Latest / Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast / MBA Wire Taps 328—327 GRE, but lower GPA. 655 GMAT, the new test format. Tuck versus Darden and Kellogg.

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MBA Wire Taps 328—327 GRE, but lower GPA. 655 GMAT, the new test format. Tuck versus Darden and Kellogg. · Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast

• 0:15
  Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions podcast. I'm Graham Richmond, and this is your wiretaps for Monday, December 18, 2023. For more than 100 years years, Emory University's Guisueta business school has been a training ground for principal leaders and a laboratory for powerful insights. Whether you're looking to accelerate your career or make a career pivot, Emory's one year and two year full time MBA programs prepare you for a lifetime of career confidence. Learn more about Emory's top 20 MBA with top five career outcomes offering world class academics and small by design classes delivered in a dynamic global city. More at Emory biz slash clearadmit, I'm joined by Alex Brown from Cornwall, England. Alex, how are things going?
• 1:03
  Speaker B: Very good, thank you, Graham.
• 1:04
  Speaker A: So another busy week on the wires last week. I mean, the big names, a lot of big names offering their round one decisions, but give us a rundown of what happened and is there anything left or do we get to breathe a sigh of relief here and head into the holidays now?
• 1:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, last week was the second of two decision weeks where all the top programs over those two weeks basically rolled out their round one decisions for the most part. Yeah, nothing next week, as far as I'm aware, in terms of the top programs releasing decisions, I think that's all completed now. There are a few that do rolling decisions like Stern or whatever. That's always a bit of a mystery to me. But yeah, last week we saw Kellogg, Sloan, we saw Columbia. Columbia. There's a bit of speculation when they were going to release their decisions, but they came out on Wednesday of last week, so that was very good of them. They have a bit of a funky process. Graham, I just asked you about this a little bit. They release decisions, but I don't think they make scholarship decisions until February.
• 2:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's been the case in the.
• 2:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's counter to what the other programs are doing other than Harvard and Stanford, which is all sort of needs based, but all the other programs merit based. When they release a decision, they release the scholarship decision, too. I think that puts Columbia a bit of a disadvantage. Graham?
• 2:37
  Speaker A: I agree. In fact, I'm going to give them a year because I suspect they will change this over time, just as they changed the early decision and did away with it. But, yeah, you have to think, I mean, someone's staring at what is usually kind of an exploding offer, like you have a certain amount of time to put in your deposit if you're going to take an offer somewhere and you don't know about your Columbia offer in terms of what money may come through, you might lean the other way. So, yeah, I think it's a challenge for them. So we'll see how it plays out. But, yeah, for no, if you've got an offer at Columbia, you don't necessarily know how much money they're going to give you.
• 3:10
  Speaker B: Yeah. They even just lose about a month's worth of sort of marketing and connection and stuff. Right. So I think, yeah, that's something Columbia should really take a look at. But anyway, yeah, lots of decisions last week. I mean, we'll still see activity on Livewire over the next few weeks, but it won't be the sort of explosive sort of decision releases that we're seeing. The next big date is January 4. Graham, do you know what's happening on January 4?
• 3:40
  Speaker A: I have an idea. Yeah. Do you want to tell me? Is it that there are like five schools or ten schools with deadlines that day or something for round two?
• 3:47
  Speaker B: Yeah. Stanford, Wharton Booth talk. Slow, not slow. Stanford, Wharton Booth talk. Yale has Darden, Anderson, McDonough, and Foster all have their round two application deadlines. So we should call that terrible Thursday. We should come up with some acronym for that. I mean, the day before Harvard and lbs have their round two applications, but it just boggles my mind that all these application deadlines are right around two or three days of the first week of the new year.
