The Ins & Outs Of MBA Careers
Maria |
November 28, 2024

In this episode of Business Casual, hosts John Byrne and Caroline Diarte Edwards explore career transitions via MBA programs with guest Michael Malone, a former associate dean at Columbia Business School. They discuss the concept of the “triple jump”—changing industry, function, and geography simultaneously—and its feasibility in today’s job market. Michael compares today’s career changes to pole vaulting, emphasizing strategic choices in transitions. 

The discussion also covers the impact of online MBAs and internships on career opportunities.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.370] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Caroline Diarte Edwards. This week, Maria Wich-Vila, my other longtime co-host, is off and running someplace, but we have not a replacement, but a guest, Michael Malone, who is a colleague of Caroline’s at Fortuna, has been at Fortuna for a little over four years. For our intents and purposes, however, he had been Associate Dean of Columbia Business School for seven years. And for a long time, he was in the career management function. He was Managing Director of the Career Management Center at the Kellogg School of Management and Director of Career Education and Advising at Columbia Business School for about six years. And even before that, he was in the whole business of careers. Michael, welcome.

[00:01:00.530] – Michael

Thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be able to spend a little time with you and your listeners today.

[00:01:05.170] – John

So we’re intrigued because in many cases, of course, people go to business school, a professional business school, to enhance their careers. Many people who go into full-time MBA programs go in to make a significant transition. There’s a so-called triple jump where you change your industry, your discipline, and your geography all in one fell swoop, and you do so with an MBA. I’m wondering if things like that, the triple jump, are more elusive today than they had been in the past when the MBA, let’s say in the 1980s, is really at its peak. What do you think?

[00:01:43.650] – Michael

Great question. I will refer because I think he’ll appreciate this, my 17-year-old son is a pole vaulter. I would analogize today’s market more like pole vault than it is a triple jump. I think that you’re increasing your risk, the more hops you got to make. I think that you really need that pull to get over the bar in order to really make a significant change. I think you have to pick your shot. Are you going after a significant change in industry? Then you may want to mitigate whether or not you’re making another significant change in function and/or geography. Again, the more changes you’re going to make, the more risk I think the market perceives. And business schools, particularly top business schools, John, I think that they have always had the reputation of being able to help people to get over some of these hurdles. Not that I’m mixing now crack and field analogies. But I do think that the more you’re trying to take on, even for top business schools, that becomes a tall order. So I think you have to really be thoughtful about what it is you’re going after and articulate that well to yourself and then to the schools that you’re targeting.

[00:02:51.360] – John

And what’s also interesting about the market is how it’s changed in terms of modality. So I see more and more online MBA students doing the degree that way and still thinking that they can make a career transition without that summer internship where you try something out. In many cases, let’s face it, an internship in investment banking and finance or in consulting is basically a tryout. In most cases, those firms will not hire you unless they’ve gotten to see you for three months over summer. Isn’t that right?

[00:03:26.950] – Michael

Absolutely. It’s one big airport can I sit next to this person for several hours and not run out of things to talk about and not be scared by them? You’re right. There are so many industries that still rely heavily on relationship first, and that is very difficult to replicate in an online environment. I will say it’s not impossible, but boy, does it really fall on a candidate to make their way toward establishing contacts, turning those contacts into advocacy at a particular organization in order to get their foot in the door. And it is just harder. The more of a remote environment they’re in, the harder that’s going to be.

[00:04:11.260] – John

And people who really aspire to some of the most lucrative post-MBA jobs like in private equity, hedge funds, venture capital. I mean, the truth is, you pretty much need to have had some experience in those fields or at least an adjacent field to even have a shot at transitioning into PE. Is that right?

[00:04:36.340] – Michael

Absolutely. PE and VC, they run as lean as they possibly can. They are not bringing on an ounce of that in terms of their headcount. They need people that are ready to roll. The challenge there, John, is that you have folks who may actually have the skills and background, but if they can’t articulate that really well and demonstrate that they’re plug and play, private equity VC shops, VC shops are going to move on. Folks having that toolkit, it used to be, Well, I do a couple of years of investment banking, I go to business school, and then I can make a run at private equity. Now, they really need to do more of that pre-MBA. They need to make that transition pre-MBA in order to have a really viable shot. Again, it’s not impossible, but the cards are not stacked in your favor. If you don’t have some a direct segue into PE or VC, they are a very relationship-based set of organizations. And without that preemptive move into those spaces, it’s going to be very difficult for them to see you as a potential insider.

[00:05:44.290] – John

And this goes back to the old Wharton Follies routine about everyone wanting to get into private equities, even if you sold ice cream before you went for your MBA, right?

[00:05:55.420] – Michael

That that that Follies bit from Wharton still makes me chuckle all these years later. There was a point, and I think that the market and candidates have gotten more research savvy, and I appreciate that on the candidate side, but there was a point at which folks wouldn’t even really have a genuine understanding of what private equity was. They just knew it earned really well, and they knew that that’s how they were going to get the ROI from doing an MBA, was they were going to go into private equity. I do think that now there is a little bit more daylight on private equity and what it takes and how selective that space is. I do think that both the employer side and the candidate side have matured over the last several years.

[00:06:39.450] – John

Caroline, you see this early on. When people are trying to put their best foot forward in an MBA application, they’ll tell you the truth. In other words, I am a product manager at a Fang company, but I really want to be a PE guy or PE gal. You got to tell them, Well, you better not tell admissions that, because if you do, they’re not going to let you in.

[00:07:05.390] – Caroline

We often have those discussions with candidates about their career goals, and we try to be very honest with them about what it takes. Like Michael, I’ve worked at a school and had those discussions. So I was in admissions and having those discussions with the careers, and they did not want us to be admitting people who had unrealistic career goals. So it doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t help the student. It doesn’t help to bring someone in who is set up to fail. So we are very honest with our clients about that and often have those discussions about actually what it takes to get into private equity and venture capital, and often that multi-step approach that Michael talked about. And we increasingly see candidates who have started to make that shift pre-MBA, as Michael said. I was just chatting last week with Michael about with one of our former clients who’s now at Stanford, and he worked at Goldman, and then he shifted into private equity, and now he’s at Stanford, right? In the past, it would probably have been Goldman, Stanford, and then private equity. So people are making those transitions earlier. And I think so it helps them, obviously in their careers.

[00:08:20.390] – Caroline

And I think it also helps them in their applications because they bring something different from your average investment banker, because they’ve got a a broader skill set and deeper experience than someone who has only done investment banking or someone who’s only done management consulting. We also see that people who’ve done a couple of years at McKinsey, and then they’ve gone to work in another industry, and perhaps it’s venture capital, private equity, and they’ve done that pre-MBA. That’s much more common than it used to be five or six years ago.

[00:08:54.710] – John

Yeah, exactly. So, Michael, this is probably also why in the past, admissions and career management had a wall between those two functions. But increasingly today, the career folks are playing a hand in admissions. And I know there are some schools that actually have a member of the Career Management sitting in on admission committee meetings because when you evaluate a candidate in their goals, you want to make sure the school can actually deliver on their expectation.

