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Meet Jeffrey, current UVA Darden student and Consortium member

Accepted.com is continuing a blog series featuring interviews with current MBA students, offering readers a behind-the-scenes look at top MBA programs. We hope to offer you a candid picture of student life, and what you should consider as you prepare your MBA application.

Here’s a talk with Jeffrey Love, a student at UVA Darden who provides a window into student life in Charlottesville, his thoughts on Darden’s case study method of instruction, and advice on how to apply to Darden and the Consortium successfully. Thank you Jeff for sharing your thoughts with us!

Accepted: First, can you tell us a little about yourself – where are you from? What and where did you study as an undergraduate and when did you graduate?

Jeff: I am from Huntsville, Alabama. I matriculated at Alabama A&M University, where I majored in accounting. I graduated summa cum laude in 2006. After obtaining my Bachelor’s, I attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to pursue the Masters of Accountancy. I graduated from UAB in August 2007 and after graduation, sat for the CPA Exam (which I passed).

Accepted: Why did you decide to attend UVA Darden? Which other programs were you considering and what tipped the scales to favor Darden?

Jeff: I was admitted to other top business schools, but I chose to attend Darden because Darden had a reputation for being one of the toughest business schools in the country and because I believe in the experiential learning that the case method provides. Darden has a rigorous first year curriculum and I knew that after graduating from Darden, I would be very prepared for whatever career I pursued. The other schools that I considered attending were HBS, Duke, and Booth, but I ultimately chose Darden because of its reputation of preparing students to become hardworking, principled leaders.

Accepted: What are some of your favorite things about living in Charlottesville?

Jeff: Charlottesville is a nice, small college town. I never had the college town experience so that I appealed to me about Charlottesville. Furthermore, I wanted to attend a college town that required students to connect with one another on social level as well as an academic level. In some of the other schools that are located in bigger cities, students do not interact with one another outside of the classroom because they have so many options of other things to do. Charlottesville forces you to interact with your classmates socially, which fosters long-term friendships.

Accepted: Darden is well-known for utilizing the case-study method of instruction. Is that something you had sought out specifically when choosing b-schools to apply to? Is it a learning method that you’re enjoying? What surprised you about the reality of this teaching method?

Jeff: As I mentioned earlier, the primary reason I decided to attend Darden was the case method. I knew that the case method would be an interesting and unique way to learn. However, I underestimated the full extent of the learning process. I have been pleasantly surprised by how intense the classroom setting is when you openly discuss and debate business issues with your peers. Additionally, the case method requires disciplined study habits because students must come to class fully prepared to discuss the cases. The case method always keeps the students captivated because the topics build on one another and each day you leave out of class feeling enriched because of what you have learned.

Accepted: What’s your favorite class so far?

Jeff: I have enjoyed each of my classes, but my favorite class has been economics. This class has really expanded my knowledge on macroeconomic events and has provided me with the fundamentals to assess the current state of the economy and start thinking about ways to improve the economy. I am still surprised at how much more comfortable I am when reading current news sources like the Wall Street Journal because of the increased fundamentals that we have covered in our economics class.

Accepted: Do you have an internship lined up for the summer? If so, what role did Darden play in helping you secure that position?

Jeff: This summer I will be interning at Wells Fargo Securities as a summer associate in investment banking. Darden has a great career development office and alumni base. Our career advisors and the Darden alumni were very instrumental in me obtaining my summer internship. The career advisors and Darden alumni held mock interviews and held review session to help students prepare for investment banking interviews.

Accepted: Do you have any advice for some of our applicants who will be applying to UVA Darden?

Jeff: Students interested in applying to Darden should start early working on essays and taking the GMAT. The Darden admissions department is looking for students who can demonstrate that they have a history of leadership and students that have a plan for their future. Students who qualify for the Consortium should strongly consider applying through the Consortium.

Accepted: What attracted you to the Consortium? Is the program living up to your expectations?

Jeff: I was initially attracted to the Consortium because of their mission to reduce the underrepresentation of minorities in both the top MBA programs and the ranks of management resonated with me. The Consortium also simplifies the application process by allowing students to apply for multiple business schools with one application. I was fortunate to receive the Consortium Scholarship to Darden, which has allowed me to focus on my classwork without worrying about how I would pay for school.