• 4:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. So that advice to listeners, don't party too hard for New Year's Eve because you might have to write essays and polish things up in the 24 hours that follow to get everything ready for some of these schools. But, yeah, I know why they do it. They're going to be coming back from their vacations probably on the eigth or something. And so they want all the apps that we talked about that last week. So it is what it is. But, yeah, so, crazy times. I think this week will be relatively calmer, but I do encourage everyone to keep reporting your results. I mean, it's fascinating to see these results. And as everyone knows, it's great to mine the livewire data and just sort of see historic outcomes. We do have some things coming up. One thing I wanted to mention is on January 3, we'll have our monthly Clearadmit plus webinar, which really, Alex is kind of an ask me anything with you and I, it's kind of office hours, whatever you want to call it. We've been having a blast with that, so please come out for that. It's always at the same time, so it's January 3, and it's at noon Eastern. And you just have to be a registered user on clearadmit.com in order to join us, which costs you nothing. We also have an event later in January that I wanted to mention, which is a real humans event. So we're going to have a panel of current students and alumni from top programs. So that event is January 24 from 08:00 p.m. To 09:00 p.m.. Eastern. So very much geared, I guess, a little bit more towards the US market, given the timing. But because we're talking with students and alums, we have to do it in the evening because they're all busy during the day. But you can sign up for that now by going to CA, Realhumans, all one word, all lowercase. So I'm looking forward to that. Alex, I got to get your take. One big news item that happened last week, although we could speculate as to is it really news when someone's just aggregating somebody else's work? But PNQ did their ranking of rankings, and they do this every year. They basically take all the major rankings or the rankings that they deem to be major, and they weight them according to which ones the PNQ editorial staff thinks are most important, and they come up with this aggregate ranking. So I'll just rattle off the top 16, since we often focus on that group. So here you go. Stanford, number one. Harvard, Tuck, Columbia, Yale, Duke, Cornell, Virginia, Michigan, NYU, Stern, Chicago, Booth, Kellogg, UCLA, MIT, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University. So that's the top 16. Is there anybody missing from that list in your mind, Alex?
• 6:51
  Speaker B: It's a really interesting top 16. Graham, obviously Wharton's missing. Yeah, Wharton's missing, but if you added Wharton to that, I would say that's the top 17 programs in the United States.
• 7:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, you could safely say that, I think.
• 7:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, not in that order, right, necessarily.
• 7:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah. So just so people know, Wharton is not in it because Wharton didn't take part in the Financial Times ranking. And I guess for some reason PNQ must have met about this, but they decided they would give Wharton zero points for that ranking. And so that lowered their average substantially, as you might imagine, because the FT comprises, I can't remember what it is. Is it like 20 or 30% of this overall ranking? So they tanked down and landed at number 31. The only other school that we sometimes see in the kind of top 16, or certainly top 20 is USC, and they were listed Marshall at number 22. So a little bit off there, too. Do you know what five rankings comprise the aggregate PNQ ranking? Alex, could you name them?
• 7:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'd heard of a couple of them. Obviously, the recent LinkedIn one, which I think is what it is. And yeah, the Princeton review one. I've not really looked at that one, so I don't even know much about that one, frankly. Us news to me is the gold standard of the US rankings, even though last season that was a little bit skew with. I do know I did actually read the P Q article because I wanted to get under the hood a little bit about their decision to drop Wharton like they did. And they were reasonably damning on. So it wasn't just that Wharton decided not to participate in the FT rankings, but they couldn't get enough alums to respond.
• 8:43
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 8:44
  Speaker B: And they made the speculation that that's because of X, Y and Z. And a lot of, you know, aside from listening to it from John Byrne, poets and quants, I'd not really heard a lot of that rhetoric. So I don't know its veracity. I will say, as much as I'm not really a fan of this particular ranking or whatever, John Byrne is the rankings innovator. Yeah, he started them at business. Kudos to what he did getting the business week rankings out. But, yeah, I don't know. Putting Wharton at number 31 is just not realistic.