[00:09:25.760] – Michael

Years ago, John, when I was in careers at Columbia, I had the good fortune to work with the assistant dean at the time, Linda Mian, who was a legend in this space. She did it for a number of years. She was well known, well respected among her peers. She was one of the first ones who paved the way for me as a careers person to work with her and her team to say, Hey, there’s some question marks about certain candidates and the feasibility of their short and long term goals. Would you work with us and take a second look and just give us your thoughts on this? And I really appreciated her wanting to make a well-rounded decision and not wanting to set somebody up for failure by bringing in that perspective. Fast forward to now where Columbia’s most recent person going into admissions at the director level is a former careers professional. She’s looked through that lens of career preparation for years, and now has made her way into admissions and is now influencing the way that admissions there looks at a candidate and evaluates their readiness for a rigorous MBA program. I don’t think that Columbia, I think that they’re doing really great work there, but I don’t think that perspective is unique.

[00:10:46.650] – Michael

Caroline referred to this earlier that increasingly there is this focus on wanting to make sure that there’s alignment between this person as a student, as a prepared academician, and what their career goals look like and if the school can really support those goals well enough to help this person launch.

[00:11:07.030] – John

Yeah. Now, I think that most applicants eerily look at employment reports from schools in deciding where to apply. If you were to look at the employment report at Stanford, since we just mentioned Stanford, you would find that one in four went into either private equity or venture capital, which is unbelievable believable, considering how selective those fields are and considering that these are what I would call one Z, two Z recruiters of MBAs. They do not recruit by the boat load like a Google, a McKinsey, an Amazon. So getting those jobs is incredibly difficult, even when you’re qualified for them. And yet, Stanford is able to place one in four of its graduates in one of these two fields. What is their secret? Is it simply that they’re admitting people who are already in PE and VC? And basically, it’s the luck of the draw because even schools like Columbia, which is known for finance or Wharton or Chicago Booth, don’t have anywhere near these kinds of numbers.

[00:12:14.750] – Michael

Right. So I think there’s a couple of contributing factors. And, Caroline, I’d be curious to get your take on this as well, given your familiarity. But I think it’s a couple of things. I think, one, they’re aided by the fact that they are a fraction of the size of those other free programs. That helps. That said, I think that what you are on to is 100% right. I think that they actively target folks who are bringing those experiences and have inroads into those fields. Now, it’s not that the other schools aren’t targeting them, but Stanford has a geographic advantage in that they are closer in particular to the VC world. That’s going to help them, the pre-existing relationships. At the Googles and McKinzies of the world, they have recruiting teams that are like, We want to bring in our folks. Well, VC’s version of that is they’re going to look after their own, too. And so they’re going to go back to their home institutions. And Stanford has long had a foothold in that space. So I think that some of this gets self-perpetuating exciting. But I do think that the fact that things have shifted where more candidates are bringing pre-MBA experience in VC and PE, if that’s in fact, their exit strategy from the MBA program, I think that that works to Stanford’s advantage.

[00:13:31.720] – John

Yeah, totally. And, Caroline, I wonder, when you were head of admissions at INSEAD, what relationship, in fact, you had with the career management team? Were you aligned and worked closely together? Or when they had difficulty placing someone, did they say to you, Caroline, you made an admissions mistake on this one?

[00:13:54.190] – Caroline

Yeah. So we would have regular discussions. It was fairly informal, but over the For me, it became more of a regular, frequent discussion. I think that now someone from the careers team sits on the admissions committee at INSEAD, which wasn’t the case in the past. Definitely, I agree with Michael that I think there is a trend, and I’m sure that’s the case across the schools, of bringing admissions and the careers perspective closer together to make sure that those career goals are realistic. Because it can be very difficult for someone from admissions who doesn’t have a career’s background to evaluate how realistic a career goal is. Because the career goals are often very diverse. Their backgrounds are incredibly diverse. And so understanding the ins and outs of what all these different recruiters are looking for and what they might like and what they might not like in a certain profile is quite complex. And so whilst the admissions team will be very familiar with the recruiters and the overall trends and some of the key principles, they won’t have the nitty-gritty insight that someone from the careers team would have. And that can be really useful in flagging and raising a red flag with a candidate where there’s just too big a stretch from where they are right now to where they want to be in the future.

[00:15:19.780] – John

Yeah, exactly. Michael, I wonder, from your perspective, what percentage of MBAs who enter a program know for sure that they want to get out In other words, they know what career they’re aiming for. They may even know what company they want to work for. What percentage you think really know that with any level of certainty when they enter a program?

[00:15:41.140] – Michael

I feel like it’s close to 50/50.

[00:15:43.920] – John

Well, actually, that’s pretty good. I think that’s great.

[00:15:47.510] – Michael

I’ll be honest, the ones that worry me more are the ones that are like, Hey, since I was a newborn child, I know that I wanted this company and this role. Those Those ones worry me more.

[00:16:01.740] – John

Oh, God, yeah. They’re going to be disappointed when they don’t get the product management job at Apple.

[00:16:06.100] – Michael

That’s right, exactly. They’re so over-rotated. Oftentimes, one of the things that I do think that an MBA can do, it did this for me when I started working with MBAs, John. I came from a household where my dad was a city engineer for the city of Yonkers for 40 years. I didn’t have anybody in my immediate family who came from a business background. I know nothing walking in there. I had to learn about all these industries that I had never even heard of before. I was one of those people that was like, What are the private equities? I don’t understand them. But I think that the advantage of that is you have to come in with an open mind and recognize even if you’ve got a goal, that there are things that your classmates are going to teach you about that you’ve never heard of before, but could, in fact, be a better fit. And that’s why the over-rotated hyper-focused person worries me more is that they’re so set on what they need I know there’s a really good chance that they haven’t been open-minded enough to say, But if this doesn’t work out, or maybe it’s not exactly the right fit, it’s just been made to be so in my mind, I need to have the flexibility and the agility to think about other areas that could, in fact, be a better use of my interests, values, motivators, and skills.

[00:17:19.940] – John

True. When it comes down to the company level, I mean, if you entered an MBA program and you said, I want to work at Bain and nowhere else, meaning I don’t even I don’t want McKinsey and BCG. I don’t want Deloitte. I don’t want Accenture. I don’t want AT Carnie.

[00:17:34.260] – Michael

I don’t want any of these things to plan. I love the Bainy never lets a beanie fall. That’s me. I feel that. Absolutely.

[00:17:40.460] – John

I mean, you’re almost setting yourself up for a disappointment, let’s face it.

[00:17:45.150] – Michael

I mean, it’s never what the website and the promos make it look like. I actually had a person that I worked with years and years ago said exactly that thing, came the two-year MBA program I’ve dreamed of being for as long as I can remember, got the summer internship, and so it was over the moon about this. I got a call from this person in early August, so they’ve got another couple of weeks to finish their internship. The person was like, I’m thinking about leaving now before the end of the summer, before my e-mail, because I hate it so much. John, you hit it on the head. It’s such a case of it’s been built up and they They’ve made it into something that it’s not and they’re not open to the realism of recognizing there’s no perfect place. What you’re looking for is the best fit and you’re looking to figure out, is this going to offer me an opportunity to grow and continue to learn and contribute in a way that’s meaningful to me?

