Interview with Laurel Grodman, Director of Admissions for Analytics and Evaluation at Yale SOM [Show Summary]

Laurel Grodman, Director of Admissions for Analytics and Evaluation at Yale SOM, shares her perspective on how Yale differentiates itself from its competition and what it takes to be a successful applicant. The school has experienced explosive year-over-year growth in application volume for the last five years. Let’s learn what Laurel sees for the future.

Yale SOM: The Curriculum, Admissions, and What the Future Holds [Show Notes]

It gives me great pleasure to welcome for the first time to Admissions Straight Talk Laurel Grodman, Director of Admissions, Analytics and Evaluation at Yale School of Management. Laurel is a Yalie through and through. She earned her BA at Yale University in 2002 and her MBA from Yale SOM in 2006. After working for Citigroup and Unilever she returned to Yale as Senior Associate Director for Career Development in 2010. In 2014, she became the Director of Admissions for Analytics and Evaluation.

Let’s start with the basics. Can you give me a brief overview of the full-time MBA program at Yale SOM, focusing on differentiators? [1:59]

I like to start with our mission, which is to educate leaders for business and society, which is the founding mission of the school and brings everything together. That mission in and of itself is a differentiator in terms of the candidates it attracts and where alumni focus their careers, but in addition to that there are three things:

1. We aim to be the business school most integrated with its home university. You really are part of Yale more broadly, with access to classes across the entire university. You can choose electives in any number outside of the school and we encourage students to take advantage of that.

2. Our objective is to be the most distinctly global business school in the U.S. We have a global studies requirement so every student will engage globally at least once. That is fueled by our membership in the Global Network for Advanced Management which is a network established six years ago that brings together 30 business schools from around the world to provide travel options and global experiences.

3. Our integrated curriculum: we teach the business fundamentals and we teach them well, but beyond that we go a step further in terms of how it all works together. Beyond traditional core curriculum we organize around organizational perspective. It’s much more deliberate in terms of how courses work together – with co-teaching, and experts from across entire university. Organizational problems require you to pull from a bunch of different areas so that is how we like to teach it to students.

What’s new at Yale SOM? [7:05]

We’ve continued our streak of strong new faculty hires in all areas. We’ve also continued to build our master degree programs. We have a masters in systemic risk, and we are bringing in our inaugural class in Master of Management Studies in Global Business and Society, a small but probably growing program for early career students. This brings an additional voice to campus, more perspective to the class which is great. We are also in the midst of a search for our next dean, in its earlier stages - more info gathering at this point.

Is the global nature of Yale mostly due to the network of 30 ...