Round 1 applicants to the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business can expect to receive invitations to interview today, according to Ross Director of Admissions Soojin Kwon. In a recent post to the Ross Admissions Blog, Kwon shared that all Round 1 interview invitations will go out today, including for those applying through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Management. The school’s associate admissions directors spent the past weekend completing their review of applicants, and the students who conduct interviews on behalf of the school entered their availability into the interview scheduler. Applicants will be able to schedule an interview time as soon as they receive their invitations, Kwon added.
Ross this year is officially debuting a new team-based activity as part of the application process, an optional component designed to give the admissions team more insight into how candidates engage with other people. This was something Kwon and her team felt they didn’t get enough of a sense of from the one-on-one interviews. For the first 10 minutes of the half-hour exercise, candidates will each be given two random words to weave into a story to share with their group. (The groups are made up of four to six candidates.) Working together as a group, participants then spend the remaining 20 minutes connecting their word pairs into a business challenge and solution to present to an observer.
No advance preparation is needed, and candidates will be evaluated individually, not as a group, based on how they interact with others, Kwon said. “We’re not looking for ‘leaders’ in the sense that many people may expect – i.e., it’s not about ‘airtime’ or having the ‘best idea,’” she wrote. “It’s about how you work with other people on a project or task. We’re looking at two things: communication skills and teamwork skills.”
As part of a video Q&A about the team activity, Kwon stressed that it really is optional and that not participating won’t hurt an applicant in the admissions process. “But you’ll be missing another opportunity to make a positive impression,” she said. “If I wanted to go to Ross, I’d do it,” she added.
On the Ross Admissions Blog, Kwon shared that the second-year MBA students she recently trained to conduct admissions interviews did a mock team interview as part of the training. . “Having worked on numerous teams throughout their first year (MAP being just one example), they saw the value and relevance of gauging candidates’ skills on key team dimensions,” she wrote.
Read Kwon’s blog for more on Ross Round 1 interviews and the team-based activity.