Accepted: Can you share some application tips for other students applying to business school through the Consortium?

Jeff: My advice to any student interested in applying to Darden through the Consortium is to apply to Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT). MLT is an organization that equips talented minorities with coaching throughout the business school application process, provides early exposure to admission officers, and allows fellows to reflect on their past and properly plan for their future through a detailed curriculum. Any candidate that becomes an MLT fellow before applying to the Consortium will be fully prepared for the application process.

Please visit our UVA Darden B-School Zone and Consortium Zone for more Darden- and Consortium-specific advice. For complete, soup-to-nuts guidance on the MBA admissions process, please purchase Linda Abraham’s new book, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools – now available in paperback and Kindle editions!

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Here are Sara’s thoughts on the issue:

Linda Abraham: I have a couple of questions about the essay question on your application. Do you have any advice on what information an applicant should consider in the answer in answering that one essay question? It seems to have a strong focus on globalization. How would you approach the question if you don’t have very global experience?

So more generally, what are you looking for in this one question? Obviously it is very important. And secondarily, what if you don’t have international experience?

Sara Neher: We seem to have caused people a lot of consternation with having only one essay question, and I have to say, it has been really wonderful for us! When we had two essay questions, let’s be real. We know you are applying to other schools and that is okay. But we used to see people pick one of our questions to answer and one they would try to make a copy and paste thing from another school’s question. This way, you have to understand the question. We really appreciate that because people are taking the time and they are writing better responses to our one question than when we had the two bigger questions, so I really appreciate that people are putting in so much time on it.

The other thing is that you need to think about the entire application as an opportunity to help us get to know you. This is only one part, and there are short answer questions in other parts of the application that answer some of the things that are traditionally in essays. The elevator pitch question that we have in the employment area is really about your goals. I don’t need 500 words on your goal; I think 100 words is just fine because that is the amount of time you are going to get to tell a recruiter what your goals are. So it is really for your benefit to help you really distill down what your goals are; you’ll be better off.

For the longer essay itself, it’s okay if you don’t have international experience. We’ll know that from the rest of your application. …Just make sure that it is your perspective and what you have learned. And so if it is a more domestic type experience but it helped you learn about people of different cultures or it helped you learn about people who think differently from you, that is really what we are ultimately after. We want to know, have you had an experience that helps you see that there are differences in the world, and what did you learn from it? That tends to be most obviously global experiences, but if your global experience is limited, it could be any kind of experience like that. We had a great one from a person working in their home country, but with a team of people with different religions. And he discussed what that meant for the kind of things the team had to consider when they were having events and gathering together.

So it can be anything that you had an experience with. And what we are really looking for is: Do you answer the question? How well do you write? Do we learn something from you? Do we think your classmates would learn something from you? And this is just a proxy for that. So it’s not so much about the experience as how you describe it, and what kind of language you use that others would learn from.

For the full discussion, please view the UVA Darden MBA transcript or listen to the audio file. You can also boost your UVA Darden IQ by visiting our UVA Darden B-School Zone page and our blog post, UVA Darden 2012 MBA Application Questions, Deadlines, Tips.

To automatically receive notices about these MBA admissions chats and other MBA admissions events, please subscribe to our MBA event list. To listen to the Q&A recordings on-the-go, please subscribe to the Accepted Admissions Podcast.

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Register now to reserve your spot for UVA Darden’s MBA Q&A.

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• Tepper Takes New Path- The Wall Street Journal interviews Robert Dammon, recently appointed dean of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, about the school’s new curriculum that begins next fall. Tepper will no longer just be known for teaching quantitative skills, but will also focus on leadership training and writing, as well as teaching finance and operations. Dammon also tells WSJ that the MBA program plans on expanding its class size by 50% in coming years.

• A PhD Shortage Can be a Good Thing- BizEd looks at how the changing nature of faculty at business schools has affected MBA education. While the number of academically qualified faculty has increased with Ph.D. numbers doubling in the past decade, so has the number of MBA students. As a result, there are more professionals than academics in the classroom—and this is a good thing according to the article. The faculty members that are professionals rather than academics bring “creative curricula and pedagogical innovations that are more market-focused, career-oriented, technologically supported, and globally immersive.”

• AACSB Takes on India- The Financial Times announces that The Indian School of Business is the first business school in India to be accredited by the AACSB (the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business). Equis, the European equivalent of the American AACSB, has already accredited two business schools in India.

