Today’s guest is Soojin Kwon, Director of Admissions at Michigan Ross. Soojin earned her Bachelor’s at Yale, her MPP at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and her MBA from Ross. She worked at Deloitte Consulting before joining Ross’s admissions team in 2004, and has been Director since 2006. She writes an outstanding blog and has an equally outstanding YouTube channel, which I highly recommend. Welcome, Soojin!

Can you give us an overview of Ross’s fulltime MBA program? [1:20]

There are three things that differentiate us from other programs.

First is our focus on learning by doing. If you’re someone who likes to get their hands dirty and learns best by experiential learning, this is a great program for you.

Second, we have a great strength across the board in business specializations. (USNews ranked us second behind Stanford for most top-ranked specializations.)

And third, being part of the University of Michigan, we have access to top-ranked graduate programs across disciplines (law, education, etc.), so there are a lot of interdisciplinary education opportunities.

What’s new at Ross? [2:50]

We have a new dean! Scott DeRue, who was a longtime management and organizations professor here. Since he came from inside Ross, he really knows our community here.

He’s creating a vision for our students – he wants students to have experience advising, investing in, starting up, and managing a business. The idea is to give students all those opportunities while they’re students.

Are all four of those elements currently part of every MBA student’s experience, or is this being developed? [5:15]

The only part that is currently required is advising experience (through our MAP program). The rest are available as elective or co-curricular opportunities. What Dean DeRue envisions is building it out – working with companies that envision our students helping manage their companies, etc.

You mentioned MAP, one of Ross’s signature programs. What differentiates this program from other b-schools’ experiential learning/consulting projects? [7:00]

MAP is a mini consulting project during the last quarter of the first year. Students work full time with three to five other students on a real world consulting challenge. It’s a seven-week project, working full time with an organization to help solve a business challenge.

Students select projects based on their interests, career plans, geographical interests, etc. It comes right before the internship, so it also helps them hit the ground running when they start their internship.

What makes it unique is that it’s full time, and at seven weeks it’s almost the length of an internship. The breadth of the projects we offer also sets the program apart. More than half of the projects are outside the US.

Can you give an example of a project? [9:40]

One cool example was a cruise line that needed help figuring out how to increase on-board revenue, as well as improve the onboarding process. They brought the student team onboard to observe every step of the process.

We have many market entry projects – how do we break into a new market with a given product.

There are projects in Israel, Ireland, etc. A lot of tech projects, an increasing number of social impact projects, and startups.

We work with alums to help us source projects. We’re looking for projects that will really interest the students.

Dean DeRue has also announced lifelong tuition free executive education for grads. Why? [11:55]

His goal is to make a Ross degree a long-term relationship – not just a two-year transaction.