What other resources does Washington University offer to Olin students?
We include joint degrees, or dual degrees, as part of the offerings to our students. We have joint degrees in Architecture, Urban Design, Biomedical Engineering,
and East Asian Studies, and with the Law School and the School of Social Work. So people who are very interested in these areas, for professional or personal reasons, can go ahead and do a full-blown joint degree. That's something that's always available to all of our students, should they be admitted to both schools.
Again, a lot of people may not be of the mindset where "I need to get two degrees, but I still want to have knowledge in a certain area."
So, again, we encourage them to be able to take classes outside the Business School. We'll take what we consider to be nine credit hours outside of the Business School as credit toward their degree.
The other way sometimes that this happens is that through the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, we get a lot of people coming to us from other parts of the campus – the Health Sciences School,
or Computer Science, or Engineering – who want to partner with our Business students in order to see what business ideas they can bring to fruition. A lot of these folks tend to have excellent ideas in whatever area they're studying, but they rely on our Business students to help them create business analyses, business plans, and that sort of thing. We encourage our students to look outside the Business School as well.
How was the 2005-2006 admissions season for Olin?
This year our applications were relatively flat, meaning there wasn't a significant increase or decrease in applications. I think, as
is the case with business schools industry-wide, we expect that over the next few years, applications will, in fact, be increasing.
Although from an applications perspective it was about the same, I think overall I would characterize it as an excellent year. What ended up happening is
that we had a terrific year in converting those people we admitted to enrolled students. In fact, I think we hit a record, at least for as far back as the data goes, which is about 11 years. And we increased our class size from 119 students to 139 students.
Is that an ongoing goal, to have that larger size?
No. We want to cap it. 140 to 150 is optimal for us. We really don't want to go past the 150 mark.
What general advice do you have for applicants?
First and foremost, an applicant has to really understand what the role of the MBA will be in their life. I think it's important that they demonstrate not only
to themselves but to the admissions committee – and eventually to corporate groups – why the MBA is a good choice for them. So it takes a lot of self-reflection.
Part of what we ask them to do is to tell us about who they are and who they want to be and how the MBA fits in to those aspirations. The very first thing I would say to an applicant is: "Make sure you know why
you need the MBA degree. Make sure you understand why this might be the correct time, and then ultimately why the schools that you're choosing are good fits for you."
Then the other things are relatively straightforward. We look at, fundamentally, two things. We want to make sure a person can succeed academically in the program, so we look at things like grades, their transcripts. We include our perception of the rigor of the courses that they took to get here.
The second fundamental question is: "Will you be professionally successful?" We look at a number of different things in order to assess that – what they say on their résumé, the progression of responsibility they've had in their careers, what people who are recommenders have to say about them. Then we try to align that with what they say they want to do down the road.
Then we have to assess whether or not we can provide them with what it is they're looking for.
There are a lot of 'soft' issues involved. We want to make sure that we take people who can work well on teams. We spend a lot of time putting our students into groups so they can study together and work together because that's what will happen to them once they leave us and go into the marketplace.
We look for people who communicate well. We look for people who have leadership potential, ultimately, because we're training people not only to be technicians, but to be leaders within their organizations. To the extent that we can do this at such an early stage in their career, we want to make sure that we take people who reflect the potential to be excellent leaders within their communities and their organizations.
Can you describe the applicant interview process at Olin?
The way that it will be working this year – which is a bit of a departure from the past – is that an applicant can be considered for an interview in
one of two ways. The first is that anybody who applies to the program can request an interview. The second is that anybody coming from outside of the area – from out of state – regardless of where they are in the admissions process, can request an interview as well.
We will end up interviewing probably everybody who is admitted into the program and many more beyond that. But our goal is to make sure that we can assess those soft skills that I was talking about to make sure that they will fit into the classroom and be good employees down the road. Our goal is to interview everybody who we are interested in.
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