[00:18:45.310] – John

Whether or not your mommy bought you a beanie onesie when you were an infant, it ain’t going to matter, man. You better have one. That’s right.

[00:18:53.740] – Michael

Yeah, get one in blue and green and red and get some variation because you don’t know where you’re going to land.

[00:19:01.670] – John

Now, Michael, most of the people listening to us are applicants. I mean, we do get a lot of decision makers in business education who listen to us. But for the applicant who wants to make a transition, I’m thinking, even if you don’t know exactly what you want to do, there are things that you should be doing even during the application phase, to grease the skids, to create at least a path or multiple paths to where you want to go. What are those kinds of things that you would recommend?

[00:19:29.120] – Michael

A lot of things, One, and I was thinking about this, Caroline, as you were talking earlier about the admissions process, the MBA is one of several professional development steps that you’re going to take in your career. What that means is that when you get out of college, if the MBA is remotely on your radar screen, if it’s a possibility, you should start then thinking backwards from post-MBA, where could I see myself, to the MBA experience, to Where am I now? And that enables you to make some more intentional choices about what you’re doing. And so your question about, Okay, so what is it that they should be doing? If they are fresh out of college or they’re a year or two out of college and they’re thinking, Well, the MBA may be in my landscape, is to start to do an inventory of what are your interests and values and motivations and skills? One of the things that I will do with candidates is I will have them just do a quick spreadsheet and get down everything that is important to them, from the macro of, I I want a bigger hand in decision making and strategy to the micro, I don’t want to travel more than 30 minutes to my job.

[00:20:38.820] – Michael

And putting that into a column and then assigning 100 points to it. So you can’t You’re not going to exceed the 100 points, you only get 100 points, but prioritizing those values. I think that that’s a good start for folks to start, for them to start to think about what is most important, what’s a need versus what’s a want. I don’t find that lots of folks are terribly about that. They need lots of things if you ask them. But if they’re forced to make a choice, it helps to discern the needs from the wants. And that, I think, can help them to figure out, Okay, so if I really am drawn to checking out an industry and I’m going to use the MBA to help me to pivot, what exposure can I get to that? Can I start doing informational interviews with people to better understand the space generally, and more specifically, to get some of the insider language down, if you will? Are there ways that I could potentially work on a project, whether volunteer or paid, to be able to experience that industry and have some talking points so that when I am then writing my essay or I’m talking with folks on the admissions committee or alumni from a school that I’m targeting, I have some shred of credibility.

[00:21:51.860] – Michael

I sound a little bit more like I know what I’m talking about. But being that intentional and taking those concrete steps, you really have to start the thought process early.

[00:22:00.260] – John

Yeah. Now, Caroline, what Michael said, was that your process when you got your MBA and went into consulting?

[00:22:08.100] – Caroline

I don’t think my process was that in-depth, but I absolutely love what he said. We’re always very happy to talk with candidates who are at a very early stage and who are thinking that they’re maybe not going to apply for another two or three years, I’d much rather speak to someone too early in the process than too late in the process, because like Michael said, there’s so much you can do to lay the groundwork if you know that that might be the direction that you want to go in. And it’s a shame when we speak to candidates who are three months away from a deadline and they realize that maybe they haven’t distinguished themselves in their work as much as they like, or at least they’ve done great work, but it looks very similar to what a lot of other candidates will have done. And perhaps they haven’t looked for some unique opportunities. And also a typical the whole area where candidates can fall down if they haven’t thought about it in advance is they can let their extracurriculars go. And of course, business schools do like to see well-rounded candidates who have a track record of extracurricular engagement.

[00:23:12.890] – Caroline

And if candidates are not thinking about the MBA very far in advance, then they might have dropped to those activities, and that might not help them in their application either. But what we hear as well from the candidates that we work with is that the type of reflection that Michael talks about, it’s super helpful, obviously, for their application. But what we hear all the time is that it really helps them to then hit the ground running when they get to business school. So they’re not floundering with their job search because things do start earlier than you imagine. Certainly at INSEAD, where I work, if it’s a 12-month program, you start in January, and it’s only a 10-month program if you start in August. And so the pace is very fast. And so you’re pretty much straight into job search mode. But even on a two-year program, you need to start thinking about what you want to do for your summer internship, and that comes around quite quickly. So all of that foundational work that you can do ahead of time before you come to business school that will help you clarify how you want to focus your time when you’re at business school, what are the opportunities you want to pursue, and not just for your engagement with recruiters, but also how you want to tailor the program and the curriculum and the clubs and all of those other things to your interests.

[00:24:42.220] – John

Right. Yeah, it makes total sense. And even then, when you’re a student, I think a lot of doors open. When you call someone up, particularly an alum, of course, and you say you’re a current student and you’re exploring this or that, people want to talk to you. They want to be helpful to you. And you have special status, I I think, as an MBA student in a program that you may not have outside of that program. Michael, I wonder if you were to identify the single biggest misconception that students have about career management in MBA programs, what would it be?

[00:25:16.890] – Michael

If I had to pick one, John, it would be that I can be coming from any background, that I can be going to any job, and that career management has some magic wand and Harry Potter-esque rolodex that enables them to sort and match, and boom, there you go, you’re off to the races. Career management, in my experience, because I had worked in undergrad careers for a bit and then had the opportunity to go into graduate, and not just graduate, but MBA, career management. Here’s what I’ll tell you is being able to look at the two and having been at a bunch of different universities, careers on the undergrad are under-resourced, and they’re really good at what they do, but it’s scratching the surface. In terms of best practices, what I found is that many schools at universities will try to model what they do in careers after what the business schools do. They tend to be a lead indicator for how to approach careers in working with students. I think that’s the plus. I think that folks that are MBA candidates, when they’re thinking about, Well, what am I going to get out of this?

[00:26:29.840] – Michael

You’re They’re going to get a best-in-class experience. That said, they can’t do everything, and so you do have to be a partner. One of the things that I saw Trisha Bayonne, who’s a former colleague of mine at Columbia, when she moved to the admissions office at Columbia, one of the changes that she helped to implement was a question in the application that focuses on, how are you going to collaborate with the faculty, with the administration? That’s a direct call out to students coming into the program to say, We have to work together on this. This can’t be you come in and you’re looking for things on a silver platter because it’s just not that easy. There are not jobs lined up for folks. That’s probably the one misconception that I would want folks to really kick the tires on is, what are you expecting when you go in? Are you expecting folks to hand opportunities to you? My sense is you’re going to be pretty disappointed pretty quickly. If you are looking for relationships with people, whether it’s faculty, staff, fellow students or alumni, who can give you really good pieces of advice, they can point you to resources that you wouldn’t have otherwise found, and you are willing to then roll up the sleeves and do your work, I think that it can be a transformative experience.