• 9:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. So the rankings that comprise this aggregate are us news, FT, business Week, and then LinkedIn and the Princeton Review. Those two know a little bit more puzzling to me because I don't think they hold as much sway. Obviously, LinkedIn's like literally brand new, but Forbes, I guess, didn't do their ranking recently. So they're not in here. The only thing I would say about Wharton is that, yeah, I've seen those articles that have been run about, oh, students were unhappy that PNQ has run, but this could just as easily, when it comes to the FT, have been a scenario where the person managing the process for Wharton didn't chase down alums and get them to fill it out the way maybe some other schools are doing. And so, I mean, still inexcusable. And I mean, Wharton needs to be in that ranking, and I'm not going to make any apologies for them. But the problem I have is that because they're at 31 in this ranking, it's not like people who get into say, I don't know, a school ahead of them. Let's take USC Marshall. They're at 22. Does that mean that everyone that gets in USC Marshall is going to go there over Wharton. No, it's just not useful at this point. And so I don't know how they made the decision. And even as you say that top 16, this is why tiers make so much more sense. And I know we say this probably every other week on the show. So anyway, I just wanted to mention, it's kind of big news in the industry. I've always found it kind of amusing that they get so much action around something that's really just an aggregate. It's pretty fascinating to me. They don't even do their own ranking, but people think of it as a ranking because they're just compiling somebody else's work. So it's kind of funny.
• 10:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, but I mean, the concept is pretty good, right?
• 10:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, it makes sense.
• 10:59
  Speaker B: I mean, the idea is if you aggregate four or five rankings together, it should help arrive at the truth, sort of reduce the variance and so on. And so, yeah, I think the concept's good. It's fine. But I don't think this decision of dropping Wharton because of the Financial Times debacle, for whatever reasons, helps this aggregate ranking for the reasons you've articulated.
• 11:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. So anyway, we should probably move on because we have a bunch of stuff to cover. And this is actually the first week this season where we're going to do two apply wire entries. So two candidates that we're going to kind of profile and analyze, but then also there's a decision wire post that we're going to talk about somebody who's undecided about where to go. So we'll get into that momentarily. I did want to run down a couple of other things. The first is that we put up an admissions tip on the site that's called five tips for making the best of the MBA waitlist. Unfortunately, there are quite a few people who are waitlisted in round one, and so we put that up. You should read that just real quick. The five tips are know and follow the rules, communicate if you can, keep in touch. So it's not like a one and done sort of scenario, learning about letters of support and then have a contingency plan, which means don't assume you're going to get in off the waitlist. So that's kind of the tips. You can read more about each of them in detail on the site. The other thing is, we did run some more real humans. We connected with a whole bunch of students. So we connected with six students at Washington University Olin. We also talked with six students at IMD and I was kind of laughing. I mean, their program is really small, so that's like a high percentage of their student body. So six students from IMD, and then we connected with five students over at Chicago Booth. So those are all up. Great insights from current students about how they applied, why they chose the school they're at, and everything else. Advice they'd like to give to future candidates. So read those. If you're applying to any of those three programs, I'll ask you a quick question on that.
• 12:56
  Speaker B: Graham yeah. If we had a european ranking, where would you place IMD?
• 13:01
  Speaker A: Ooh, that's a good question. So when I first got into this business, like literally, well, more than 25 years ago, Europe was known as being. There were three schools in Europe that people talked about and they were Lbs, insid and IMD. And then things have changed. The landscape shifted. Oxford and Cambridge introduced their mbas, but I would still put IMD as one of the best schools in Europe. I mean, it's a really small program. It's in Switzerland, they have a fantastic placement. It's the only thing I would say is it's different because it starts in January and it's short format too. So I think it's probably really appealing to certain candidates out there. But I throw it in the group with ESA and Cambridge, Oxford and LBS Inc. Yet, I mean, it's a really good school.
• 13:43
  Speaker B: Don't you think that this January start date harms.
• 13:47
  Speaker A: Do you know, I actually asked them like, hey, why know? And they've just been on this calendar and there are some other european programs that have that calendar. ESMt in Berlin is one. But yeah, it is an interesting know INSEAD has a January start date too. I think one of the issues that they're very small programs, so I don't think they have the bandwidth to run two start times the way NCID does. Otherwise they probably would. They might have both a September and a January start, but it's kind of a smaller program. And so short of maybe building a new building, I don't know how they would do it.
• 14:19
  Speaker B: I don't know why they start in January, not September.
