MIT Sloan MBA News
Get the latest MBA news from MIT Sloan.
Published: November 8, 2015
New Forté Data Shows Impressive Gains in Female MBA Enrollment
Women make up at least 40 percent of the MBA class at 12 leading U.S. business schools this year, compared to just five last year, according to new data released today by the Forté Foundation, a nonprofit consortium of business schools and companies working to increase opportunities for women in business.
“In 2011, less than a third of MBA students were women. Today we’re inching closer to 40 percent in the United States and working to close the gap significantly in another five years,” says Forté Executive Director Elissa Sangster. “Every percentage point gain is not only hard earned, but something to celebrate, and should go a long way in building the senior leadership pipeline at companies and on boards,” she continues.
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Published: October 28, 2015
Understanding the MBA Admissions Interview, Part IV
We’ve tackled open versus invitation-only, blind versus non-blind and the newer team-based discussion interview. What’s left? In this, our final post in our MBA admissions interview series, we’re going to take a closer look at a few of the anomalies in the interview arena—special approaches thus far embraced by just one or two schools. Of course, the team-based discussion was itself an anomaly not so many years ago, so these could also be harbingers of the next big thing.
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Published: October 21, 2015
MIT Sloan Launches Inclusive Innovation Competition to Improve Economic Opportunity for All Workers
As tempting as it may be to believe that a rising tide of technological innovation will lift all boats, too often low and middle income workers are left behind—or even harmed by advances that otherwise benefit business, economy and society. To meet the challenge of “inclusive innovation”—innovation that improves economic opportunity for all—MIT Sloan School of Management earlier this month launched a new competition designed to crowd source entrepreneurial and innovative energy toward this end.
The MIT Inclusive Innovation Competition (IIC), funded by the Rockefeller and Joyce Foundations, was announced on October 7th as part of the launch of Solve, a new cross-disciplinary program at MIT to address the greatest challenges facing the world today. IIC is a joint effort of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and the MIT Innovation Initiative (MITii).
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Published: October 11, 2015
MIT Sloan Admissions Committee Shares Round 1 Updates
In case you missed it, MIT Sloan School of Management last week shared updates from its Admissions Committee, which is busy reviewing Round 1 applications. The committee will begin sending out interview invitations in mid-October (that’s this week!) and will continue through November 9th. Every applicant, whether invited to interview or not, will receive an updated status on that date.
The interview period is slated to begin October 26th and continue through December 4th, the school reports. Applicants will have the choice between interviewing on campus in Cambridge or in a city near where they currently live. The Admissions Committee plans to visit approximately 15 cities, both within the United States and abroad, to conduct off-campus interviews. “We will give applicants as much notice as possible when scheduling interviews,” reads the website.
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Published: October 1, 2015
Fridays from the Frontline: MIT Sloan MBA Student, Veteran Discusses Humility and Success
It’s Friday, and once again we’re bringing you insights straight from current MBA applicants and students as part of our Fridays from the Frontline column. Our contributor this week, MIT Sloan School of Management second-year Brian Kirk (pictured above, second from left), knows his fair share about the frontline, both figurative and real, having served as a U.S. Navy submariner prior to business school.
In the post that follows, he offers some incredible insights about humility and its impact on success, drawn both from his time at Sloan and his military service. Worth the read. Kirk and other leaders of the MIT Sloan Veterans Association just hosted Veteran's Ambassadors Day, a day of programming and activities for prospective MBA applicants from the armed forces. They are planning a second Ambassadors Day in the spring, so if you are an active duty service person or veteran considering business school, check it out.
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Published: September 28, 2015
Career Services Q&A: Sue Kline of MIT Sloan’s Career Development Office
What does the job search look like for MBA students? How does it unfold at each individual school? The Clear Admit Career Services Q&A Series is designed to answer those questions and more—and we’re kicking off the newest round with an interview with Sue Kline, co-senior director of the Career Development Office (CDO) at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Kline kicked off her own career working as part of Sloan’s CDO more than 30 years ago. Five years in, she left to pursue a graduate degree and then worked for more than a decade in human relations at Boston Consulting Group and Hewlett-Packard, learning the industry side of things intimately before coming home again to Sloan 14 years ago.