[00:27:49.080] – John

Yeah. Now, Michael, you made an interesting transition out of career management back in 2013 when you became associate dean at Columbia Business School. So you were at Kellogg, and before that, you were at Columbia, and you went back to Columbia, but in a role where you were responsible for the end-to-end student experience of a Columbia MBA. And I wonder what that entailed, because a lot of people talk about the so-called student experience. And there are some schools, particularly a smaller school that’s not in an urban location, that have advantages to really make a student experience special. I’m thinking Hanover, New Hampshire for Dartmouth talk. I’m thinking UVA Darden in Charlottesville, Virginia, places where you’re not distracted by city life so that there can be much deeper and more profound bonding among students. How did you deal with that role in trying to create a sublime student engagement in a very busy city It’s quite competitive at a school known for finance where people do have sharp elbows, let’s face it, at Columbia Business School.

[00:29:07.300] – Michael

When I was brought into that role, so Glenn Hubbard was the dean, and one of the things that he said to me, and this was on the heels of having to redefine the curriculum after the ’07 to ’09 disaster in the economy and the recognition, for example, with GM, that you had all of these silos and none of them were talking, and that led to their demise. Glenn was a real visionary in that way, and he recognized that there was a potential risk at Columbia for that as well. And so when he brought me in, I will never forget one of the things that he said to me was, I believe that we have the best car parts in the market. What I want to do is make a great car. What I focused on the values that we agreed that I was going to focus on were collaboration and innovation. That was really That’s what I worked with my team to try to do, is to recognize and reward where were these different areas of the student experience working in isolation and where could they collaborate better so that they were connecting dots and the students felt like it was a much more tightly knit safety net rather than having these big gaps where they could fall through and there just wasn’t that same level of connection.

[00:30:25.500] – Michael

I think that’s ultimately what we tried to do. I think that subsequently, Kostis Mcglaris, who’s now their dean, has taken that to another level by focusing on infusing technology and data insights into the MBA experience to make that something that everybody, not just the folks that are going into tech, but everybody is getting that sense. I feel like it’s really taken that next step.

[00:30:51.030] – John

You had the handicap of that old building that- It was so charming, though, John.

[00:30:56.790] – Michael

I mean, it had a certain panash and character I don’t think that the current students have any understanding for what students were dealing with. I mean, there was a certain pride about yours as whole, but now the new building is just otherworldly, and it enables them to do… One of the key things I talked with somebody who had just been back to the new buildings. They had not been there before, and they went in the fall, and they said, I remember being in yours where everybody was just on top of each other. There was not a single classroom. There was not a study space. There was nothing that wasn’t- When classes left out, you were in a school of fish.

[00:31:44.190] – John

Yeah, it was Grand Central at Rush Hour.

[00:31:46.900] – Michael

We had replicated Grand Central at Rush Hour all the dang time. When this person went to the new building, he was like, There’s just none of that. There is a sense of calm. It’s really sharp. Just a great place to be, but it’s taken that stressor, that anxiety out.

[00:32:05.380] – John

Yes. And I should point out that you also do consulting for schools and have been consulting with Fordham and University of Georgia and NYU, I’m assuming it’s probably on engagement, connection, partnerships, that thing, right?

[00:32:24.030] – Michael

It’s been it’s been really interesting. So a lot of it has been around how do you build a good advising model? How do you let students know that you put them as a top priority? But how do you do that sustainably? How do you identify what your values are as an institution and have that trickled down to the behaviors that your staff is then bringing out each interaction that they’re having with students? So, yeah, I’ve been really fortunate to be able to have those opportunities to talk with leaders in these different areas and to see what they ultimately choose to do to reflect those values and get it down to the student by student level.

[00:33:03.250] – John

Now, Caroline and I have the advantage here of asking you about your secrets. I think there’s often mysteries that students may have, even faculty may have, about the inner workings of a great business school like Columbia or Kellogg. And, Caroline, I wonder what secret you would like Michael to reveal.

[00:33:26.250] – Michael

Is this going to be a one for one, though? Because I feel like it’s on the.

[00:33:30.280] – Caroline

Well, I mean, I’ve had many conversations with Michael over the years, but I guess I would be interested to hear a bit more about your perspective, Michael, on how what the school, or at least at Columbia, how what they’re looking for has evolved. Practically, especially as you talk about they’ve brought in the careers perspective more and more, could you give us some examples of candidates who you think, therefore stand out and candidates who you think they would weed out because of that increased careers perspective?

[00:34:05.570] – Michael

It’s a great question, Caroline. I think that the roadmap for this is based in some ways on the questions that Columbia asks. I think you could extrapolate this and look at any top business school and say, what questions are they asking and what’s the why behind it? That gives you a roadmap for what the school is really looking for. Using Columbia as an example, what are the questions that they ask? Well, first off, they ask a 50-character question. What do you want to do? What does that tell you about the school? It tells you, Cut the BS. We’re not going to spend time reading waxing poetic. We’ve got the third- This is a New York’s Minute, baby. Yeah, Exactly. We get the third most candidates of any school in the world. Get to your point. We don’t have the time for this stuff. They want somebody who is going to be able to get to the point, distill down what it is you got to tell us. They are also looking, their question about the Phillips pathway. Give us a time where you’ve worked with a global team or you’ve addressed inequity. What does that tell you?

[00:35:09.040] – Michael

It tells you they are looking for a global perspective. You are looking to support others who maybe don’t have a strong voice place, and you’re looking to use your skills and your place of influence and privilege to be able to speak and help on their behalf. So it gives you a sense for who is likely to resonate. So the person that’s not going to resonate maybe hasn’t had those global perspectives. And again, global is loose definition. You can look in that at a bunch of different ways. But if you have stayed in a more myopic or parochial environment and you haven’t really stretched yourself to get out, that’s not going to stand out. We’re in a place like Columbia. And so that’s something that, Caroline, to your point, when you’re doing that self-analysis of saying, Well, how do I approach this? That’s where you have to challenge yourself to take on, whether it’s a part-time job or an internship or a volunteer thing or an extracurricular that does push your connection to the global environment so that you have something to bring to the table.

[00:36:10.910] – John

Yeah, good point there. What other secrets do you have, Michael, about the inner workings of a business school?

[00:36:18.250] – Michael

One of the things I’m just trying to think of the processes that I’ve seen. I think one of the things that candidates are a little surprised by is the interview process. Different schools go about this in different ways. Kellogg has their online where you have to do your video interview and they only give you a short window to be able to prepare for that. That is, in my sense, that is Kellogg’s way of saying, We want to make sure that we’re getting the real you. This isn’t something that you have a ton of time to prepare for. You can’t really read your notes because you don’t know what you’re going to be asked. We want you to shoot from the hip. We’re really trying to a sense of the real you. Conversely, Columbia, they have long had a model where they match you. And again, it’s a pretty quick turnaround. They match you with somebody who is not on the admissions committee. They use alumni for their interviews. And again, what does that tell you about the school? Tells you that they are looking for you to talk about your career goals because they’re matching you with a professional who’s in an industry.