• MBA Gets Paid $675K…To Start!- Poets and Quants looks at the average salary  of this year’s graduating MBA class. While the highest paying graduate was from Stanford Graduate School of Business and pulled in $675,000, that individual is the exception.  Private equity firms and hedge funds usually hire the highest paid graduates, but the average starting salary is closer to $150,000 for a Stanford graduate. Not too shabby.

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Here’s a talk with a student who came to the University of Virginia/Darden from South Asia with a background in electrical engineering and IT, transitioning into a consulting career.

I had to wake up pretty early to call you.  Where are you right now?

I’m on my lunch break here in London. Right now I’m completing my internship at a British telecom, in internal consulting.  We’re looking at the kinds of problems that a company faces and determining what kind of solutions should be brought in to resolve them.

Well, I’m going to brush aside British civility and ask you the hard question first.  The brand question. That’s what a lot of students, especially from overseas, are worried about these days when it comes to an MBA.  How can you justify the money and time investment in a Darden MBA, which compared to some schools might not have top name recognition worldwide?

You’re right. Darden doesn’t have the cache of a HBS or Wharton degree, and the school is well aware of this. Officials are making greater efforts to understanding the ranking system, to travel internationally and to communicate the value of the education for the money.  It’s paying off – Darden cracked the top ten for the first time in the most recent Forbes ranking.

So what does this mean for me though? Just like anybody else I’ve got to get my name out there.  I’m the first intern from Darden at this company – so the pressure’s on to make a good impression – for my future and for the school. But you know what, yes, the brand can do a lot of things for you, but the brand is also what you make of it. Go to a school that fits you. MBA’s cost a lot of money and time – and if you don’t find a good fit, it’s not worth it.

So was Darden a good fit for you?

Absolutely. First, I knew that I wanted to get to know my classmates really well.  From prior experience I know that when people attend a school in big cities like New York or London they’ve often got pre-existing networks. Charlottesville is a laid back community, and with a small class size – average around 310 – we got to bond really quickly.

Second, I really liked Darden’s case study method.  The school is best known for its general management curriculum, so in the first year you’re set up really well with the fundamentals. Then with the case studies you’re given a problem set of data, and you have to do the best you can with that set of data. It’s great preparation for my planned career transition into consulting.

Tell me more about this career transition.

I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, and got my first job in IT at a bank. I got bored pretty quickly, so I left and spent the next five years at a big telecom in Toronto.  I started out as a business analyst and moved into a strategy role. But I started to feel like I was getting to pigeonholed into technology and I wanted to expose myself to other aspects of business. Consulting sounding exciting — a career where I can tap into my past skill set and build new strengths.

What are other popular specialties at Darden?

I know a lot of people going into finance, corporate and investment banking, and asset management.  If you look at the employment report, going into finance is a pretty consistent trend.

How about after graduation – if you don’t want to settle in Virginia, what are your options?

For consulting, I will have absolutely no problem getting traction for a position in a big city – that’s the lifestyle I had before now and where I’d eventually like to settle.  The top three or four consulting firms hire here.

But it also depends on what you’re trying to get into. I had a friend who wanted to get hired by a niche investment management firm – not a traditional big name. He had to put in a really big effort. He spent a lot of his own money going up to New York, introducing himself – showing he was more than a name on a resume. He got the job. But for other big firms, you wouldn’t have to spend anything. They will fly you up to audition.

How did you lock down your internship?

It was pretty straight-forward. British Telecom came on campus – it’s their first year recruiting here. I found the job posting through career services. They invited five or six people back for interviews, and I was the one they asked to come on over.

Moving over to academics, who would you rate as your best professors?

Michael Ho, hands down.  He teaches a course in valuation. One of the dangers with case method is that it can have professors who are not used to teaching, or can teach the wrong way.  He’s a professor who will step in and tell students that they’re not going down the right path, and will help you correct course.

What was one of your toughest times?

If you speak to a lot of students, there’s a period of time called Black November. You’ve preparing for tests on three tough courses, and that’s when you have all the recruiting wrapping up. There was just one day when I had like, three classes and three cases, and I needed to prep for my interviews. I had a moment there when I wasn’t sure I could do it, but everyone has one of those days, at Darden I guarantee you will.

