The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is offering college seniors a rare second chance to make a first impression—announcing this week that it has added an August 1st deadline for its Future Year Admissions MBA Program. The program, first announced last summer, is geared toward undergraduate students in their final year of study or students who have gone on directly from college into a fifth-year master’s program.
It originally featured a single May 1st deadline, but Katherine Alford, who leads admissions for the new program, shared in a video yesterday that the school has added a second deadline to give more time to interested students who weren’t able to complete the application during their busy senior year. “So all of you seniors who thought you were going to be able to apply but got caught up with graduation, exams, finding a job—you now have three more months to study and prepare for the GMAT or GRE and pull your application together,” Alford shared.
Similar to Harvard Business School’s 2+2 Program, Darden’s Future Year Admissions Program is designed to help get college students to start thinking about business school, in part so they will study for and take the GMAT exam while they are still in a test prep mode. Applicants can apply while they are still in school—or soon after they graduate, thanks to the addition of a second deadline—and then opt to defer admission to Darden by between two and four years while they gain work experience.
According to Alford, the decision to launch the new program was prompted in part by the fact that Darden Dean Scott Beardsley lives on “the Lawn” at UVA, a coveted string of dorm rooms inhabited by UVA undergraduate seniors who go through a competitive application process to secure them. Beardsley, a veteran of consulting firm McKinsey, last year replaced long-serving Dean Bob Bruner and took up residence in a pavilion on the Lawn. “His neighbors are all fourth-year students at UVA, and I think he has been really impressed with the talent he has seen,” Alford said in an interview with Clear Admit last summer just as the new program was being announced.
To apply, interested students complete the same application form used by applicants to the traditional full-time MBA, although letters of recommendation from faculty members—generally discouraged for applicants who have been in the workforce—are accepted. The final deadline to submit applications for the Future Year Admissions Program is Tuesday, August 1, 2017.
To learn more about the program, don’t miss this article from the Clear Admit archives: “Darden Launches New ‘Future Year Admissions’ Deferred MBA Program.”