[00:37:26.980] – Michael

And they’re also looking to find out, well, could you connect with this person who’s an alum, feel comfortable with you as a learning teammate or a cluster mate? Could they see you in that way? Whereas other schools, it’s a little more top down. They have an admissions committee member talking with you, and they’re going to give you one or two questions, and they’re just going to dig in and see when they peel back layer after layer, do you still have a cogen argument for why you should be at this school? So I think that’s the secret there is you really have to do your homework, first of all, on the schools. But secondly, thinking about what it is that they’re driving at based on their processes and knowing that they are looking for very different things. The same candidate who is going to be a dream boat for Stanford may not be the same fit for a place like a Kellogg or Chicago or MIT or Columbia.

[00:38:24.640] – John

Yeah, exactly. Well, Michael, it’s been a pleasure to have you. Thank you for joining us today.

[00:38:30.360] – Michael

Thank you for having me, John. This was great.

[00:38:32.810] – John

Totally. And Caroline, as always, adding very much to our discussion. Thank you as well. And for all of you out there, I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Michael Malone, former associate dean of Columbia Business School, guy who’s been in charge of career management at both Kellogg and Columbia before that, and even other places. I didn’t even mention Steven’s Institute of Technology way back. Michael even got his start at IBM in the early That’s a long time ago, right, Michael?

[00:39:03.000] – Michael

That’s still when they were making typewriters, John. So yeah, it was a few years ago.

[00:39:08.340] – John

You weren’t expecting that. That awkward silence I could hear way far away.

[00:39:14.000] – Michael

It took me a minute to remember back that far.

[00:39:18.980] – John

All righty. Thanks for listening, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
The Ins & Outs Of MBA Careers
Maria |
November 28, 2024

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Well hello everyone, this is John Byrne with Poets and Quants, welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Today we have a special guest, Heidi Hillis from Fortuna Admissions. She is based in Australia, is a senior expert coach for Fortuna, and has three degrees, all from Stanford, a BA in English literature, that’s my degree, an MA in Russian studies, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business. And we have Heidi here to discuss some really fascinating research. Here’s what Fortuna did. They dug into the last Two class profiles of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

That’s the class of ‘23 and the class of ‘24. They looked up all these folks on LinkedIn to identify a little bit more about their backgrounds, including their former employers and their places of undergraduate education to come up with an incredible analysis. Heidi, welcome.

[00:00:46] Heidi Hillis: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:48] John Byrne: Heidi, what is, what are the big takeaways from your deep dive discovery?

[00:00:54] Heidi Hillis: It’s hard to know even where to start. I think there’s a quite a few interesting kind of trends that we’ve seen that have taken place over the years. We were mentioning before the call that traditionally there hadn’t been, 10 years ago, if you’d looked, you wouldn’t have seen so many tech companies represented, but now there’s a big presence of tech companies who are feeding a lot of these MBA programs in Stanford in particular.

I think that the thing that was really interesting was, looking, not just at where the companies that were feeding the students, the applicants to Stanford. When they were working there, when they were applying, but actually the paths that they took prior to their current job.

So how many people were working, if you look at McKinsey, for example, or Bain and BCG, those are obviously companies that feed a lot of applicants to the program, but we found 20%, which seemed to be normal of, the class came from consulting, but if you actually look into the numbers in their background, You would see that actually 37 percent of these two classes had worked at McKinsey sometime prior, or actually in consulting, so it was, it’s The kind of the patterns that are behind, what you would normally see in terms of what Stanford tells us.

So you get a sense of the paths that people have taken. And so that’s something that was really interesting to see.

[00:02:16] John Byrne: Absolutely. And of course, this is this analysis goes so far beyond what any applicant would learn by simply looking at the class profile that the school up because, this level of detail is never available to people.

[00:02:33] Heidi Hillis: No, and yeah, for example, you could see that, Stanford will say that they have around, each year around 50 percent of applicants are international, which is a great statistic and gives you lots of hope if you are an international student. But when you dig into the numbers, you actually understand that.

75 percent of the people who get into Stanford actually went to a U. S. University. So even if you’re international, it does have does seem to have kind of an advantage of having been educated in the U. S. That seems to be something that they look for. However, I think. The concentration of universities in the U.

S. that are feeding to Stanford is something also that, if you’re looking at it, you might find a little bit dis, disconcerting. There’s a few programs that are really, obviously the top. Programs as you would expect places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the Ivies but if you look at the international universities very diverse from all over the world, really lots of people from different places, which is also really interesting.

[00:03:38] John Byrne: Yeah I tell you, one of the things that struck me in the data is how consistent it is. 10 years ago, we did the same exercise at Stanford and a bunch of other. Schools from Harvard and Dartmouth and Columbia and talk and a few others and back 10 years ago, we found that 25. 2 percent of the class of 2013 were from Ivy League colleges.

And the Ivy League 8 schools, not including Stanford. And if you included Stanford, it would have been 32. 6%. So now, let’s move forward to your data. And in 23, 30. 7 percent went to Ivy League schools, even above the 25. 2. And in 24, 27. 9 percent went to Ivy League schools. So it looks like Stanford has gotten even a little bit more elitist than it was.

Yeah,

[00:04:41] Heidi Hillis: It’s, it is it’s what the data says, right? Obviously, this is a sample. We have 80 percent of the two classes. So we don’t know where those other people went. And that might skew the data a little bit in another direction. But it is, if you look at there’s 15 schools, that include the Ivy’s and then you have UC Berkeley and obviously Stanford that really are contributing, 49 percent of the class of 23, 47. 3 percent of the class of 24. So that is a pretty heavy concentration and But, if you actually look into the data, you see a lot of people also, each of these is actually an individual story.

You see a lot of people who come from other schools as well. So it’s not like you have to give up hope if you come from a different school. I see a lot of individual stories that, from the whole range of U. S. schools that really are feeding into Stanford. So I think what the data doesn’t also tell you, unfortunately, is how many of these Of people from these backgrounds are actually applying.

So

[00:05:39] John Byrne: good point.

[00:05:40] Heidi Hillis: It’s it’s hard to know. And sometimes I think people this is. A path that a lot of people who go to these schools plan to take from the very beginning. So I would see, it would be interesting to know that I don’t know that we will ever find that out. But, um, that’s something to keep in mind as well.

[00:05:56] John Byrne: Yeah. And that’s a fair point. Because how reflective are these results of the applicant pool reflective of an elitist attitude probably a combination of if I had to guess, but, it is what it is, and these institutions obviously are great filters, so you come from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and you go to Harvard or Stanford or Penn, and you pass through a fine filter, and it makes you less of a admissions risk than if you went to, frankly, the University of Kentucky and worked for a company that no one knows of.

That’s just the reality of elite MBA admissions, right?

[00:06:40] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. And so you will see that the people who are not going, you’ll see a lot of the people who you would, the profiles that you would expect, the Harvard undergrad that then goes to Goldman that then was working at a PE firm.

That’s a really typical profile that you’ll see. But you’ll also see some really, unique and interesting ones, which I think, Okay. Helps you understand that if you don’t have that path, you also have a real chance at these schools, and maybe even more of a chance, again, not knowing, how many of those Goldman P.

