CA: What aspect of your MBA program do you wish applicants knew more about?
JB: You mean in addition to all the things I just mentioned? That’s such a great question. I think that students, until they get here, don’t fully appreciate that even though we are a small program there are so many ways they can personalize and tailor the program to meet their needs.
Of course, we have all the core courses in finance, brand management, consulting—but you can also pair those with really cool things like entrepreneurship. Or you can do a deep dive into social enterprise. What’s more—you will have an impact. You are going to be working with faculty members in that area—not with TAs—and you are going to have the opportunity to really make the program your own. So the first thing I want applicants to know is that even though we are small, we offer so much.
The second thing I wish applicants knew more about is how valuable the faculty members are in terms of really wanting to have a relationship with students. That is really unique and makes this a really special place. I love it when I walk down the hall and I see students conferring with the faculty. I see it all the time—and that just can’t happen at a school where there are 900 new MBAs students, or even 500.
Finally, Atlanta is great place to live. It is a beautiful city with a lot of really interesting neighborhoods. And Emory is in the city but right in a residential area. So it’s beautiful, and yet it’s just a 20-minute drive from Coca-Cola headquarters, 30 minutes from Delta, 40 minutes from UPS. Atlanta has a lot of residential areas—a lot of green areas—interspersed throughout the city.
I’m a foodie and there are some fantastic restaurants here—from diners and hole-in-the-wall places to five-star amazing farm-to-table restaurants. There is a great variety of really high-quality places—and many of them have a very interesting feel to them.
Atlanta also has a lot of neat festivals. And we do have all four seasons. It does get hot in the summer—I won’t deny that—but the spring and fall are absolutely beautiful. And there are always festivals going on. There is a food truck festival, arts and crafts festivals, a nice theater community, lots and lots of music venues. The music scene here is very strong—that is another thing I really enjoy. Any act that is going to tour, they will play in Atlanta for sure. And there are lots of really wonderful venues for music. Atlanta is also relatively affordable relative to other major cities.
CA: If you could change one thing about the MBA application process, what would it be and why?
JB: I do think it is a very holistic process. I am not unlike candidates in that I wish that we could get rid of standardized tests. I don’t like them any more than the candidate does. But they are helpful given the variety of applicants that we have. We literally have applicants from all over the world and from hundreds of different undergraduate institutions. The tests are very helpful to us in coming up with a straightforward way to say, “What is this person’s current quantitative capability?” That is how we really use the test. So it is helpful, but it is not the be all and end all. I just really hope that candidates realize that selective programs are looking at so many different things—and the quality of the work experience, the leadership roles, the interpersonal skills are so important.
We do accept the GRE as well as the GMAT. In the past cycle about 10 percent of the folks took the GRE. We are seeing more—and it is fine for candidates to take the GRE. Having said that, we do put GRE scores, without exception, into this GMAT calculator in order to get a predictive score. So in terms of how we review it, we review it with that comparable score in mind. With the GRE, as well as with the GMAT, we are looking more at the quant results.
