip to Prague for MAP. She shared with me how incredible the MAP experience has been on so many dimensions. She said that she had been skeptical that she would go into her summer internship after just a couple semesters of b-school and be able to apply newly-gained skills and knowledge, but that MAP has quelled her skepticism as she has applied skills and knowledge she didn't have before b-school (she was a corporate communications manager for an energy company in California). She also talked about how much she has learned from her MAP teammates, her MAP coach and MAP faculty advisor - not only as it pertained to the project, but also as it pertained to her own leadership development journey. It was great to hear a student confirm that the things we tout about the Ross experience are really true.

To be fair, some students have MAP experiences that are not as rosy - team dynamics challenges, disagreement about project goals and deliverables, etc. But I'd argue that those kinds of experiences are far better learning opportunities than the ones that are incredibly smooth, because real life is not always incredibly smooth. And leadership is something you develop and strengthen through experience. Our students are out there developing their leadership muscles.

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I'm really looking forward to meeting many of you next week! If you come, and you've been a blog reader, let me know. I'd love to meet the people that go with the eyeballs that have been reading the blog!

Round 2 & 3 Timelines

Round 2 decisions are being finalized; call lists are being prepared. Admitted student calls will begin next Monday. Calls will be made in no specific order, at no specific time, other than not calling you after 9PM wherever you are. In addition to making calls, we are in the process of coordinating plans for admitted student events around the world (including meet-ups with MAP teams in various countries), securing panelists for Go Blue Rendezvous, exploring new scholarship and loan opportunities, collaborating with alumni on targeted recruiting strategies, working with current students to implement new outreach initiatives, reviewing Round 3 applications, and conducting staff and applicant interviews.

On Tuesday, I'll be out of pocket for the Consortium Fellowship selection meeting. Consortium admit calls will, therefore, begin on Wednesday.

All applicants can access their decisions online at noon EST on March 15. I wish the best to everyone. I know it's a nerve-wracking time. We'll try to get the calls done as soon as we can.

3 More (Long) Weeks

Some of you may be counting down the days (until March 15). We are too. We have much left to do and not enough hours to do everything we hope to do. Of course, reviewing your applications is taking priority among the team, since we have a deadline to meet. The ADs (Associate Directors) are a scarce sight around here while they're reading apps. The interviewers will (or should) complete all of their interviews by the end of this week. Next week will be the start of what we call the "QC" process - as in (Decision) Quality Control. Each of the region managers (ADs) will make recommendations for applications from their regions. Jon Fuller, the Senior AD, will review all of the regions in aggregate. Then I'll do my review to shape the class and bump people up/down in the process. Remember, b-school admission isn't about admissibility, it's about bringing the right group of people together to create a unique learning community.

There were many anxious questions about what it means if you didn't get an interview invitation. As I've stated in several previous posts over the years (and I know that there are some candidates who peruse the archives in search of clues for when the admit calls will start...), no invitation means we need to further evaluate your file. From an applicant's standpoint, it means you will either be waitlisted or denied. Hope that clarifies things.

And now, on to non-process updates. We welcomed almost 70 Consortium applicants to our Consortium Interview Day and Black Business Students Association Conference last weekend. After having flown back from L.A. for a Forte Foundation board meeting that morning, I was surprised to still be standing at 10:30PM when the reception ended. It sounds cliche but it was truly the energy of the candidates and students in the room that kept me going.

This week, a couple of Round 1 admitted students came for a pre-GBR visit. I had a chance to have lunch with them and some of our current students. As an Admissions Director, it's so fun to be in a room with a group of students you've admitted and you see how accomplished, interesting, passionate, sincere and extremely motivated they are. It isn't easy to glean characteristics like that from an application and short interview. That's why we spend a lot of time with your applications - so we can get as clear a picture of you as we can before we make a final decision. I know March 15 feels like an eternity; but it'll be here soon enough.