CA: How many essays do you think you may have read in your years working at admissions? And of those, how many do you remember now? What makes an essay memorable?
SK: Gosh. Over the course of thirteen years, it’s probably tens of thousands. I’ve never really counted. The vast majority of essays are pretty good. But the ones that stick out are the ones where applicants revealed a lack of judgement and maturity. Like the applicant who was a coach for a Special Olympics softball team and decided not to play a couple of his quote/unquote weaker players so that the team could win. Or the applicant who talked about passing on an opportunity to sleep with Miss America. I didn’t need to know that. There was a period when admissions consultants must have been coaching applicants to respond to our “tell us about yourself in 100 words or less essay” with the creative approach of, “if I were a fruit I would be a…” because we got dozens of those essays. And the chances of people stumbling onto that one their own are pretty slim.
CA: What three pieces of advice would you offer a candidate preparing for a Ross interview and specifically the team exercise?
SK: For the one- on-one interview, they should be prepared to talk about anything on their résumé. That will be the only information the interviewer will have about you. Be prepared to talk about how you accomplished the things noted in your résumé and why you made the choices that you did. Secondly, prepare questions to ask your interviewer. Ask questions about the things that are important to you. You’ll have time at the end to do that. And don’t waste it asking questions about things that could be answered on our website or things you think you should ask. Ask about the things that are on your list of criteria in choosing schools. And the last piece of advice I have, for both the one-on-one interview and the team exercise, is to be yourself, so you can end up at the school that’s the right fit for you.
CA: Are there changes in the works to the admissions process at Ross currently? Can you give us any hints if there are? But also, what would motivate changes? Are there points you’re trying to address?
SK: As a matter of fact, the team spent half a day yesterday in a planning and review session, to look back on how the application year went. How did the essays that we had, the qualities that we were looking for, the interview questions that we recommended, did they help elicit the kind of information that we were looking for? And so everybody on the admissions committee gave input on what was useful, what could have been better, and how could we change the questions, the team exercise. And then the interview, what we look for and how we ask it. So we’re in the process of doing that now. I expect there will be minor changes in the essay questions. It’s probably going to be just tweaks. And the team exercise, we’re taking a look at that. Should we continue to do the four word thing or should we do a different approach? But we will still be looking for how students work together, how they communicate, how they interact with each other. And then in the interviews, I think it will be a different kind of training for the interviewers, based on what we want feedback on. Each year we’re tweaking how we set up the evaluation form for them and what we ask them to look for. And in some years they’ve written pages and pages of evaluation, which was time consuming for them and not necessarily the most insightful for us. So we are trying to come up with prompts that will help them think more clearly about what to look for in the responses.
CA: Is there anything that we haven’t touched on, in these questions so far, that you think is really important to understanding admissions at Ross? Or that you just want to highlight, that we haven’t spent sufficient time on?
SK: Well, I think applicants probably think we’re not serious when we say we really want to get to know you as a whole person and that fit is really important and it’s a two way street. Applicants are so worried about getting into every school that they apply to rather than thinking through ‘what are the right schools for me to even apply to in the first place,’ ‘have I done enough research to find out is this the kind of place I could see myself, where I’ll thrive, where I will enjoy going to school with my classmates, and where I can achieve my career goals and my personal goals,’ as well. So, doing a lot of research up front, I think, can be really helpful to them. And save them time at the end when they get into a bunch of schools and they have to decide, ‘where do I want to end up, where am I going to enroll this fall.’ So if they start off with a clear list of what’s important to them and what they’re looking to get out of that experience, that’s going to serve them really well, if they do that before they start the research of schools. So that it’s kind of untainted and it’s true… It’s their true North. As opposed to, ‘that looks shiny, and that looks shiny, and that looks shiny, so I’ll add all these things to my list.’ And my friend, who’s also applying to business school, has these five things on his or her list. So maybe I should add those, too. And then pretty soon you’ve got a list of thirty, forty things. And how do you compare on that basis?
So really starting off with self-reflection, and thinking about, ‘why am I doing this, why am I going to take two years out of my career to go and do business school, and what do I want to get out of it?’ ‘Where do I want to be at the end, and what do I want to look like? How will I transform myself?’
This post was transcribed from a recorded interview by Clear Admit’s former Editor in Chief, Jeanette Brown, of Michigan Ross’s Managing Director of Full-time MBA Admissions and Program, Soojin Kwon. Edits made for clarity and context.
Clear Admit Resources
As you work on your Ross MBA essays and application, we encourage you to consider all of Clear Admit’s Ross School of Business offerings:
- Michigan Ross School of Business Profile on the Clear Admit website: up-to-date advice and admissions information
- Clear Admit LiveWire: admissions updates submitted in real time by applicants to Michigan / Ross
- Clear Admit DecisionWire: school selections in real-time by admits to Michigan / Ross
