In this week's MBA Admissions podcast we began by discussing the next chapter of the 2024-25 MBA admissions cycle, which begins on January 3rd with Round 2 deadlines for UPenn / Wharton and London Business School.

Graham highlighted an admissions tip which focuses on the GMAC standard letter of recommendation which has been adopted by many leading MBA programs. This format simplifies the admissions process for recommenders by standardizing the questions to which they need to respond.

Graham then discussed a new Real Humans that features students from Toronto / Rotman.

Graham also presented the career placement reports from Stanford and Michigan / Ross.  We are continuing to see a trend that shows that a higher percentage of MBA graduates are moving on to financial services careers; Ross experienced a significant decline in consulting placement. Stanford is also reporting consulting placements are down for their Class of 2025 interns from last summer, which may be an early signal for next year’s career placement report.

For this week, for the candidate profile review portion of the show, Alex selected two ApplyWire entries and one DecisionWire entry:

This week’s first MBA admissions candidate is planning to apply for next season. They are a cloud engineer with a computer science major and psychology minor. They also have interesting activities outside of work. Their GRE is 324, and we think it might make sense to try to improve that score.

This week’s second MBA candidate is only targeting two programs, Berkeley / Haas and Stanford, which we think is very risky. Their GRE score is 318, which will present significant challenges for these two programs.

The final MBA candidate is deciding between UPenn / Wharton, Chicago / Booth and Yale SOM. They also have scholarship offers at each program to factor into their final decision.

This episode was recorded in Paris, France and Cornwall, England. It was produced and engineered by the fabulous Dennis Crowley in Philadelphia, USA. Thanks to all of you who’ve been joining us and please remember to rate and review this show wherever you listen!