In this week's MBA Admissions podcast we began by discussing the upcoming MBA admissions season. This week, Dartmouth / Tuck, IESE and Imperial Business School have their Round 1 application deadlines; Duke / Fuqua is scheduled to release its interview invites for its Early Action Round.

Graham noted that our second livestream AMA is scheduled for this Tuesday on YouTube; here’s the link to Clear Admit’s YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/cayoutubelive.  Graham then highlighted the ongoing September series of admissions events. The third session is on Wednesday, and includes Berkeley / Haas, INSEAD, London Business School, Michigan / Ross and UNC / Kenan / Flagler. Signups for this series are here: https://bit.ly/cainsidemba

We then had a detailed discussion on the recently released 2025-26 MBA rankings from LinkedIn and Bloomberg / Business Week.

Graham noted two recently published MBA admissions-related tips that focus on completing the business school application data forms, and whether it is advisable to skip the GMAT or GRE and seek a test waiver.  We continued our series of profiling star MBA professors. This week we feature two professors from Columbia Business School and Northwestern / Kellogg. We then discussed our first student-focused Real Humans for this season, from UNC / Kenan Flagler.

Finally, we had our first class profile to review, from the Duke / Fuqua Class of 2027.

For this week, for the candidate profile review portion of the show, Alex selected three ApplyWire entries:

This week’s first MBA admissions candidate graduated from the Naval Academy and was a division 1 athlete. They appear to have a very decent career in the navy. Unfortunately, they have a low GPA and a modest GRE score.

This week’s second MBA candidate is from Mexico and targeting Dartmouth / Tuck and several Canada-based programs. They are a chemical engineer graduate with several years of business experience.

The final MBA candidate has recently had a fourteen-month break from work. They also want to waive the GMAT. They do appear to have strong prior experience and academics, but we caution against the waiver.

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!