What every applicant to Georgetown McDonough should know [Show summary]

Shelly Heinrich, Associate Dean of MBA Admissions at Georgetown McDonough, explores what’s new with the school’s full-time and flex MBA programs and how applicants can stand out to the admissions committee.

Make your application to Georgetown McDonough shine! [Show notes]

Interested in an MBA focused on international business with rigorous academics and a supportive collaborative culture? Pull up a chair. Today's guest is the Dean of Admissions at Georgetown McDonough's MBA program, and it fits your bill perfectly.

Shelly Heinrich is Associate Dean of MBA Admissions and Director of Marketing at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. Shelly has been leading Georgetown's admissions efforts since 2014 and became Associate Dean in 2017. She earned her BBA from Texas Christian University, her master's in educational administration from UT Austin, and her executive MBA from Georgetown McDonough.

Can you give us an overview of Georgetown's full-time and flex MBA programs for those listeners who aren't that familiar with these programs, and focus on their more distinctive elements? [2:13]

The great thing about our full-time and flex program is that they are both 54-credit degrees, and they both follow the same exact curriculum. You have the same access to the career center, which is unique sometimes for a part-time MBA, the same access to professors and the global consulting experience. The real difference is the timing and the format. The full-time MBA is a standard full-time MBA. It's 20 months with an internship the summer between year one and year two. Our flex MBA program, you can complete in two and a half to five years, really crafting your own schedule. If you want to take two to three classes at a time, you can speed it up. If you want to stretch it out, taking maybe one or two classes at a time, you can do that as well. With the flex MBA, you also have different course delivery options in order to make it more flexible. You can choose between electives that are on Saturday, that are in the evening, that are hybrid and also do more of our intensive learning experiences, the intense one-week electives to get an entire credit knocked out. You do have a little bit more flexibility. But in general, both are standard MBAs and when you graduate, your degree says “MBA.”

What's new at McDonough, other than the pandemic and the new reality that we're all dealing with? [3:35]

What I love so much about Georgetown and our Dean Almeida is his energy. Even while we were dealing with the pandemic, we were still continuing to forge ahead and launch the new initiatives that we had wanted to launch and then even launch some new ones. We launched in December our MBA advanced access program, which is our deferral program. We launched an MBA mentorship program, which is a mentorship program between alumni and MBA students to get professional mentorship and guidance. Our students launched a McDonough Talks podcast to give you the real story of what it's like to be a student.

Then,