• 14:23
  Speaker A: Anyway, it is interesting. All right. Last thing we did run our analyses of employment reports for MIT, Berkeley and Wharton. So three really big top programs. So I'll just run through some numbers. I'm curious to get your take, Alex. So with MIT, we'll start there. 75% of their graduating class was looking for work, right? So the other 25% were either returning to a sponsored employer, going on for further graduate study, or 8% of them were starting their own business. 90% of those seeking employment had an offer within three months of graduation, and the median salary was $170,000. So those are the kind of basic numbers. And then when we get into kind of industry, 34% went into consulting. That's up a little bit from 31% last year. 24% went into tech. That's actually up a tick from 23% last year. And then 20% into finance. That's down 3%. 6% healthcare, 3% consumer packaged goods. In terms of the regional placements, 45% landed in the northeast. That's actually down quite a bit. It was 54% last year. 24% went out west, and that's up from 19%. So, interesting. Kind of bucking the trend there with MIT, 7% to the southwest, 7% Mid Atlantic, 6% south, and 4% midwest. Any thoughts on MIT?
• 15:45
  Speaker B: I want to hear the other ones.
• 15:46
  Speaker A: Okay. All right. Berkeley had 87% seeking employment, so more than the 75% that were looking for jobs at MIT, and only 3% running kind of starting their own company. So a little bit smaller there. Again, 90% who were looking for jobs had offers within three months, and the median salary is $166,000. 30% of Berkeley grads who are looking for work and finding jobs went into tech. So that's the number one field for them. 28% close on the heels is consulting. 15% went into finance, 8% healthcare, 7% energy. And then when it comes to regional facts and figures, 75% of HOS grads stay on the west coast. 9% go to the northeast, 5% to the south, 4% Southwest, 2% Midwest, and 1% Mid Atlantic. So Berkeley, a little bit more centered on the western portion of the United States. Wharton numbers 73% seeking employment. So it's so interesting because we saw with, like, Stanford and Harvard last week, there's these lower percentages seeking employment at the top schools. And I think it's because so many of them are doing their own thing, or maybe they're sponsored, et cetera. So 4% of Wharton grads are starting their own business. 97% of Wharton grads who are looking for work had an offer within three months. That figure stands out to me a little bit, because, remember, the other two schools we just talked about were at 90, so 97% have jobs at Wharton. 175,000. Median salary number one, industry, finance, at 37%. That's off a little bit. From 39. 28% went into consulting. That's up 4%. And 17.2% went into tech. The reason I'm sharing that .2 is because last year it was 16.9. So really close, but up a tiny bit. 6% go to healthcare, 4% consumer packaged goods. And then when it comes to where people land geographically, 48% in the northeast, 21% out west, 9% Mid Atlantic, 7% Midwest, 5% south, 5% southwest. And those numbers are pretty stable, although the West coast number is down a little bit. It was 25% last year and it's 21% this year. It seems like all that shift ended up boosting the northeast number, which is up a little bit, too. So, yeah. What do you make of all these? I mean, three different schools and MIT. The biggest kind of industry was consulting, Berkeley Tech, Wharton finance. So that's kind of interesting. But what do you observe in these numbers?
• 18:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think it is interesting. The average salary, Wharton, 175. I think that might even be lower than some of the New York schools.
• 18:38
  Speaker A: It's possible.
• 18:39
  Speaker B: I forget what they were reporting at Columbia and Stern. So the finance number at 37%. I'd love to know the breakout like buy side versus sell side, because we had this conversation last week with Harvard and Stanford, a lot of buy side finance, employment. And Wharton is the one other program that I think could have a good sort of skew in that direction, right? That's correct. But, yeah, 37% for financial services overall. Nothing really surprising here. Obviously, if you go to hass, you're going there because you either on the west coast staying on the west coast, or you want to be on the west coast. So 75%.
• 19:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a big.
• 19:26
  Speaker B: And I would say that skews to northern California probably in quite a high fashion. And tech, as their number one employer makes sense given their proximity to Silicon Valley.
• 19:37
  Speaker A: Right.
• 19:39
  Speaker B: So that's not surprising. Sloan, I thought was quite interesting. Tech, still quite a robust number at 24%. And consulting leading the way at 34%. Like all programs, Graham, these numbers are pretty impressive.