To wrap up, what are the best things about Darden?

It’s a great school where, because of its size, the professors and students socialize together all the time.  With that much contact – you really become friends – and they can reach out and become great advocates for you on the job hunt.

Interview conducted by Michelle Stockman, who worked in the Columbia Business School admissions office, has a Masters in Journalism from Columbia, and has assisted Accepted.com clients applying to top business schools since 2007.  She is happy to help you with your application.

This UVA Darden 2012 MBA Application tip post is one of a series of posts providing MBA application and essay advice for applicants to top MBA programs around the world. Check out the entire 2012 MBA Application Tips series for more valuable MBA essay advice. 

UVA Darden 2012 MBA Essay Question

Share your perspective on leadership in the workplace and describe how it has been shaped by the increasing influence of globalization. (500 words maximum)

Darden has taken a whole new approach with its application this year. Just one essay to write and just one essay to impress them with.

The question gets to the heart of two key topics in graduate management education: leadership and globalization.  You essay will have to share your perspective on leadership and tie it to multi-cultural or international experience.

Since the essay is only 500 words and the topic is quite broad, you will need to focus, focus, focus.

A couple of possible approaches to this question:

• Start with an anecdote showing you in a leadership role where you did well. Analyze your success and how you were influenced by an international experience or some aspect of globalization.
• Start with an influential experience and then bring it forward to your perspective on leadership. End with a situation where you successfully applied lessons learned to lead in a multi-ethnic or national setting.
  

If you would like professional guidance with your UVA Darden MBA application, please consider Accepted’s MBA essay editing and MBA admissions consulting or our UVA Darden School Packages, which include advising, editing, interview coaching, and a resume edit for the Darden MBA application.

UVA Darden 2012 MBA Application Deadlines

By Linda Abraham, President and Founder of Accepted.com.

U.S. News just released its 2012 MBA rankings just a few hours ago, and with them, a number of good articles and resources. First we’ll give you the top 20 best U.S. business schools, and then we’ll direct you to some of the meaty articles.

2012 Best Business Schools

1. Stanford GSB

2. Harvard Business School

3. MIT Sloan

3. Pennsylvania Wharton

5. Northwestern Kellogg

5. Chicago Booth

7. Dartmouth Tuck

7. UC Berkeley Haas

9. Columbia

10. NYU Stern

10. Yale SOM

12. Duke Fuqua

13. UVA Darden

14. UCLA Anderson

14. Michigan Ross

16. Cornell Johnson

17. Texas McCombs

18. CMU Tepper

19. UNC Kenan-Flagler

20. Washington Olin

For more information please see:

• “The Sustainable MBA” – This article highlights the ways in which the MBA degree has gone green. Courses that used to focus on finance and profit now focus on those things as well as on how they relate to larger social and environmental issues. A number of programs have sprung up around the country that focus on sustainability. Buzzwords include “impact investing” and “social entrepreneurship.”
• “Reinventing the MBA” – This article is about the goals business educators are working to bring about, mainly “to de-emphasize traditional discipline-based courses like marketing and finance in favor of a focus on leadership skills, innovation, social responsibility, and a global perspective.” Many top schools are introducing new curricula that focus more on leadership development.
• “Business School Ranking Methodology” – Please see this article for details on how the business school rankings were determined.

For a better understanding of why the data behind the rankings is much more valuable than the rankings themselves — a view I have espoused for years — please see “Winners and Losers in the 2011 US News Rankings.”

Discover the answers you need to interpret the MBA rankings and learn how to use them to evaluate top MBA programs around the world by downloading Accepted.com’s FREE special report MBA Rankings now!

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We had an excellent Q&A just before the year’s end where we learned everything we needed to know about UVA Darden‘s admissions practices, interview tips, student life, curriculum, and more! Thank you Sara Neher, Assistant Dean of MBA Admissions at UVA Darden for an excellent Q&A!

Here’s an excerpt from the chat on UVA Darden’s application process:

Linda Abraham: Chuck asks, “Can you please tell us about the life-cycle of an MBA application once the applicant submits his/her application? Please throw some light on how the interview process works.”

