It gives me great pleasure to welcome Kellee Scott. This is Kellee’s first time on AST, but she is no stranger to Accepted, having participated in our old online chats.

Kellee earned her bachelors in business at the University of Miami and worked in business for companies like Unilever and Ernst and Young. Then she became a Trojan through and through, joining the Marshall admissions team in 2001. She also earned her MBA at USC. In addition to her duties today as Senior Associate Director at Marshall, she has served on the Boards of the Forte Foundation and The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management.

Can you give an overview of the USC Marshall FT MBA program for those listeners who aren’t that familiar with it? Please focus on its more distinctive elements. [2:40]

The flexibility of the program is one aspect – we really are a “Make Your Own MBA.” We start with a pretty tight core but students start taking electives pretty early on in the program, to provide breadth and depth, and students are also welcome to take classes outside of Marshall.

Communications is part of the core, which is rare for MBA programs at this point. We feel it is a critical component for success - knowledge and expertise don’t matter if you can’t convey your ideas. In fact, The Bloomberg BusinessWeek jobs skills report named us as a school consulting companies love to come to because of our students’ great communications skills, and this will remain part of our core.

We also were the first school to require international travel as part of the core, so everyone at Marshall needs a passport since you will be going overseas. Additionally, we have an intensive case competition. Even if you are not going into consulting it helps with leadership and critical thinking skills, and allows you to apply things you are learning very quickly. Finally, we are the only MBA program that presents at the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), another major project where students present to CEOs of APEC.

When I think of Marshall’s strengths I think of entrepreneurship, media and entertainment, and global business, especially on the Pacific Rim. What else should I be thinking of and why? [5:55]

We have a very active tech club, and the tech industry is now 2nd to consulting for MBA hires. Being here in LA, which we call Silicon Beach, is great because of the tight start-up culture, which is very important to lots of MBAs. There has been lots of growth in the interest in gaming, and it has grown such that our Gaming Club was created as an offshoot of our Tech Club. Also, Business Analytics is part of our core. We were one of the first schools to add it, and we now have a new Masters in Business Analytics, and MBA students can take additional courses in that area as electives, or can concentrate in it if they like.

USC Marshall states that its four core values are: Transformational courage, collaborative ambition, impactful service, and unwavering integrity. How do those values influence admissions decisions? [7:49]

The wonderful thing about those values is they came from our students. As we look at applications in the admissions process we assess these values in different ways. With transformational courage, we are looking for applicants who transform and find ways to stretch themselves - constantl...