• 19:57
  Speaker A: You can say that again. Yeah, we're kind of splitting hairs getting into the nitty gritty and the nuance and stuff. But you're right, these are all pretty fantastic numbers. Most of the people looking for jobs get jobs, and they're making good money. I mean, these are big numbers. So, yeah, it's just fun to look at these. I think there may be still a few more coming, but those, I feel like we've talked over the last several weeks about most of the top schools, so we'll see if there's some more that materialize. One thing, as I've been saying for the last couple of weeks that Alex and I would like is reviews, ratings, or just nice emails for the holidays. So you can reach out to us at info@clearadmit.com use the subject line wiretaps. But please spread the word about this show as you mean, we have a great sponsor in Emory, Gustwetta, and they've been terrific about sponsoring this show, but we can't have that without listeners. Right? So spread the word. Help us keep this rolling along. Alex, anything you want to add before we get into our candidates for this week?
• 20:55
  Speaker B: No, let's kick on.
• 20:56
  Speaker A: All right, so this is wiretaps, candidate number one. Our first candidate has five schools on the target list, and those schools are Columbia, Tuck, Harvard, Kellogg and Stanford. This candidate's been working in venture capital and they have a wide range of potential target industries. I mean, they mentioned consulting, tech, VC, PE, et cetera. And as a result, the list of companies they're interested in joining is also quite varied. So they probably need to think through that a little bit more. Their GRE is a 327. Their GPA is a 3.1. They've got just three years of work experience and they don't say where they are, but we think they might be in Africa. They want to land in the United States when they're done with business school. And in the notes, they did say that they're 25 years old, been working for three years. A couple of years of those are experience at a YC backed product company. I wonder if that's Y combinator or maybe it was meant to be VC. I don't know, but anyway. And then they have a couple of years experience at a venture capital firm, and it sounds like they've done quite a bit when it comes to sort of african venture capital and things like that. There's some roundtables and things that they've been involved in, and they have done some work with Google, some sort of a program that Google did where they ended up training students for that, and people were now working in tech. So, Alex, you went back and forth with this candidate a little bit to get some additional information, but what do you make of their candidacy?
• 22:33
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think we go along with the assumption they're based in Africa as a black African, which they declared, and I probably suspect that their work experience is super interesting. Let's make that assumption that they've got really strong work experience working in an innovation type role, like you say, YCVC backed product company for two years and then in a venture capital firm and this type of experience is typically really sought after. Right. So I think to gain that type of experience, they probably must be pretty decent. Their Gre score at 327, I think that's going to be competitive for the top programs that they're targeting, Harvard, Kellogg, Columbia, Stanford and Tuck. I do worry a little bit about a couple of things. One is their GPA on a relative scale is slightly lower. Now it's computer science, so that gives them a little bit of a leg up. But still, we get lots of engineers applying with stronger gpas. So that's a potential issue. With three years of work experience, too. They're a little bit earlier in the cycle for applying or maybe for optimizing their candidacy. So they're going to have to really nail that why now aspect, which clearly they probably can. But I do worry because they're targeting the very top programs, that the GPA might be a little bit of a red flag. I don't know what they can do to tackle that, whether it makes sense for someone like themselves to do something like MBA math or something, because there might be a lot of math in that transcript. And also it would depend on the balance of the GRE score that they have. Right. But it might mean that they probably look for maybe one or two more in that sort of top 16 range because right now it's all m seven plus tuck.
• 24:47
  Speaker A: Right.
• 24:47
  Speaker B: And as we know, tuck is in that next tier just outside the m seven. So their list of target schools is pretty impressive.
• 24:56
  Speaker A: Yeah, I could not agree more. Like, and you were saying what could they do? And I would say, yeah, when you have a low GPA, normally you could take outside courses, you could look at schools that are a little bit lower in the rankings. I don't know that I would say to retake the GRe, I mean, 327 is obviously a really good score. Now, I will say places like Stanford, like, we routinely see people with like 330 plus. So, I mean, if they felt like it would be a piece of cake for them to study a bit and get stellar GRE result, I guess that could help. But I think mostly it's about not putting all their eggs in one basket, which in this case is sort of the m seven.