Sara Neher: Yes, I’d be happy to. I know that it seems like your application goes into a giant black hole. The first thing that happens after you hit that “submit” button is that one of our Account Managers, either Pat or Maggie, checks your application. They are divided up by alphabet so depending on whether you are at the beginning or the end of the alphabet, you’ll get to know Pat or Maggie, and you can talk to them on the phone or email them. They’ll check to make sure that everything is complete. And if it’s not, they’ll reach out to you to see what might be missing. Then the next part of the process is that it gets assigned to a first reader. Each application is going to be reviewed a minimum of three times. If the first reader says they think we should interview this person, it will go onto another person. And then if that person agrees, it will go to the interview. For the last two years, that has been a virtual process, so we read all of your applications online through software that we have. So we can actually look at them at the same time, or it automatically goes to the next person when the person before finishes. It is a very efficient process and it allowed us to survive in bad weather last year which hopefully is not going to happen this year. If the person does not think it should go to interview, it still goes onto another person who gets to review it and decide that. All of these people reading are members of our Admissions Committee, and there are seven of us. Eventually, it will get to me, so I’m either the third reader or the fifth or sixth reader, depending on how much agreement or disagreement there is about your application. And for those people that we really can’t decide about, maybe you have a lower score but a really great GPA, or you have lots of things going for you but we are not sure, we will sit around a room and all talk about you together, and then we make the decision. So it’s pretty comprehensive. We do spend a lot of time with your application, and nothing is decided based on any one element. Before any possible decisions are entered, everything is reviewed by multiple people. Once the reader says yes, this person should be interviewed, we make a determination based on where you live as to what kind of interview we offer you. So if you live in the Continental US, we invite you to interview here at Darden, to come to Charlottesville. We are very lucky to have a beautiful campus, and we want you to be able to see it.

Linda Abraham: It is one of the most stunning campuses I’ve ever seen.

Sara Neher: We are really lucky; it’s beautiful. And then if you live outside the Continental US, we will invite you to interview either with an alum or via Skype. The reason we would do a Skype interview is either if we need to do it in a hurry for some reason, or if there is no alum that lives in your area, or if the alum is unavailable at that time when we need it done. In any of those cases we’ll invite you to do it via Skype. And I’ll give some advice because the first people we did Skype interviews with, sometimes they had really funny things behind them in the picture. So just practice that before you do any Skype interviews with any schools; just make sure that what is behind you in the background looks normal and pretty drab so that our focus could be on you. And then we just get the interview right up. It becomes part of your file, and then again goes onto another reader. And then again, eventually to me. I review every single file and I am the final decision maker on all the applications. But usually that is easy for me because many people have read it before and agreed.

Linda Abraham: And then the second part of the question was about how the interview process works. Well actually, you did discuss that.

Sara Neher: A little bit. We have 28 people here interviewing today. We do have specific days; you sign up on our website for whichever type of interview you are going to do. And it works really well because we like to bring people in as a group. That way you get to meet each other. You also get to have lunch with both faculty and students, and you get to have a tour with some students. There are students always in our lobby to talk with so it’s a really enjoyable experience, and you really get to make an assessment of the school. When classes are in session, we also offer you class visits, but the classes are done for now.

Linda Abraham: What are the different roles of the essays, interview, and letters of recommendation in the evaluative process?

Sara Neher: It’s hard to say. It really depends on the context of the individual. I always say that I am look for quantitative ability. So if your GMAT is very high, then I can see it there. If not, then I go to the GPA and the transcript. If it’s not there, then I go to the work experience, and maybe even the recommendations. If a recommender says that this person does tremendous analytical work working with complex data sets, that tells me something that maybe isn’t somewhere else in the application. The same is true about the essays. We get a sense for who you are and how you write. And the essays are really your opportunity to tell us what you’ve done at work, but more importantly who you are as a person and if you are someone we want to talk with. And then we will invite you to interview if the answer is “yes”. But the most important thing is that the entire application be consistent. So if your recommendation says something about you and your essays say something similar and we get the same feel from the activities you’ve been involved in, and we see that you understand that there is a world outside of yourself, those are all things that we are looking for. But it will depend on each individual. Also if you have more work experience, your grades in undergrad might matter a little less, but if you have not much work experience, we don’t have a lot else to go on so we are going to be putting more emphasis on the scores and undergrad. So it really depends on the individual.

Please view the full transcript for more up-to-date UVA Darden admissions news or listen to the audio recording of the Q&A event.

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