E. Harvard grads are applying. So I’m thinking of the guy that I saw who he went to UPenn undergrad, studied engineering, started out a kind of pretty typical path working in private equity, but then made a big pivot to work for go to Poland where he was working in a real estate investment firm and the head coach of the Polish lacrosse team.

So you have really interesting profiles like that, that you can see that. aren’t necessarily taking that typical path. And sometimes that really does help you stand out.

[00:07:42] John Byrne: True. Maria, what surprised you most about the data?

[00:07:48] Maria Wich-Vila: Wow. I think we already covered, the, one of the biggest ones was the number, the percentage of people who would had some sort of either their undergraduate or graduate education within the United States.

Intuitively, I had felt that was true. And sometimes when I try to, give some honest, tough love to applicants from certain countries, and they’ll say, oh, but Maria, I think you’re being a little too pessimistic. After all, X percent of the applicants at these schools are international, and Y percent are from a certain geography internationally.

I’ll say yes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all Solely from that area. A lot of them are, do have significant international educational experiences. I think another, speaking of the international piece the percentage of people who had significant international work experience as well was something else that really jumped out at me.

Because it would signal to me that Stanford really does value this global perspective both within probably its domestic applicants and also its international applicants. So I thought that was also a really interesting piece of data that jumped out at me.

[00:08:52] John Byrne: Now remind me what percentage was that?

[00:08:56] Heidi Hillis: People who are international

[00:08:58] John Byrne: who have had international work experience.

[00:09:01] Heidi Hillis: I think it was 30%.

[00:09:02] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty

[00:09:04] John Byrne: impressive.

[00:09:04] Caroline Diarte Edwards: 30%, which I was thrilled to see. As well as coming from in Seattle and Europe. Obviously the international schools put a heavy emphasis on international experience and I hadn’t fully appreciated that. A school like Stanford would also.

really value that to the same extent. And it’s great to see that candidates are making the effort to get outside of the U. S. and get international experience because I think you gain so much from that exposure. And you bring more to the classroom if you’ve got that experience. I know that both Maria and Heidi.

I’ve worked outside of the home countries as well. Pre MBA and I think that you just have so much more to contribute to the whole experience. And it was great to see that 30%.

[00:09:50] John Byrne: What else struck you, Caroline?

[00:09:53] Caroline Diarte Edwards: We talked about the concentration of academic institutions, and I was also surprised about the concentration in employers.

So while there is a very long list of employers where the students have worked pre MBA when you dig into the career paths that they’ve taken there is some interesting concentration. Heidi had noted that the reports that There are 26 companies that account for nearly one third of the class in terms of where they were working right before Stanford.

But when you look at their whole career history, those same 26 companies represent over 60 percent of the class. So that is, yeah, that’s quite extraordinary that so many of the class have experience of working at quite a short list of companies.

[00:10:46] Heidi Hillis: I think that’s reflective of, if you really think about it, you have a lot of these companies.

You’re talking about the Goldmans and the Morgan Stanley and McKinsey that have really large programs that recruit out of undergrad that are really training grounds for. A lot of people that then on to do, work in industry or go on to work for in finance in particular, a lot of people starting out at some of these bulge bracket banks and then going into.

Private equity or smaller firms. So the diversity within finance in terms of where they were working prior to MBA is quite large compared to consulting because there just aren’t as many consulting firms, but a lot of people in financing, a lot of different firms, but they, a lot of them really do start out in these training programs, these analyst programs that are so big and popular.

[00:11:34] John Byrne: Yeah, true. And looking back, I did this exercise as well. The feeder companies to Stanford 10 years ago in the class of 2023, 22. 8 percent from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and your data, 22. 5 percent work there. Incredible consistency over a 10 year period. When you look at the top six employers 10 years ago, they were McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JP.

Morgan Chase. They accounted alone for 34 percent of all the students in the class of 20, 2013 at Stanford. In your data for 23 and 24 they account for 29. 8%, just a few percentage points less. So remarkable consistency. And I think you’re right, Heidi, this is a function of the fact that these firms bring in a lot of people who are analysts and actually expect them after 3 to 5 years to go to a top MBA school.

So there’s a good number of them in the applicant pool to choose from and let’s face it, they’re terrific candidates.

[00:12:46] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. I think another pool of really terrific candidates that you see, and I don’t know what the 2013 data was saying, but is the US military, which is really, I think, again, something that I felt having worked with lots of military candidates myself, understand that, Yeah, intuitively, I would have expected, but to see it in the data is actually really interesting.

You just see Stanford in particular, I think, is really looking for leadership potential, and it’s so hard to show that as an analyst, as a consultant, but as in the military, these people have such incredible leadership experience that it really helps them to stand out.

[00:13:23] John Byrne: Yeah. And let’s tell people what the data shows.

How many out of us military academies,

[00:13:28] Heidi Hillis: In all in total, we had, 20 over the two years. So that’s in the two classes that we found. So that’s, a pretty large number. And they come from all the different academies, right? So you’ll find them from different, not academies, in the army, navy and the marines.

So you’ll see that. And you also see quite a few, in the data we’ll, we see a lot from the Israeli military as well, but that’s actually a little bit difficult to because every Israeli does go into the military. So it’s they have that in their background. Any Israeli candidate would have Israeli military background as well, but again, that’s.

Place that people can really highlight their leadership. So you had eight people from who had been, who were Israeli and obviously had military experience where they were able to demonstrate significant impact and leadership prior to MBA.

[00:14:18] John Byrne: Yeah. In fact, 10 years ago, roughly 2%. of the class went to either West Point or the U.

S. Naval Academy. Good number of people actually from the military. Maria, any other observations?

[00:14:34] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, I was also surprised at the fact that within those top employers And when we look at the tech companies, it was Google and Facebook and Meta with a pretty large showing. Google was actually the fourth largest employer after the MBBs and, but then, I was expecting there to be an equal distribution amongst those famous large cap technology companies.

So I, I would have expected even representation amongst Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, et cetera. And yet. Apple and Amazon only had one or two people each versus Google at 25. So I thought that was really fascinating and it makes me wonder if perhaps it’s a function of maybe Google and Meta might give their younger talent more opportunities to lead impactful projects, perhaps.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe Apple and Amazon perhaps are more hierarchical. And maybe don’t give their younger talent so many opportunities, but I was really surprised by that. I would have expected a much more even distribution amongst the those famous those famous tech companies.

[00:15:40] John Byrne: Yeah. You’re right. And I crunched the numbers on the percentages and Google took three and a half percent of the two classes and that’s better than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase. Facebook had 2. 7 percent and Microsoft at 1. 5, and I was shocked at Amazon because, Amazon is widely known as the largest single recruiter of MBAs in the past five years.

At one point, they were recruiting a thousand MBAs a year, but in, in one sense, maybe Amazon quite doesn’t really have the prestige. For Stanford MBAs who might rather work elsewhere, I think that might be is, you look at the employment reports at a lot of the other schools and Amazon is number one at a number of schools and very low percentage of people from Amazon going to Stanford.