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Published: September 1, 2015
The Inside Scoop on the Forté Forums: Great Networking for Prospective Female MBA Applicants
From Atlanta to Seattle and back, Forté Forums have been taking place around the country, giving prospective female MBA applicants a terrific opportunity to connect with admissions staff from dozens of leading business schools, hear from current students and alumnae and meet fellow applicants.
The Forté Forums are an annual event series put on by the Forté Foundation, a consortium of leading companies and business schools committed to helping launch women into fulfilling careers in business. Taking place in 10 U.S. cities as well as Toronto and London, these free events kicked off on August 17th and will culminate with a final event in October.
To truly understand what prospective female MBA applicants can hope to gain from attending a forum, we dropped in on one ourselves late last month in Boston. The cluster of professionally dressed young women in the lobby of the Liberty Mutual Building on St. James Avenue provided a preview of what we would discover upstairs. After a brief and efficient check-in process, attendees were given a package of materials and welcomed into a large banquet hall, where admissions staff, current students and alumnae from leading business schools stood ready to answer their questions.
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MIT Sloan Admissions to Host Women’s Week, August 3rd – 6th
The MIT Sloan School of Management admissions team has planned a week of events in early August designed to showcase the diverse paths and accomplishments of its women students and graduates to prospective female applicants. The week, which will take place from August 3rd through 6th, will include a Google Hangout open to prospective applicants anywhere in the world, as well as alumnae panels in five U.S. cities.
“Our female students bring unique backgrounds, perspectives and beliefs to MIT Sloan, building a diverse campus community filled with opportunity,” reads an announcement about the events on the school’s website. “Their collective experiences create a rich educational experience and fuel the experimentation and transformation that develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world.”
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Why Mission Matters at MIT Sloan School of Management
Spoiler Alert co-founders Ricky Ashenfelter and Emily MalinaPhoto credit: Mimi Phan/MIT Sloan
How important is a business school’s mission statement to the experience of its students? According to recent graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, the school’s mission—to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice—influenced where they chose to attend business school, the experiences they had there and the future path of their careers.
Ricky Ashenfelter knew he wanted a school in a market that had a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, which led him to focus his search on San Francisco and Boston. But more than that, he also wanted a school that valued and would offer coursework tied to energy and sustainability. That narrowed his focus further to MIT Sloan, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Business, he says.
“What I liked most about Sloan was that it was part of a larger MIT ecosystem, which was not the case for many business schools,” Ashenfelter says. And so he left his consulting job at Deloitte and headed for Boston hoping to find solutions to the problems of food waste in business supply chains.
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MIT Sloan Admissions Director Provides Insight into New Essay Question, Third Round
In an interview today with Clear Admit, the admissions director at the MIT Sloan School of Management shared the reasoning behind the school’s decision to add an additional round to its admissions process and reduce the number of required essays applicants must answer to just one.
For the first time in its history, MIT Sloan will give applicants the opportunity to apply as part of a third admissions round, which will feature a deadline of April 11th and a notification date of May 18th. The change comes in response to requests from multiple applicants, according to MIT Sloan Admissions Director Dawna Levenson. “Many of our peer schools, if not all of them, have a Round 3,” says Levenson. By adding a third round, she says, MIT Sloan provides greater options to prospective applicants whose work situation may have changed after earlier round deadlines passed, for example.
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MIT Sloan Gears Up for April Ambassadors Days
MIT Sloan School of Management features its interactive, customizable Ambassadors Program each fall and spring for prospective students, hosted by current students. The Ambassadors Program runs on Mondays and Thursdays throughout MIT Sloan’s spring semester, giving visiting prospective students the chance to choose from a range of options to design the visit that best fits their schedule and interests.
A full Ambassadors day beings with registration, followed by coffee with current students, attendance in a class, an information session with an Admissions representative, a second opportunity to attend a class, and then two campus tour options. Those who register are invited to pick and choose from the available sessions as they like. (Note, visitors are asked to attend only one class, but are given two time slots for ease of scheduling. Classes available to visitors change each day, and visitors may select the time of their class visit, but not the specific class.)
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Published: January 4, 2015
MIT Sloan School of Management Announces New LGBT MBA Fellowship
As part of its commitment to fostering a diverse MBA class, MIT Sloan School of Management will award a new fellowship for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students to one or more members of the class of 2017, the school announced last week. The new Reaching Out LGBT MBA Fellowship will be worth at least $10,000 per year.