• 25:34
  Speaker B: Right.
• 25:34
  Speaker A: And so I'm a little concerned because I would liken this to a low test score in the sense that, you know, the middle 80 percentile at the m seven schools is probably like three, three to three eight or something, or three. And so I'm worried that they really will be kind of. It's going to be a long shot in terms of being one of those very few candidates who gets in with a lower GPA. But I would want to know more like where did they get this undergraduate degree? Maybe what was their class rank? I mean, there are a lot of other factors that could go into this, so that's worth noting, too. But, yeah. So my advice to them would be maybe cast a wider nat and just go in with your eyes wide open when it comes to the fact that.
• 26:21
  Speaker B: And we don't know much about what they do outside of work, so maybe there's something really interesting there that can help, sort of. Yeah, that would be good for their overall profile.
• 26:30
  Speaker A: Agreed. Yeah. So I know you asked them. They didn't really respond to that. So it'd be good to know if they have a robust set of outside activities, because that would almost be. You kind of need to have that for these top schools, too. So hopefully they have something there. I do want to thank them for submitting their profile. It is a very interesting question because great work experience, potentially interesting personal background, maybe some good activities. And so it's really just the GPA and it's a challenge, but we'll see how it turns out. Hopefully they'll keep us posted. Let's move on, though, and talk about wiretaps. Candidate number two. So our second candidate this week, Alex, this might be the first candidate that we've profiled so far as I know, who's taken the new GMAT, the GMAT focus edition. We'll get into that in a moment. But they have seven schools on the target list, and those schools are Columbia, Georgetown, Kellogg, NYU, UCLA, UNC, and Yale. This person's been working in private equity and alternative asset based lending. They want to pivot and get into consulting in the short term. So they've got Bing and BCG, Ernst and Young, McKinsey on their target list. Their GMAT score is a 655. Before anyone has a heart attack, the new test scores lower than the old test, and it also is in intervals of five. Right. So that's why 655. That's how we made the assumption that this is a new test result and not the traditional GMAT. So their GPA is a 3.6. They've got three years of work experience, they're located in Canada, and they want to land in the United States. And, Alex, do you want to talk about that 655? Because I know you have some context on what that means in terms of maybe the old score and. Yeah, just give us your thoughts on this candidacy overall, too.
• 28:13
  Speaker B: Yeah, 655 GMAT that sends out the sirens at first, and then you're like, well, I better Google to see what the comparison is. Is it apples to apples? I. E. Is it a 656 60 type score, or did GMAC do something different on their scoring chart?
• 28:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, they did.
• 28:35
  Speaker B: So I kind of had a suspicion that they might have done. So I did Google it. And yes, it sort of hits that 700 and 710 marker. So I'm hoping that when schools report their average GMAT scores for the incoming class, they separate out the new to the old, assuming they're going to do that. Graham I mean, I don't want to start making people speculate and get nervous.
• 29:01
  Speaker A: About Will, will they, and I talked to somebody at GMAT at the conference I was at a couple of weeks ago, and they said that it turns out that most people, for example, the new GMAT is available now. And what that means is that next season, so not this season, but next season, like 90 some percent of people submitting a test will have the new test because it turns out that most people.
• 29:22
  Speaker B: No, I disagree.
• 29:23
  Speaker A: Graham well, they're saying people apply shortly. Not too long after that, it won't be as bad as we think in terms of, like, it'll pretty quickly fade away. But anyway, I don't know. We'll see.
• 29:34
  Speaker B: But not forgetting the traditional test will last for five years.
• 29:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. You can use it for five years. That's right.
• 29:40
  Speaker B: Yeah. Anyway, it just makes for an interesting conversation. It is a 655 GMAP, but schools will interpret it as a seven to 710 gmap. Okay. So that'll be good. One thing I like about this candidate, Graham, is their range of target schools is, well, it's a nice mix of m seven, top 16, even a couple of top 20.
• 30:06
  Speaker A: Right.
• 30:06
  Speaker B: So they've really done a good job, I think, of sort of going for the reach, going for the target, and going for the safety.