We don’t know, of course, how many. Leaving Stanford and going back to Amazon, but it can’t be that many.

[00:16:41] Heidi Hillis: I wonder if there’s something about just a proximity effect here. You have the plate, like the meta and Google just being so close to Stanford, maybe it just, attracts more people applying because they.

They’re almost on campus and maybe, just being Amazon all over the world and different places could be not attracting as many. I don’t know.

[00:17:03] John Byrne: Yeah, true. The other thing, the analysis shows, and this is what you also gather from the more public class profile is really the remarkable diversity of talent that a school like Stanford can attract year after year.

It is, it blows you away, really. The quality and the diversity of people despite the concentration of undergraduate degree holders or company employers, it’s it’s really mind boggling, isn’t it?

[00:17:33] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, they come from everywhere and really interesting paths and even the people I think that, have those kind of typical paths, you see a lot of diversity within them as well.

So I think, even if you’re coming from a Goldman or a McKinsey having lived in another country or gone to done a fellowship abroad or running a non profit on the side. These things are actually what helped them to stand out. But you do see some really interesting, I think, profiles, too, of people who’ve just done, you get a sense of what it would be like to be in the Stanford classroom.

People from really unique and different backgrounds. People who come from all different countries and lawyers, doctors people who have run, nonprofits in developing countries people running large programs for places like Heineken or Amazon too. But, it’s a real diversity of backgrounds.

[00:18:27] John Byrne: Now, Heidi, I wonder if one is an applicant. Is this discouraging to read and here’s why if I’m not from Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and if I didn’t work for McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google am I at a disadvantage and should I even try? Some people look at the data and come away with that conclusion.

[00:18:52] Heidi Hillis: I think it’s a reality check for a lot of people. I think it’s just, it’s really, it just helps people understand, what it, the difficulty of this, why it’s so competitive, but I think that there is, again, behind the kind of the percentages, you do look at these individual profiles and I would get, I would actually take a lot of hope from it if I were looking, as an applicant, because especially if you are.

Maybe a little bit more of a big fish or small fish in a bigger pond or big fish in a smaller pond you go to Rice or you go to Purdue or, and you do really well, those are the people who, they’re definitely looking for that diversity of background as well as the international.

I think that’s really neat. think that, instead of looking at the data and saying, why not, why I shouldn’t even apply, it’s why not me look at these other profiles of people who have taken really unique paths that that do get in. So I think it is actually a Kind of a mix of both, it is a reality check for a lot of people, but it’s actually, there is so much diversity in the data as well.

I think also one thing that we haven’t really covered is about is just the prevalence of social impact in, that’s really taken hold of the class. I don’t, again, going back to your 2013 analysis, I’m not sure how easy it was to tell that, but a lot of you can see reflected in the both the types of organizations people are working for, but also their titles and the kinds of work that they’re doing that that there’s a huge 40 percent of the class of the two classes had some kind of social impact in their background.

Whether that’s, running their own nonprofit on the side or volunteering or. Running trans transformational kind of programs within companies that are, either in finance or consulting or in industry. That’s a big trend. I think that people can take heart from as well.

So if you’re working if you feel like you’re in an organization where you’re not getting the leadership that you. can use to highlight your potential for Stanford, that’s definitely a place you can go is working for in volunteer capacity for a non profit or on the board of a of some kind of foundation.

Those are the kinds of places that you can highlight your potential

[00:21:00] John Byrne: true. And I know we have a overrepresented part of every applicant pool at an elite business school are software engineers from India. And I wonder in your analysis, how many of them did you find from like the IITs?

[00:21:18] Heidi Hillis: That’s a good question. The IITs, it was again, it was one of these you have about 50 percent of classes internet, so 25 percent of the class. was educated outside of the US. The IITs are going to be up there. Let’s see from India, 2. 1 percent of the class came from India. So probably, I don’t know offhand exactly how many of those were IITs, but

[00:21:43] John Byrne: I’ve had a lot of them.

[00:21:45] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, probably a lot of them. Although I think, that’s the other thing is that people who come, to work with me from India, they feel like if they haven’t gone to IIT, then that’s going to be a disadvantage. But I think, you’ll find that there are, there’s representation of other universities as well.

Definitely.

[00:22:00] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I was just looking at the list of undergrad institutions. And for example, you’ve got Osmania University from Hyderabad. So it is not, it’s not all IIT. Okay.

[00:22:12] John Byrne: Yeah, exactly. And Caroline, 1 of the things about the institutions that are really represented here and that I don’t really see unless I missed it.

I didn’t see a Cambridge or an Oxford. Two of the best five universities in the world. And I wonder if that’s just a function of fewer people in the applicant pool or what? What do you think that could be about?

[00:22:36] Caroline Diarte Edwards: I had a look through the uk Institutions and you have got cambridge in there.

I think I also noticed. Bristol university there are a few different universities. So i’m aston university, which is not it’s not on a par with Oxford or Cambridge. So I think that speaks to the point that Heidi made that you don’t have to have been to an elite school to get into Stanford.

Aston is a good solid university, nothing wrong with Aston, but it’s not it’s not one of the top UK universities. So there’s definitely some interesting variety in the educational backgrounds of the students going to Stanford. And

[00:23:16] John Byrne: then, yeah, it is if you’re a big fish in a small pond, like Afton, you’ll you could still stand out in the pool.

[00:23:26] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely. There’s a lot of really interesting background, you have look hard on blue and you have Miami University and some really smaller universities abroad. I think. Again, it’s really, if you look at that, it does give you hope because it’s really what you do afterwards and if you, obviously, if you come from one of these schools, you probably want to be in the top, 5 percent of the graduating class, you want to show that you have the GPA that can support an academic background that they feel comfortable that you’ll be able to compete academically, but, and maybe that’s what you’re Offset by the, the GMA or the scores, you don’t know, we don’t have those on here.

But, um, the path post university really becomes much more important in those cases. What you’ve done since then where you’ve, how you’ve risen from starting at a entry level position to, running a division or heading a country group or something like that.

[00:24:21] John Byrne: And as far as Cordon Bleu goes, every good business program needs a Cordon Bleu, for God’s sake, right?

You want to eat well at those NBA parties, don’t you?

[00:24:32] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely.

[00:24:35] John Byrne: Maria, I’m sure that was true at Harvard.

[00:24:38] Maria Wich-Vila: I wasn’t the one doing the cooking but I certainly, I was certainly a member of the wine and cuisine society where I happily participated in the eating and consuming a part of that.

But to, to the point that we were just recently talking about. regarding being a big fish in a small pond. Not only have I seen it personally with applicants that I’ve worked with who did not attend these elite universities, but even many years ago, I attended a, an admissions conference where Kirsten Moss, who was the former head of admissions at Stanford, she actually told stories about how they’ve accepted people who even attended community college.

But within the context of that community college, they had really moved mountains. And she said that one of the things that they look for is, Within the context and the opportunities that you’ve been given, how much impact have you had? So maybe you don’t have an opportunity to go to Yale or MIT or IIT for your undergraduate, but whatever opportunity you have been given, have you grabbed that opportunity and really made the most of it and really driven change?