“This is the first year that MIT Sloan will award this specific fellowship,” Jeff Carbone, associate director of admissions, said in an article on the MIT Sloan website. He added that the decision to offer the fellowship was a simple one, “because we look for diversity in all forms.”
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Published: October 30, 2014
Stanford Graduate School of Business Calls It Quits for MBA Admission Blog
Don’t look for future posts on the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) MBA Admissions Blog. In a final entry earlier this week, the school announced that it was saying goodbye to its blog. All prior blog content will remain accessible through mid-December, after which prospective applicants will need to keep up with news and developments regarding Stanford MBA admissions via other means.
“Our blog has begun to resemble a Tesla at a gas station,” wrote admissions staffer Victoria Hendel De La O as part of a final post on October 29th. She attributed the decline of the blog to the school’s increasing reliance on other forms of social media to communicate updates. Indeed, posts to the Stanford MBA Admissions blog have grown increasingly infrequent over the past year – with the last post going up back in June.
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Published: October 22, 2014
U.S. News & World Report Ranks Business Schools by Graduates’ Indebtedness
Rankings of graduate management education programs abound, each with their own particular criteria for assessing which business schools ultimately come out on top. Separate from its overall business school rankings, U.S. News & World Report recently used data collected from schools to determine the top 10 programs from which MBA students graduate with the most debt.
The number one spot goes to Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where full-time MBA students from the 2013 class who borrowed for business school had an average indebtedness of $108,186. Fuqua’s full-time MBA students had more debt than any of the other 86 ranked institutions, according to data submitted to U.S. News.
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Published: October 20, 2014
New Light Installation Commissioned for MIT Sloan School of Management Main Building
When Building E52, the main facility for the MIT Sloan School of Management, reopens after extensive renovations in January 2016, it will feature a new light installation by artist Leo Villareal, the school announced recently.
Villareal, who last year created The Bay Lights on the San Francisco Bay Bridge West Span, was recently awarded an MIT Percent-for-Art commission to create a light installation for MIT’s Building E52. His plans for E52 include a light sculpture in the north vestibule of the building as part of a new, glass-enclosed entrance. The sculpture will feature 240 hanging LED rods – each approximately 9 feet tall with 72 individual LEDs – arranged from the ceiling in rows. As part of the work, Villareal will create a software code programming the LEDs to cycle through a randomly generated series of combinations.
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Published: October 5, 2014
New Loan Program Launches for International MBA Students at U.S. Schools
A new pilot loan program will provide expanded options for international MBA students at a number of top programs in the United States, according to a recent report in Poestandquants. The program, offered by Prodigy Finance, will extend to international students and U.S. residents with non-permanent status who are studying at 16 top schools, including Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and MIT Sloan School of Management.
Especially in recent years, banks have been reluctant to lend to students who are studying internationally. Prodigy Finance seeks to fill this need using a “community finance” model. Basically, alumni from participating schools fund loans for current students, banking on the value of a degree from their alma mater and the likelihood that future alums will repay. Interest rates on the loans vary between 6 and 12 percent, depending on the school, the individual borrower’s profile and current rates.
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Published: September 16, 2014
MIT Sloan School of Management to Host Diversity Weekend for Prospectives
Prospective MBA applicants from diverse backgrounds are invited to take part in an upcoming Diversity Weekend at the MIT Sloan School of Management. On October 2nd and 3rd, MIT Sloan will host a range of interactive sessions designed to help prospective MBA students get to know the MIT Sloan community by interacting with current students and getting a glimpse of the school’s experiential learning curriculum in action.
MIT Sloan’s Diversity Weekend events begin on Thursday night, October 2nd, with a welcome reception. Following the reception, Diversity Weekend participants are also invited to take part in the school’s weekly C-Function. These informal, after-hours celebrations, organized by MIT Sloan students, are held each Thursday evening and open to the entire graduate community, faculty and staff.
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MIT Sloan to Host Women’s Week, August 4th – 7th
The MIT Sloan School of Management is gearing up for a week filled with events designed to increase awareness about the school among women who are considering a graduate management degree. MIT Sloan Women’s Week, which will take place from August 4th through 7th, will include a webinar open to prospective applicants anywhere in the world, as well as three alumnae panels in cities around the country.
“There are so many opportunities for women to contribute while they are here on campus as well as after they graduate and become part of our alumni network,” Sloan Admissions Director Dawna Levenson said as part of an article about the week’s events. “MIT Sloan women are making an impact in the world, and these panels will showcase just that,” she added.
