This week we welcome Christie St. John, Director of Admissions at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Christie earned her PhD in French and Italian from Vanderbilt and worked at Vanderbilt as Director of International Relations before becoming the Senior Associate Director of Admissions at Tuck. Christie returned to Vanderbilt as Director of MBA admission in 2012.

Can you give an overview of the Vanderbilt 2-year MBA program with a focus on its distinctive elements? [1:54]

Two things make our program distinctive. First, we are on a modular system, instead of semester, so we have seven week mods. Students get through all core courses in the first year, and they also start taking electives during their second mods. Students have three required courses and one elective in Mod 2, two and two in Mod 3, and in Mod 4, one required course and three electives. Second, we have the Leadership Development Program, which is distinctive in that we use executive coaches who have worked with mid-level managers from Fortune 500 companies and we pair up the students with coaches in the fields they are planning to go into. For example, if you are interested in going into finance, you would be paired with someone who had worked with businesses on Wall Street. The coaching is included in the program, and strictly optional, but 80+ percent of students participate. Students also work on their own leadership development plan for the entire two years and also as alums. We have staff devoted to leadership development for each of our degree programs.

Vanderbilt also has several one-year programs including a Master of Management in Health Care, Master of Accounting, Master of Finance, and a Master of Marketing. Can you touch on these programs and how they differ from the MBA? [5:00]

The main difference is that those programs are for people just graduating from undergrad without much experience. The Master of Finance is quite competitive and they do look for internships and quant proficiency – the GMAT is required. The Master of Marketing is new as of last year and growing fast, and the Master of Accounting is also quite new. Each degree program has their own dedicated admissions person, faculty member and career service person, and for the last five years we have had 100% placement with the Master of Finance. The Master of Accounting also has 100% placement as we work with the Big Four accounting firms on projects and early placement. The Master of Marketing is so new we don’t have stats yet. Each program is one year long. Graduates of these programs can get experience and then come back to Vanderbilt and get their MBA in three semesters with a guaranteed scholarship.

One exception is the Master of Management in Health Care, which was launched several years ago for people in the industry with 8-10 years of experience.

What’s new at Vanderbilt? [8:07]

We have the Turner Family Center for Social Enterprise, which resulted from the Turner family having given us a large grant to pull all of our coursework and programs that relate to the non-profit industry under one umbrella. The person directing that is a graduate who started a minority business lending institution when graduating and finds projects all over the local area as well as internationally. Our students work with these organizations to find a business solution to a social problem. If students are interested in going into this area when they graduate, the director of the program, Mario Avila, will help them with their job search.

Project Pyramid is the international projects that we do. This is an interdisciplinary trans-university initiative, which means not just a business school project.