• 30:15
  Speaker A: Agreed.
• 30:16
  Speaker B: So I give them a lot of credit for that. So three, six GPA. That's decent. I assume their work experience is quite good. Private equity, typically, that's going to be quite strong experience relative to other industries. They double majored in economics and business administration. I'd like to see a little bit more about sort of what makes them tick outside of work. Again, some of their activities that they've discussed seems almost like it's somewhat sort of work college related. But they are an avid racket sports enthusiast.
• 30:55
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 30:55
  Speaker B: If they're a tournament winner, whether it's tennis or squash or one of these more obscure things, it'd be good to just know a bit more about that. But, yeah, I think overall, a pretty decent profile overall. Graham?
• 31:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree. And they're an advisor for their local fraternity chapter. They help young adults who have disabilities. So I think they have some stuff. They kind of rattled it off. And so it'd be good to know how in depth are these activities?
• 31:27
  Speaker B: I did speak a bit out of turn there. I love the young adults with disabilities.
• 31:33
  Speaker A: Activity.
• 31:34
  Speaker B: Sounds like, obviously, then what's interesting to me, or the admissions reader would be why? Right.
• 31:41
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 31:42
  Speaker B: So oftentimes when we donate to a charity or contribute to a cause, a personal experience stimulates that.
• 31:50
  Speaker A: Right, right. So it'd be good to know. Yeah. One question I have for you. This person, they dropped this little comment in there where they said they want to go to consulting and then they want to get back into the asset based lending space, which I understand that they want to get some broad based experience and then return to their roots kind of thing. But then they say in the long term, like more than 15 years from now, they'd like to get into teaching or academia. I noticed you said, okay, well, I don't know if you should tell the schools that or not, but I wondered, what is your rationale? What's your take around that? Because that is something we don't see very often, someone saying they want to teach. Yeah.
• 32:24
  Speaker B: I mean, at the end of the day, I think it's a good aspiration if it's sort of a part time teaching gig. Some people want to go off and do that. I think if it's full time, in the longer run, if you're targeting one of the top MBA programs, they're really looking for people to really shine in the professional arena, even whether that's for profit, nonprofit, government, whatever. And I just don't know. You get the same kudos for saying, well, I want to come back to your school and teach sort of thing. Now, teachers have really good impact to the folks that they're teaching, so I'm not.
• 33:04
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
• 33:05
  Speaker B: Well, you missing the, I mean, I teach, right. So I can't say it's a bad thing, but I don't know for the top programs whether I would broach that. I think it's great that they've got a long term 15 plus goal, and I would stick to that.
• 33:21
  Speaker A: Yeah. I think my view is if it's a side gig, which we see a lot of successful business people coming back to school and doing like a course. So that could be fine. But, yeah, otherwise it's a little bit of a curveball to me. I think this candidate's main hurdle when it comes to getting into some of the top schools on their list might end up being that test score because they will be a little bit, maybe, south of what schools are looking for, but they're not too far and it is the new test and maybe there's some wiggle room. You never know. So we'll see how that all goes. But I want to thank them for sharing their profile and engaging with you on Livewire to kind of answer some additional questions you had. We've got one more candidate this week, so let's move into wiretaps. Candidate number three. So this is a decision wire entry, Alex, that you picked, which tells me that we're now into that kind of part of the season. I love this. This is where instead of profiling someone's candidacy, we look at the outcome and usually it's a situation where the person doesn't know which school to attend. So I'll give you the stats on this person and I can't wait to hear what you think they should do. So they applied to Tuck, Kellogg and Darden. Okay. And it turns out that they were waitlisted at Kellogg and admitted to Dartmouth where they were also offered a $40,000 scholarship. And then they were also admitted to Uva, Darden, but without any money. They're going to be starting school this fall. So they got to make this decision. They want to get into either consulting or investment banking. So they don't seem to quite know yet which of those two, their GMAT score was a 740 and their GPA was a 3.53, in case you're curious. And they said, I don't know that they're actually on the waitlist of Kellogg. I may have misspoke. I think they said they're still waiting on the Kellogg results. So they may know that now because Kellogg's been issuing decisions all last week, right? So they may know now, but they said, if I get an offer without financial aid at Kellogg, should I take that over Tuck with forty k? And they're saying, I'm assuming it's Tuck versus Darden, that between Tuck versus Darden, Tuck is the better choice, especially with the money. But I'm trying to understand the Kellogg versus tuck comparison. Of course, Kellogg is an m seven, but Tuck is an Ivy League. Given my post MBA goal of consulting, not sure which is better. So that's where they kind of left it. And you chimed in and then Elliot on our team chimed in. So what do you make of this, Alex?