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Admissions Director Q&A: MIT Sloan School of Management’s Dawna Levenson
As we continue to make the rounds, checking in with admissions directors at top business schools around the globe, we had the good fortune recently to speak with Dawna Levenson, director of MBA admission at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Levenson’s MIT roots run deep. She has an undergraduate degree from the school as well as an MBA from Sloan. She spent 18 years working for the company now known as Accenture but then decided it was time do something new and different.
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Meet MIT Sloan School of Management Admissions Team Members Around the Globe
Members of the admissions team at the MIT Sloan School of Management are hitting the road in a big way, with admissions events scheduled in every corner of the globe over the next few months. The global trek starts tomorrow with events in Madrid and Bogota and will continue throughout the summer months and into the fall. The tour, called “MIT Sloan on the Road,” includes more than three dozen events in cities throughout North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. So regardless of how far you live from Sloan’s campus, you’ll have the opportunity to hear first-hand about the school’s MBA program, admissions process and more.
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Some Business Schools Adopt Tracking Software in a Bid to Increase Yield
A number of top-tier business schools have begun to use software to track prospective applicants’ interactions with their school in an effort to gauge how interested they are in attending, according to a recent article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The data points – which can include whether a student has emailed admissions staff, how many admissions events they’ve attended and whether they requested program information – are now included in candidate profiles alongside test scores and essay responses, Bloomberg BW adds.
Most schools report that student interest isn’t a main factor in admissions decisions, but the fact that increasing numbers of schools are using the tracking programs suggest that the data gathered counts for something.
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New MIT Sloan School of Management Essay Question Presents Challenging Opportunity to Applicants
MIT Sloan School of Management, like many top business schools, has recently released its essay questions for the upcoming application season, leaving prospective applicants and others in the admissions community buzzing about how this year’s prompts require more or less from applicants than in years past. Sloan put a new twist on things late last week when it revealed that its newest question invites applicants to write their own letters of recommendation.
Make no mistake. These essays are not intended to take the place of actual letters of recommendation, two of which will still be required of all applicants to Sloan. Instead, the new essay prompt is designed to encourage applicants to reflect on themselves in a new and different way. Specifically, they are asked to put themselves in their most recent supervisor’s shoes and – from that manager’s perspective – offer an assessment of how they themselves interact with others, stand out from others and what they would change about themselves.
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The Soaring Price of Business School Networking
A New York Times article this weekend examined the growing number of trips and other “lifestyle experiences” that now compete with academic ones as part of the MBA program at many leading business schools. Even those that don’t offer any form of academic credit can be viewed as valuable networking opportunities that can help position students for jobs upon graduation—worth their steep price tags in the eyes of some.
As an example, the Times story lead with a February ski trip to Park City, Utah, that about a third of the MBA class from the University of Texas as Austin’s McCombs School of Business went on. The three-day trip, planned by a student-run group called the Graduate Business Adventure Team, was advertised to cost about $1,000, though final costs may have ended up higher.
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MIT Sloan School of Management to Host Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum in Beijing
MIT Sloan School of Management later this week will host a conference in Beijing focused on the challenges facing entrepreneurs in China, including a cultural focus on efficiency over innovation. The Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum will take place on Friday, May 17th.
“Entrepreneurship is critical for China’s economic development, yet entrepreneurs have to overcome many hurdles,” MIT Sloan Professor and Associate Dean for International Programs and Action Learning Yasheng Huang said in a statement. “Many of those issues are ones faced by all founders, such as retaining good employees and navigating government bureaucracy, but those in the technology sector are pioneering new territory in China.”
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Economist Ranks Top 20 North American MBA Programs, Chicago Booth Leads
In case you missed it, the Economist earlier this week broke out the top 20 North American full-time MBA programs, as a follow-up to its global ranking. As an introduction to this North American-specific list, the Economist calls America the “spiritual home of the MBA,” noting that the first MBA was offered there more than a century ago and that today, U.S. schools dominate the publication's global ranking. (Eight of the top 10 business schools in the worldwide ranking are located in U.S.)
Among the Top 20 North American MBA programs, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business claimed the top spot (as it did in the global rankings). Among the other highest-ranking North American schools were several prestigious U.S. names, including Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, MIT Sloan School of Management and Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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