So she specifically called out, I believe, I believe there were two students that year at the GSB who had both started their educations, their higher educations at community college. Anything is possible. It really is about finding the people who, wherever they go, they jump in and make an impact.

[00:25:55] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that to that point, I think it can almost be a more difficult if you’ve gone to Harvard and then worked at one of these, gone on one of these paths because we know that there’s, that’s an overrepresented pool in the applicant pool to stand out among those to have had that, that pedigree sometimes can be a disadvantage, right?

If you haven’t done as much as you should have with that, or if you started at that high level to show that level of progress over the course of your career is actually a little bit more difficult. Okay. And coming from a community college and rising to, a country level manager in some places is actually puts you at a significant advantage, I would say.

[00:26:31] Maria Wich-Vila: Because it’s hard for those people, it’s hard for those people to stand out, but also I think some of them go on autopilot, right? I think some people are on this kind of achievement, elite achievement treadmill, where they’re not even really thinking about what do I want to do with my life?

They’re always reaching for whatever that next, what’s the best college to go to? It’s Harvard Princeton. Yeah. Okay. Now that I’m here, what’s the best employer to work for? It’s McKinsey, Bain, BCG and without actually perhaps stopping to think about what is my passion? What impact do I want to make in the world?

And so I feel sometimes those autopilot candidates, I feel a little bit bad for them because they’re doing everything quote unquote and yet sometimes when you speak with them, that passion just isn’t there. And I do think that may ultimately harm them in the very, very elite business school.

Admissions because business schools want people who are passionate because at the end of the day, in order to do hard things, you’re going to need passion at some point to get you through those low periods. And so I think that’s something business schools look for. And I do think that sometimes these.

These kind of autopilot candidates might sometimes be at a disadvantage.

[00:27:29] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that, to that point look in the data, when you look at it, you see so many people who’ve gone to McKinsey, Bain, Weasley, or Goldman, but then there’s a, you see a lot of success for people who’ve actually pivoted.

So those pivots that are post The second or third job really do show you that, if you’re if you get a candidate who’s coming from, still at McKinsey, okay, that’s fine. They have to be the top 5 percent of McKinsey, like they have to be going to get so many McKinsey applicants that the only the, you can look at the data in a couple ways.

One is, oh, my God, they took 12 people from McKinsey and the others. Oh, my God, they only took 12 people from McKinsey, right? That’s So if you want to be one of those 12, you have to be the top 12 in the world, right? Whereas if you’ve gone to McKinsey and then done an externship at a health care startup and then moved on to be a product manager at for health at Google, that kind of a path is definitely showing a little bit more, maybe risk taking, maybe ability to follow your passions.

So I think that. When I see candidates who come to me, for example, and they’re like, not thinking about applying now, but maybe in a year or two, I say, look for an externship, maybe think about pivoting out of one of these places and looking for some operational experience.

And because you see in the data that works.

[00:28:42] Maria Wich-Vila: And they’re doing themselves a service not only in terms of enhancing their admissions chances, but even just in terms of determining, what do I want to do with my career? If I do eventually want to go into industry, what functional role do I want to have?

What industry do I want to work in? So it’s, it actually benefits them in the long term to do that as well, even if they don’t go to business school. I think those secondments and externships and second job, post consulting jobs are extremely valuable. Totally agree with you.

[00:29:06] Caroline Diarte Edwards: And I’m sure they also bring more to the classroom as well.

I would think that’s also why Stanford is selecting some of those candidates, because not only have they worked at McKinsey, but they’ve also led a non profit in Africa or worked in private equity or whatever it is. So they have much more breadth that they can bring to the classroom. And I think that It’s seen as a very valuable contribution

[00:29:29] John Byrne: in Heidi.

Did you see that? The majority of the candidates to examined actually did work in more than one place, right?

[00:29:37] Heidi Hillis: Yes, most of them did. There were very few that, you see working at one place. And I would say that those are people that would have really risen through the ranks.

Someone who’s worked at Walmart and become, started in, I don’t know, in one state, but then to become a regional manager and things like that really are going to onto a global role. The people who have stayed at one place really have shown significant career progression within that.

And then the other people I think you do see a lot of movement. The big. The most typical would be from investment banking to private equity and then you do find in finance, there’s a little bit less kind of movement into other industries. You see a lot of people staying within finance, but within finance.

Yeah. Yeah. The other industries, especially consulting or other, tech, people are really moving into other places and it’s becoming, it is a little bit difficult. We have these categories that we’ve talked about, for example, healthcare, but it’s hard to categorize some of these companies.

Are they healthcare? Are they tech? There’s a lot of overlap. And so everything’s a little bit of tech in something nowadays. So whether it’s finance and fintech or education and ed tech or health care and health tech, these are all merging and combining. It’s hard to categorize them.

[00:30:53] John Byrne: So looking at the data here I wonder if you’ve seen your old classmates in the sense that these new people are very much like the people you went to school with at Stanford. I

[00:31:05] Heidi Hillis: put this out and it’s really interesting to a lot of my classmates downloaded the report and read it. And a lot of them came back and said, oh, boy, I would never get in now.

It’s these people are super impressive. I think that you see a lot of. It’s just become more and more competitive. And I think that with more information and more people every year applying, it is becoming really difficult. I think that you do see a lot of, I am encouraged by the diversity part of it that you see still Stanford.

I feel like they do take risks on some really interesting profiles and candidates that maybe some other schools are less likely to do. And so that’s what does give me. A lot of hope when I get some kind of really nontraditional candidate who wants to, their dream school is Stanford. I feel like, I say all the time, there’s a 6 percent chance.

You’re going to get in, but there’s 100 percent chance. You won’t get in if you don’t apply. So you’ve got to, you got to give it a go. And that’s, the attitude that we take to it.

[00:32:04] John Byrne: Indeed. So for all of you out there read Heidi’s article on our site, it’s called who gets in and why exclusive research.

Into Stanford GSB and I’ll tell you one conclusion I have about this is that, man, if you really want to get into Stanford, you need a Sherpa, and and Heidi would be a great Sherpa for you because the, just the profiles of these folks, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished in their early lives is so remarkable that To compete against, in this pool for a spot in the class you need every possible advantage you can get.

And and having an expert guide you through this trip probably would be a really big advantage. So Heidi, thank you for sharing your insights with us and the research, the very cool research.

[00:33:01] Heidi Hillis: Thank you

[00:33:03] John Byrne: and for all of you out there. Good luck. And if you want to go to Stanford, you got to check out this report.

Okay. It will inspire you to up your game, even if you are from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or wherever McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google, you want to look at this report and you want to really think about. What it will really take to get in. I think it will inspire you, motivate you to really put your best foot forward.

Thanks for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants.

Maria

New around here? I’m an HBS graduate and a proud member (and former Board Member) of AIGAC. I considered opening a high-end boutique admissions consulting firm, but I wanted to make high-quality admissions advice accessible to all, so I “scaled myself” by creating ApplicantLab. ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!