• 35:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, they're waiting on Kellogg's result as they posted this. I think they got admitted to Kellogg. If I'm interpreting some of the other conversations I've seen, but who knows whether they did or not. It's interesting because if you think of three programs that are really geared for consulting, they said consulting and investment banking, but let's focus on consulting.
• 36:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, because they did say that seems to be their first goal.
• 36:15
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think know Kellogg, Tuck and Darden are three really programs for consulting. So I admire them for their selection of target programs. Now, getting money at Tuck versus no money at Darden, you could argue that Tuck is probably in the tier above anyway. But the money, whether it is or it isn't, depending on how you would think of tiers, that money, I think is enough to make Tuck a bit more attractive. You would then look at maybe some geographic sort of things. Does Darden feed into a certain geography better than tuck? If you have a certain geographic interest? But, yeah, I think Tuck's probably the winner in that sort of face off because, again, Tuck is offering 40,000, offering some money, and it's nice to be able to see 40,000 because usually when I clicked on them, it would hyperlink over and drive me nuts on our site. But that's fixed. So I can see the 40,000. That's good. Yeah. So the question is, if they got admitted to Kellogg with no money, should they go to Kellogg or top plus 40,000? And I think that on the whole, that's a very personal decision. There's no one's the winner versus the other in that I think that little bit of money at Tuck does elevate Tuck a little bit. And I would argue that Kellogg is in the higher tier. Now, I know that Tuck's an Ivy League, Kellogg's an m seven, but we're talking about MBA programs in my book, Kellogg, Trump's Tuck from that tiering structure. But Elliot brings up the good points that, again, geography might be the factor that drives the decision. If they want to go to the west coast or the midwest, then Kellogg, if they want to be on the east coast, then that does make Tuck more attractive.
• 38:22
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think you made a really good point with respect to that. I mean, obviously there are graduates of both programs everywhere, but Tuck has a bit of a competitive advantage in the northeast, I would argue, especially that's where that Ivy League network kind of plays a role. Kellogg, you know, does an amazing job placing people out west and obviously in the it. I don't know. I mean, that's also maybe a fit question, too, right? These programs aren't of the same size, and so I would obviously go to the welcome events and figure it out from there, too, in case they really feel a certain affinity to one versus the other. But, yeah. Nice problem. What do we call these champagne problems. Right.
• 39:04
  Speaker B: What about throwing an app in. In round two, Grant?
• 39:06
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. That's interesting. So they didn't apply. They only applied to those three schools. So you're saying, oh, what about throw an app in at, say, HBS or something? Although if they want to do consulting, some of these schools might even be really well suited. So, yeah, I don't know.
• 39:25
  Speaker B: It's too tempting, though. Harvest Stanford walk if you get in one of those.
• 39:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's tricky.
• 39:31
  Speaker B: I think all bets are off in terms of MBB recruiting, so that might be a consideration, too. It's great to be able to apply in round two knowing you've got great in round one.
• 39:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's. Yeah. So, anyway, very interesting quandary. We'll probably see more of these. I encourage everyone to post to decisionwire with your results, and we have a lot of fun talking about these. So, in any event, Alex, we've done it. We've gone through your candidates and we didn't even talk about any of the craziness happening in higher ed with presidents being maybe fired and everything else that's been going on in the world. But I guess we have many weeks to come to discuss all kinds of issues. So I'll be back in a week if you're willing to pick out some candidates to discuss.
• 40:12
  Speaker B: Very good. Stay safe, everyone. Take care.